Thirteen-Character Verse

What next, pocket poem?
Can you make yourself
Fit for a napkin?
One-line equation?

That’s the elegance
Your maker wanted,
Mathematical,
But shifty, bal-peen

Hammer in velvet.
Four, five characters
Crammed per tongue-tied line,
Concrete as highways,

Gorgeous as clear nights
Over deserts left
Far from city lights,
Showing the season,

Outlining the theme,
Incomplete without
The calligraphy,
Iconography. . . .

Astronaut, don’t leave.
Sun chews horizons,
Bleeding battlefields
Where no one can breathe.