Michael Lee Johnson lives in Itasca, IL.  after spending 10 years in Edmonton, Alberta Canada during the Vietnam War era. He is a
freelance writer, and poet.   He has been published in USA, Canada,New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, Turkey, Fuji, Nigeria Africa, India,
United Kingdom, Thailand, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  Michael Lee Johnson is a member of Poets & Writers, Inc and Directory of American
Poets & Fictions Writers: http://www.pw.org/.  He is a member of The Illinois Authors Directory. Illinois Center for the Book:
http://www.illinoiscenterforthebook.org/directory.html He has published 145 poems in 2007 to date.  He is the author of: The
Lost American: From Exile to Freedom. http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0-595-46091-7.
 The book is also listed at Amazon.com, & Barnes & Noble.  Visit his website at: http://poetryman.mysite.com/.   He is now the publisher,
editor of Poetic Legacy,  http://www.poetriclegacy.mysite.com/ ; and Birds By My Window: Willow Tree Poems  at,
http://birdsbywindow.blogspot.com/.  Both publications are now open for submissions.


 

Forked in Itasca

I am so frustrated
I want to chew
the dandruff
out of the internet hair implant
and dislodge it,
for a lost love affair I never cared
about and hardly knew.
Don't tell me about my sentence structure,
I am human in these simple words.
I swear to you I curse.
Then the ram of my affair falls short
frustrating my approach to the world
at my fingertips.
No Yellow Pages here my love.
The dial up of my local connection
is wretched, stuck unincorporated
in the land I approved to live in,
monopolized by Comcast the
robbers of the poor and the humbled.
All I hear is the rambling of the railroad tracks.
I grow numb in my deafness faint with my hearing.
Did I ask for your opinion?
I am a frustrated foreign camper
in my own community.
Of a village I don't live in,
but I love this local village I lie about.
I am estranged.
I tie knots in contradictions
when I travel light and far,
visit home I long for a journey
past where I have never been.
Is this the reason I am lost
forked in between
the poet I think I am
and the working man
my bills dictate?