A photograph:
Fields the color of winter
Nothing growing, nothing moving,
Just you, looking over your shoulder
As if I could still touch you.
A tanka for summer
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Tag Archives: life
As a child suffocating
In the great withered dugs
Of Holy Mother Church
I was taught to beg God’s forgiveness
For my transgressions
Real, imagined, or only aspired to
But really, I thought,
For the sheer gall of living
For the audacity of human-ness
For the clear inexcusable lack
Of appreciation for the
Perversity of existence
As humanity
Of which I was but one
Paltry example
Now I know it’s
Not God who can forgive
But only I
For the willfulness
Of falling for that
A tavern, so right
I’ve been feeling like I need to expand my horizons lately. I mostly write autobiographical, not to say confessional, poems. I’m a great admirer of other people’s narrative poems, and I like the idea of the freedom a fictional setting can afford. So, here’s an attempt.
A tavern, so right, so clean, every chair in its place,
every light bulb unflickering bright,
every floor swept relentlessly:
This is where he comes
every day,
tie straight, collar clean,
shoes shined to piercing,
until every crumb has been consumed,
every glass empty,
and he stands, checks his trousers,
and walks, stately,
to the mens room,
slides the lock to,
and dances wildly to the mirror,
his best and only lover.
Just before the final extinction
Just before the final extinction
There were strange and wonderful creatures
Elusive slabs of silver
Darting through the water
Among shape-shifting bulbs
Trailing fierce limbs
And some barely-there whisps
Still deadly with near visible
Strands of poison
And the stone-clasping tendrils
Living dually beneath and above
The frothing rock wacked about
By unseen surrounds
Miniscule bits buzzing through the air
But strong enough to pierce the
Thick outards of others
To suck their vital fluids
Long bendy tails with no body
Slinking among roots and shoots
A mouth at one end and nothing at the other
Lumbering bellowing lumps
With long tusks
That dazzled white in the pristine sunlight
Oddest of all, a bipartite creature
Split nearly symmetrical
Nearly similar but cruelly not
Moving by alternating stilts
Spindly and unbecoming
The two halves bound in eternal embrace
Clutching each other’s throat
Desperate to let go
But trapped, trapped by fear of succeeding
Snow, a haiku
New snow
Cold and weightless
As yesterday’s ghosts
exiles child 