My poem “Nebraska” is live at ONE ART: a journal of poetry. Many thanks to editor Mark Danowsky for taking this piece.
Poem Up at ONE ART: a journal of poetry
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Tag Archives: creative writing
Not Blame Your Pleasure
Not Blame Your Pleasure
Because vision limits options, I close my eyes.
Becoming urges patience.
The morning after I didn’t die, I took breakfast in bed.
Arrival stamps the difference between waiting and choice.
Expectation, too, extends its squeeze, rendering sleep impossible.
I ride the bike and go nowhere, or walk steadily, covering the same ground.
Which will claim me first? An occlusion, gravity or unchecked growth?
Anticipation replaces one sigh with another: I have three falls from two roofs.
A friend has named me executor of his estate, and now the race is on.
The path to the void seems straight only near its end.
My ashes will one day soil someone’s morning.
“Not Blame Your Pleasure” first appeared here in November 2015.
May You Find Peace, Joy and Good Health in the Coming Year
May you find peace and joy in the coming year.
Scarecrow Dances
Scarecrow Dances
A case of the almost
tapping into the deed:
I dance in daylight,
but never on stairs
nor in countable
patterns, the wind
and birds my only
partners. When the
left arm twitches
counter to the right
hand’s frisk, my
head swivels with
the breeze, catching
my feet in pointe,
a moment endured
in humor. Luther
Robinson switched names
with his brother Bill
and became Bojangles,
but my brothers remain
nameless and silent,
flapping without desire
or intent. Why am I
as I am, born of no
mother, stitched and
stuffed, never nurtured
but left to become this
fluttering entity, thinking,
always thinking, whirling,
flowing rhythmically
in sequence, in time
to unheard music?
No one answers me.
But for now, I dance.
“Scarecrow Dances” first appeared in The Blue Nib in September 2016.
In the Garden of Wind’s Delight
In the Garden of Wind’s Delight
Faltering, it drifts
to a stop, rests for a moment
before fluttering to its end.
It is good to be sound.
It is good to trickle through holes.
It is good to be old
even if just one of a crowd.
These notes serve no purpose
yet they linger beyond
their existence.
I listen to their past
for their future. Where are you?
I ask. What is your true name?
“In the Garden of WInd’s Delight” appeared in July 2019 in Nine Muses Poetry. Thank you, Annest Gwilym, for taking this piece.
A Word is Not a Home
A Word is Not a Home
A word is not a home
but we set our tables
between its walls,
cook meals, annoy
friends, abuse ourselves.
Sometimes I misplace
one, and can’t find
my house, much less
the window’s desk
or the chair behind it.
But if I wait, something
always takes form in the fog,
an arm, a ribcage, a feathered
hope struggling to emerge.
Inept, I take comfort
in these apparitions,
accept their offerings,
lose myself in mystery,
find shelter there
in the hollowed curves.
Poem Ending with a Whimper
Poem Ending with a Whimper
The best liar wins.
You can’t stop talking
and the truth embedded in strands
frays with each word slipping
from your cruel mouth.
If I tilt my head just so, I see God.
Or what passes for God at the periphery:
a fly stain on the window, the redness
at the eye’s corner, the shrike’s beak.
Silence fills me daily
and trickles out in utterances and sighs
meant only for you.
Who lies best?
I look to the ground for answers.
What replies is a tail between its legs,
a headless shrug, a whimper.
“Poem Ending with a Whimper” was published in Volume 3 of Lamplit Underground. Thank you, Janna Grace, for taking these pieces.
Lamplit Underground is a beautifully illustrated publication. Please take a look!
Take Another Piece of My Heart
Take Another Piece of My Heart
Perhaps the left ventricle, or the anterior descending
vein. No matter which you grab, I’ll not survive
the seizure, but is that not the point? And which coin
will you place in my mouth to ease the passage across
the river Acheron? Or will I remain on the banks,
neutral and overlooked, forgotten. If this river is woe,
I serve its pride. I wear its banner. Do you recall the
butcher’s bill from that last flight? Sixty innocents,
including children. How many more must we tally
before admitting to the futility of perpetual war?
An acquaintance on the ground that day saw the
flash and immediately thought there are no mistakes,
just as I, from my box in Nevada, admitted, too, that
no mistakes occur, a synchronicity joined in death
and its production. I no longer employ euphemism.
When my coworker’s eyes crinkle and he laughs
about weeding the lawn of fun-sized terrorists,
I see bloody children, mangled flesh, smoke and
flame. I kill from comfort and afar. This is my life.
* * *
“Take Another Piece of My Heart” was published in Ligeia’s Winter 2019 edition. Many thanks to poetry editor Ashley Wagner for taking this poem. I’m also grateful to Tami Wright for providing the title and sponsoring “Take Another Piece of My Heart” in the August 2016 Tupelo Press 30-30 fundraiser.
Summer 1966: After France & Remembering Bobby, Who One Day Would Learn to Multiply and Divide, Write Love Poems, Define Home, Fight Unfairly and Live with as Much Gusto as a 7-Year Old. Perhaps.
Summer 1966: After France & Remembering Bobby,
Who One Day Would Learn to Multiply and Divide,
Write Love Poems, Define Home, Fight Unfairly and
Live with as Much Gusto as a 7-Year Old. Perhaps.
From left coast to right, or the wide arc between,
which place claimed you? In New York you marveled
at the building’s backs scratched by clouds, and all your
pale cousins in Baltimore spoke strangely and couldn’t fathom
your nuclear family’s private lingo, while the drive to Texas
and its red ants and iced tea blossomed into adventures between
pages in the back seat of the VW bug. By the second week you
learned that Texans sweat as much as the French, and swear even
more, that you couldn’t fight one twin without taking on the other,
sometimes both at once. There was no question of fairness then,
just brotherhood, but the librarian would slip you the choicest
donated fiction, and you played baseball every day in the vacant lot
until sundown called the players home to black and white body
counts and cigarette commercials on the three channels received.
Sometimes you lay in bed under the half-light of the whirring
fan blades, and dreamt of heroes and ornithopters, zebras
and the scent of chocolate chip cookies in the oven. Other nights
you wondered how words could rest so calmly on one page yet
explode off the next, or why a man would climb a tower in Austin
to kill fourteen people when opportunities for mayhem and murder
burgeoned across the sea. Wasn’t living a matter of simple
subtraction? One by one the days parted and you walked through
that dwindling heat, eyes squinting, questions in hand, emerging
fifty years later having suffered additions and division and the
cruelties of love and success, honor and truth, still asking why
and how, home or house, where it went, your shoulders slumping
under the heft of those beautiful, terrible summers stacked high
like so many life-gatherings of unread books awaiting a bonfire.
This was first published in theSilver Birch Press “Moving” series, and an earlier version titled “Bonjour, Texas” appeared on the blog A Holistic Journey.
Magic (with recording)
Magic
You give me nothing to hold, and for this
are blessed. Devotion
is a mirror and breath, one
solid and illusory, the other
needed yet expelled, taken, dispersed.
Which begs another question
not relying on tricks.
“Who traces names on the sheets?” you ask.
I roll up my sleeves and say “Words
conceal what the glass cannot.”
Source becomes deed, becomes habit.
In your hand a stone, a dove, the unbroken ring.
* * *
“Magic” is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second, and was first published in Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art.
O at the Edges 