Secret title haiku

The brilliance and color
And relative proportions...
Such, such is the dream.

Allohistoric gun porn

Which nations favor 7 over 8?

And just how close to 8 do they prefer?
A thousandth of an inch will re-equate
The math, and then the headaches will recur.
A fraction of a gram of charge or shot,
And your ballistic tables have been turned;
And all the toys you knew are like as not
Replaced by ones whose names you haven't learned.
Have even once you ever stopped to ask
If history is writ in ink or lead,
Before you took upon yourself the task
To script the battles where they shoot men dead?
And every time a ball goes high or low
Your world diverges from the world you know.

My father's haiku

Your son is in love.
If you could see her picture,
I think you'd approve.

Those who came at the eleventh hour

You never promised anything.
You ordered us to go.
And how could we respond to that?
It's not as if we had anywhere to go.
And at least it was something to do.

We couldn't help much. Not enough time.
But when the stars came up, you called us before anybody else.
One silver coin.
A silver coin. A silver coin apiece.

Forgive us.
Looking at this silver coin,
some of us are feeling envious right now,
and wondering what everybody else will get.
We couldn't ask them. Not enough time.

Sonnet, 3/15/2012

For lack of power to hold in my embrace
The woman whom I love across the sea,
I bid my every sentence into place
And ordered every word to dance for me.
In classic form the poem did coalesce -
But wasted was the night that saw me try
To teach its words to mean (and bear that stress)
When all they knew to do was signify.
The words meant well, but could not execute
What I choreographed, my words to make
Immediate enough to substitute -
And so their perfect form I did dismiss.
No dance of language can ever replace
Holding each other in silence, and meaning together.