Ronald J. Pelias spent most of his career writing books, e.g., If the Truth Be Told (Brill Publications), The Creative Qualitative Researcher (Routledge) and Lessons on Aging and Dying (Routledge), that call upon the literary as a research strategy. Now he just writes for the pleasures and frustrations of lingering in bafflement.

Saved

I’m standing in front of the shower
looking at the wet tiles and the shelf
holding my soap and shampoo which
I pledged to remove each day after
taking my turn. I’m dressed, including
socks over my dry feet to which I have
just applied a generous slab of lotion.
I realize I cannot reach the items 
I negligently left behind without
getting my socks wet. I’m frozen there
considering my ethical choices, clear
only in the knowledge I’d rather not,
when my wife appears like an angel,
sees my dilemma, and absolves my sin.

Peas

Knowing my propensity for the alliterative,
my wife postulates if I were penning a poem
about our supper, I’d probably proclaim:
“A spirited plethora of petit pois parading
in the soup.” Her parody of my style gave me
pause, not only because her portrayal of peas,
the most pleasing of all the legumes ever
placed in a pot, was too pedestrian, but also
because such pattering prattle is beneath a poet
who pursues precision and preaches against
poetic practices that produce a preponderance
of pretentious sounds posing as profound.
Her prod felt pejorative, although I presume
it was a playful privileging of my proclivities.