Poetry by J.T. Whitehead
Sometimes acumen gets lost
when tossed like the cards
that are lost in the bets
that we secretly play
in our way – meaning to lose
our sense of all meaning
or meaning to lose our way –
& wands become canes
now holding us upwards.
We dance across plains
all sundown & westwards
to graveyards & canyons
& tin-can saloons.
No longer seers & no longer
bards & no longer tossing
our meaningless cards
away
like our fate or our money today – tonight,
Tonight
we wager on play.
J.T. Whitehead has published poetry in Slipstream, The Iconoclast, Gargoyle and The New York Quarterly, among others. He edited “So It Goes,” the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Library, briefly, for five issues. He lives in Indianapolis with his sons, practicing law by day and poetry by night.
