Category Archives: Poems

Free will

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What parts of me lie buried in unstoned ground
Dreams and fears alike leached out
Into the indifferent clay?

What parts of what I am pleased to call
My own invention come down
Through the ancient crossfire of nature and nurture
To the ultimate epi-me,
Striding vainly along memory’s boulevards
Grasping at the heart of things?

Isn’t that, too, some determinate of blood and soil?
Of circumstance stenciled onto a genetic landscape,
Long fixed, long before I thought to uncover it?

Go back far enough, and we are all progeny
Of blind, pointless chemical replication,
Some accident of electromechanical impulse
Upon a sludge.

Accused and convicted

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They say the smell of fear
Can never be purged from that patrol car
Fear like a raging boil
Exploding into the roiling pus
Of rage, of naked rage.

Michael Brown lay dead in the street
The red, red wine of youth
Flowing into the gutter.

Accused and convicted,
Executed for the crime of being
Young, brown, and foolish.

It’s an old story.

The word fire

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“The word fire,” says Sensei,
“does not burn your lips.”
But say, Sensei, that the word fire
Burns your heart, the heat rising
Through your neck, and, yes,
Singeing your tongue on the way out?

What if the word eagle
Makes you feel like soaring,
All the while tethered to your
Earth-born dreams, that seem only to rise
Slowly?

Or the word dying, though it seems a lie,
Still feels dark and wet, not exactly cold,
But too thick for that?

I think, Sensei, that even your
Ancient schemes cannot touch
These depths.

Your finger points only to a place
Where the moon might have been

If you live long enough

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If you live long enough, you will see them die.
Longer still, and they fall like spring snow.
There are those who say grief is all second-hand,
That we grieve for ourselves alone
When those too like us prove mortal.

I suppose, for the first fierce blow,
That’s true: we stumble forward, gut-shot,
All death and bewilderment;
But after that? After the long parade begins in earnest?

True, a kind of acceptance sinks in,
A not-quite numbness, a sedation,
A shaking of the head, “Why,
Just yesterday…”

But there are ghosts.
They follow us everywhere,
And in some unguarded moment, a grief descends
Pure and sweet, almost holy,
And wholly devoid of self.

In these moments
We cradle our memories like children,
And all we long for
Is one more touch.

Songs

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Some songs are best as background:
Words unheard, rhythm only, harmony guessed,
Like a stray aroma, too vague to catch a grip
On a past long gone,
Like hawk-baiting wrens still thrashing
After the raptors have all gone home.

All the best birds will eat carrion, even prefer it
Leavened and tenderized, not like the fierce will
To hang together you get from raw muscle
Newly riven from the bone, still hoping
For a quickened heart to bring new blood,
Still pushing back at beak and claw.

I try to imagine the silent throat,
Its alarm stilled forever.