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Diane Webster
Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2021
Cartoon Character
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Diane Webster
The man is a cartoon-channel character chattering away in voices not his own to cover thickly-clad person beneath who obsesses every minor detail to death, to death like hand-painted coyote falling to the desert floor with a boulder flattening him to paper fluttering into a camper’s fire to burn and dive into nearest pond where piranhas rip teeth marks all over his body as he limps down the road only to smash into an ACME truck as TV screen fades to black and again and again we laugh as weary as the coyote as we bare our teeth reflected back in computer screen, a ghost we allow to haunt.
Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2021
Prize Illusion
Diane Webster
I habitat this fog lying across me like an effervescent mantle dissolving me into grayness so people shadows pass me in a hide-and-seek game where I am always the victor.
Always seeing but never seen from two-way mirror swirling thicker or thinner depending on my clarity. But sometimes I am too gray, too comfortable with this foggy mass, and when I grasp a person’s hand, he jerks away startled by my touch so invisible he flees, and I am blind.
Not darkness blind but muffled almost seeing light if I could open my eyes wide enough if I could stumble free or wait long enough for sunshine to fade my cloud and slip it away like a magician’s cloak leaving me the prize illusion.
Diane Webster’s goal is to remain open to poetry ideas in everyday life, nature or an overheard phrase and to write. Diane, who lives in Colorado, enjoys the challenge of transforming images into words to fit her poems. Her work has appeared in Philadelphia Poets, Old Red Kimono, Home Planet News Online and other literary magazines.
