Category Archives: Poems

Sky and water

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Water and sky indecisive,
light flitting around corners,
thunder mumbling curses,
a low energy kind of day

I recall a day exactly
like this, so long ago,
when we walked between the drops
to the 10th Street Pool Hall

to lay our fortunes down
on the Steepleton tables,
greener than any pasture,
leather pockets yawning.

Entire lives were spent
and measured in racks of nine;
I still hear the clack
between the thunder claps.

In the end, we walked out the door
pockets empty, hearts full,
into the long shadows
of the waiting sullen universe.

A sailor’s epitaph.

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Rest, you say, in peace,
rust away in peace!
All I ever did was rest into pieces;
I’m dead of it.

I know, I know, too late,
the clock has struck
and my mortal wisp is doomed
to eternity, slowly descending
into elemental
entropic stupor.

But even Achilles, brave Achilles,
would rather have risen and returned
as chattel than rule over
those resting in peace.

I want trouble to get out of,
love to fall into, happen to stance,
luck to stroke, good or bad,
it’s all the same to me.

If I’m doomed to rest,
let it be fitful, at least, full of
desire unquenched, fortune
unclaimed.

All these trials, these wounds,
are closer to heaven
than moldering nothing
without light or darkness,

changeless.

True death is the
timeless, the changeless,
the big zero.

The plague

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Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. ~ Barbara Tuchman

Everything falls, the old banners
Flung to pieces,
God reveals himself a jester,
Indifferent or cruel,

It makes little difference.
Popes and paupers rot
In the same slag heap,
All the rules, shattered.

Such a holy tantrum!
Such abandonment
Not seen since the days
Of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Do you pray, beseeching
God for pity,
If justice cannot be found?
Take care you don’t disturb his temper!

No pretense any longer
Of value, of one thing
Over another, your doom
Is made by a foul divine whim.

If I fail to contradict myself

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If I fail to contradict myself,
It’s because I’m small,
My multitudes have fled
For better quarters
Among the heebie-jeebies,
The great Coalition of the Willful,
Squabbling interminably
For the sheer joy of it.

These days it’s not enough
To be inconsistent, but it must
Be done with a vengeance,
With a truculence matched only
By contempt for all
That is reconcilable.

I’ve heard it said that
We are but shadows
Of some inescapable ambiguity,
And to pretend otherwise
Is pathetic.
So say the shadows.

Hawk

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“It’s a brutal world,”
says the hawk, who sees himself
as a realist.
“Everywhere I go, I see ruin,
hostility, violence.”

He shifts from one foot
to the other, spreads
his wide wings.

“I think this dove I’m eating
would have agreed.”