Roger Jones: Old Man

Dad had taken me to have my hair cut short. “He keeps trying to look like a Beatle,” he told the chuckling barber.

Afterwards, in the car, I hid my head under a baseball cap.

Backing out of the slot, Dad slammed his brakes. My cap flew off. A long-haired teenager wheeling past behind him on a bike screamed, “Watch where you’re goin’, old man!”

"Old man?" -- I'd never thought of my father as old.

Forty years ago, and Dad a decade younger than I am now.

day after day
wheeling by—
this same blue sky

by Roger Jones
New Braunfels, Texas
first pubished in Frogpond 29:3 (Autumn 2006)

Roger Jones: ICU

A warm light and the night nurse in the hall padding by. I’m hooked to machines with changing green numbers, tubes in both hands. Heartbeat and blood pressure steady. Drifting into the harbor of sleep.

schoolyard dream
laughter echoing
through fog

by Roger Jones
New Braunfels, Texas

Roger Jones: ALZHEIMER'S

I'm starting to understand: the mother I grew up with isn’t here now ― only the stranger who stands by the ringing phone and cannot remember what she is supposed to do with it.

clinging to the pine bough
but gone as well ―
cicada

by Roger Jones

New Braunfels, Texas

first published in Modern Haiku, V38, N1, Winter/Spring 2007