I attended a poetry presentation at Full Circle Last Sunday Poetry Readings.

Full Circle Bookstore is the largest independent, locally-owned, general interest bookstore in Oklahoma. We have been in business for more than 30 years and are located on the first level of 50 Penn Place in northwest Oklahoma City.

The featured reader this Sunday was Ashley Reighard, a Woody Guthrie Poet in 2025. She has published work in Native Tongues and Presence.

The Rules of the Game, However Unfair

by Richard R. Barron

As most of us know, many state and federal laws require us to write poems in the month of October.

But in case you didn’t know, it was in the fine print in the back of your Charter of Rhyme Handbook, which you hastily signed as you eagerly schemed to sleep with the cute clerk behind the counter of that one book store that closed last year.

A Secret Love

by Richard R. Barron

“Can I come with you?” she asked as I started to leave on the drive back home. Tears filled her hazel eyes.

“Yes, Melissa, you can come with me,” I answered, since I would have agreed to anything just to spend another minute with her hazel-eyed tears. But she just wanted to go home.

No, Melissa, you can’t come with me. There are too many rivers of tears to cross between here and where I’m going.

The Missing Ingredient

by Richard R. Barron

I once half-jokingly asked Pam to send me a vial of her tears.

She didn’t, and it occurred to me later that tears might be harder to harvest than I realize.

Instead, she sent me a cigarette, some sage and sweetgrass ash, a seer stone, and a bracelet with an owl on it, which she said would protect me, but no tears.

After she died, someone handed me a vial of her ashes, and that was as close to a vial of her tears as I got.

Mirrors are Chasing Me

by The Usual Suspect

Day after day, I can be as dishonest with myself as I like.

The little lies in every strangers eyes don’t count against me.

But then there are mirrors. In the hall. In the bathroom. In my car.

And there’s no lying to them.

The Best Lies Are the Lies We Tell Ourselves

by Richard R. Barron

I read and re-read my journal entry from that chilly autumn day all those years ago.

I count up all the shallow, hopeless, romantic lies I tell myself.

I wrote, “It all went so fast. I can still feel her soft hair brushing against my face as I held her. I miss her so much.”

The lies? She didn’t care for or about me. In her eyes, I was dragging out a very awkward moment with her. I wasn’t “holding” her, I was grabbing her and trying to hug her, and she was reluctantly putting up with it, with this geeky high school junior living out his crush.

I brought nothing but those lies to that moment.