We can all use a helping hand from time to time.
These guys are awesome. Happy 4th of July!
Helping Hand by Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile
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Tag Archives: Living
Sometimes Love is a Dry Gutter
Sometimes Love is a Dry Gutter
Or a restless leaf, a footprint.
Is fault on a blameless day,
scrawled on a washed-out sky.
My friend’s music orbits his home,
worms through the cracks
in the bluest lines, ever new
and permanent, staining even his hope
long after the lights stutter away.
And the rain’s attenuated sorrows?
They’re coming, he says. Like goats
through a fence. Like lava. Like tomorrow.
“Sometimes Love is a Dry Gutter” was first featured at Vox Populi in January 2017. I’m grateful to editor Michael Sims for supporting my work.
Poem Up at Red Eft Review
Portrait in Ash
Portrait in Ash
In summer, sweet crushed ice, and crickets pulsing through the night.
Brake lights, and always the blurred memory of nicotine.
I recall running through the glow, laughing, fingers splayed forward,
and the ensuing sharp admonishment.
Steel, flint and spark. Blackened linings and diminishment.
How many washings must one endure to accept an indelible soiling?
In retrospect, your body still resists.
Lovely smoke uncoiling towards the moon, residue of impurities
and substance. Desire, freed and returning.
You dwell underground. I gaze at the cloud-marred sky.
* * *
“Portrait in Ash” appears in Interval’s Night, a mini-digital chapbook, available for free download from Platypus Press.
Unwinding
Unwinding
As in a day’s long
thread
or with cold drink
in hand,
glass sweating,
ice
shrinking, a little
sweet,
some salt, her
smile saying
relax, put up
your feet,
I’ll take care
of this,
don’t worry,
tomorrow’s
a full moon
away.
“Unwinding” first appeared here in January 2017.
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.
Vesuvius
Vesuvius
When the earth shrugs,
some warnings are better
heeded. A little
smoke, some ash.
A knife point held to the chin.
Why listen at all?
The man in the big house hides in its vastness.
Surrounded, he walks alone.
People speak, but he hears only himself.
Meanwhile,
the mountain
belches
and the birds fly north
seeking firm ground
upon which to land.
* * *
“Vesuvius” was first published in The Big Windows Review in December 2017. Thanks to editor Thomas Zimmerman for accepting this piece.
My Poem “Nine Ways of Shaping the Moon” is on Other People’s Flowers Podcast
My poem “Nine Ways of Shaping the Moon” is featured on the Podcast Other People’s Flowers. I’ve never heard this poem read by someone else. It’s good to hear a different voice. Many thanks to Hugo Gibson for recording this version. You may find the podcast at these various links:
Nine Ways of Shaping the Moon
for Lissa
1
Tilt your head and laugh
until the night bends
and I see only you.
2
Weave the wind into a song.
Rub its fabric over your skin.
For whom does it speak?
3
Remove all stars and streetlights.
Remove thought, remove voice.
Remove me. But do not remove yourself.
4
Tear the clouds into threads
and place them in layered circles.
Then breathe slowly into my ear.
5
Drink deeply. Raise your eyes to the brightness
above the cedars. Observe their motion
through the empty glass. Repeat.
6
Talk music to me. Talk conspiracies
and food and dogs and rain. Do this
under the wild night sky.
7
Harvest red pollen from the trees.
Cast it about the room
and look through the haze.
8
From the bed, gaze into the mirror.
The reflection you see is the darkness
absorbing your glow.
9
Fold the light around us, and listen.
You are the moon in whose waters
I would gladly drown.
* * *
First posted in October 2014, and again on Valentine’s Day in 2016, 2017 and 2018, “Nine Ways of Shaping the Moon” also appears in my chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform. Coincidentally, my poem is paired with one by Veronica Haunani Fitzhugh, with whom I am acquainted via this blog and the Tupelo Press 30-30 challenge. I’m very pleased and proud to have my poem read alongside hers.
Portrait of Donald Trump as Poet Transforming into a Creature from Out of a Francis Bacon Painting
Ah, this poem by one of my favorite poets!
Sometimes I feel like I’m several billion dollars
worth of tax free income but all you want to do
is kill my high. Like I’ve just had a
poetry reading in an elegant theater,
attended by three hundred people,
which for poetry is big, it’s huge, but
all this guy with a poetry blog publishes
is a blurry photo of some sad bar where
ten drunk guys are nursing their craft beers
while I stand alone in a corner reading
my magnificent poem about how great I am.
That’s not how it’s supposed to happen.
And that’s why I didn’t have some other poet
read his work at my inauguration because
I’m the only poet worth reading nowadays
and I was too busy to read my own poems
while being inaugurated as the forty-fifth
and best president ever that day so screw you.
It’s because of people like you that…
View original post 377 more words
The Military Industrial Complex’s CPAs Never Sleep
The Military Industrial Complex’s CPAs Never Sleep
We so seldom bury people at sea
in weighted shrouds,
preferring instead sealed
containers or ashes
mixed with concrete.
Little girls skip
down the street,
giggling, unaware of their
value on the open
market. Dollars, oil.
Weapons. All fungible.
On the forgotten shelf,
the avocado’s flesh
blackens inside
its withering armor.
How is too much
never enough?
Targets based on
possibilities, innuendo,
cost-benefit analysis:
three men and a camel,
wedding parties,
hospitals, homes.
When morning comes,
they’re still awake,
collating damage, counting
opportunities, massaging
sums, ignoring cost,
harvesting their dead fruit.
This first appeared here in September 2016.
O at the Edges 