Category Archives: Poems

Sailing

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“Let’s go sailing,” you say,
“The winds are favorable,
And the pounding surf
Yearns for us.”
So we sail away on our blind voyage
Deftly navigating a precise nowhere.
O sky, be kind; our compass, rusted,
Spins dubiously
Yet we sail,
Our wild dreams
Nailed firmly
To the deck
The sound of crashing waves
Covering their own retreat.

A toast

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Here’s to the sheer, perverse joy of living,
Slogging or dancing, singing or weeping.
Let breath follow breath
While it can.
Green, weatherbound, hunched
In the midst of dust and bluster
The blowhard sky sputtering
A bravado of mist, a bluff of froth.
There is self, and there is truth.
One is a speck, a mote, a droplet
The other is the ocean.
Choose.

Archaeology

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All hopes and dreams fill barrows
Lie chucked into graveyards
Cast aside like so many gifts
Grown wearisome
Long dead, long forgotten pain and passion
All dust, all echoes and stains in the soil
The great swath of history
Unbroken and unremembered
Even the grandest monuments lie
Cracked and rubbed smooth by sheer forgetfulness
From these crude shadows we make stories
And drift further and further away
Until whispers alone remain
Impossible to say from where

We’re no grains

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We’re no grains of sand
On the vast shores of time
Dumb, irresolute, unable to anger
Or submit
We’re not mute glaciers
Unparticipating,  unrelenting
Uninterested, wasting or waxing
All the same
We are not like a moon
In unblissful unawareness
Of its unserene
Bondage
No planets or pebbles
No turbulent magma,
Or unmoving nothingness
No human can aspire to that.

After a long drought…some haikus

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Icarus relaxed
Though his wings began to melt
He had thought this through
The cat stalks the fledgling
Even the breezes have stilled
Far above, a hawk
A pebble thrown
Into turbulent waters
Makes secret ripples
The earth does not care
What you and I are thinking
Nor does the blue sky
A profligate pair!
The exhausted, waning moon,
Venus in her arms
Rock is powerless
To dissuade this burst of life
From spilling color