Category: ars poetica
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“You seem quite normal. Can you tell me? Why
does one want to write a poem?
Because it is there to be written.“—William Carlos Williams
somewherefor decades now
it has been there
in this sequence
of unlined sketch books
waiting
unwritten as I write
out of a present
necessity
never knowing the why or how
anxious each moment
it will not
trusting
it will be
(April 10, 2025) -
writing
by
such arrogance, this trope
where we bend a new world
to our image, our doubts
and failings, our belief
we are somehow unique
against which all other
must be compared wholly
is too simple a path
to follow with devotion
who are we to demandour vision, no matter
how myopic, provide
a luminous clarity
for all who are not us
as if we were small gods
caught up in a turf war
where any loss in faith
begins a slow decline
that in and of itselfbecomes a corollary
tangental to love:
so we cower in fear
the mind’s splinter slices
along old wounds to bleed
like stigmata, easy
to hold close, as our days
fall away to soft ash
(July 3, 2024) -
(8 of pentacles-reversed, rider-white)
I’m not sure
why i continue
to write,
to stack thirty years
of notebooks neatly
upon the shelf
like dead flowers
from old lovers—
But I do write,
cutting lines of memory
like a stonewright
with a chisel,
exacting
bits of my vanity
with each stroke
of the pen until
what is left
is, perhaps,
made more
by what has been
taken away.
(October 8, 2023)
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The sun appears to rise
or fall, which is which
depends, as so much else
with our world, upon one’s
metaphorical point of view.
The earth, like us, just rolls
along its elliptical pulling
away from the sun while
simultaneously falling back,
into a stronger gravitational
field— an easy enough image,
if one desires, for a parent
and child, except that is not
what this poem is about.
Any more than it is about
Ben Franklin’s apocryphal
chair, or Dr. Williams’ red wheel
barrow, which were, as you noticed
no doubt, alluded to in the first
few broken lines at the beginning
of of this poem, before being
relegated to an empty trail
that somehow lead toward
this cave covered in mist
that we cannot enter.
(September 25, 2023)
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(Page of Cups, reversed, Rider-Waite)
as a boy I believed
my self-deceptions
and hid within them
I wrote, seducingmyself with lies
of happiness
like thin snakesmy doubts curled
within each cup
each what-if cuta new line
through old flesh
until I stooda lacework of blood
upon a silent shore
(August 2, 2023)
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I mistrust my poems
when people say
they understand—-
as if I failedto open a space
for an emergent
thought— the sentence
extends like a hand
to help an old man stand
why say what could gounsaid, easier to stay silent,
to allow them to stay
within their thoughts
without my re-inscriptionof a belief they had forgotten
(July 25, 2023)
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“If I knew what I was doing, I’d be doing it right now…”
—Radney Foster
Another morning sun trickles
through the cottonwoods. Today,
I have time to write. Instead,
I watch the cardinal pair twitter
from branch to branch, fluttering
like drunken dancers in love.
I have nothing to say; yet, today
that is enough. The cottonwoods
slowly clatter in the soft breeze,
while the grey cat purrs at my feet.
(July 1, 2022)
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Between bars and brothels,
I dance a whirlwind.
No one can see
with my blind eyes.
(April 30, 2022)
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Becoming too old and short of breath
to climb the ladders myself any more,
the young men working outside nimbly
spring up with growling chainsaws
to cut down the trees and trim off
the tangled branches which were left
for dead after the great Texas freeze
last year in February.
Earlier today on the wayto the bank to withdraw money to pay
the young landscaper, I heard on NPR
an Irish poet pray in a poem to St. Agnes
for his words to be true, cleanly spoken,
and unadorned by the frippery of poetry.
So, I have placed no metaphor here today,
other than what each brings with us to say.
(April 9, 2022)
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Along a fire’s periphery, I speak
into residual silence where my words
are heard beneath darker whispers,
and all I desire dissolves into effluent
chatter like the staccato gossip of gulls
gliding near the sea’s vague edge.
As within this morning’s warmth
nestled in tangled bed sheets draped
against our bodies, our words take
shape against the shape of each other’s,
forming, like smoke, loose patterns
which trail behind in subvocal trains.
(January 24, 2022)
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stand still
and breathe out
through the mouth
breach the rib cagecracking bones like branches
shattered in winter’s ice
until the proffered heartlies still in the cold bowl
as if it were not yours
(January 13, 2022) -
whose story
your story
my story
some other
someone speakssome listen
some believe
some obey
here the page turnshear the page turn
slow whispers
form a deaf ear
control’s the word’sdarkest destiny
(August 13, 2020)
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I started a serial poem back at the beginning of January. The plan was to write 140 poems, each poem’s length pre-determined by a random number generator, ranging from 3-140 syllables. It was to follow vaguely the rules of a renga, where each poem grew out of the one before it somehow, whether through theme, pun, image, or a reply. The number of poems was determined by the number of syllables in a sonnet.
I have reached 80 poems in this series. I hit 40 back at the end of March. I have 60 more to go. I would like to finish this by the end of December, which means I should speed up a bit. LOL. I have never really written under a deadline except for required essays in grad school. However, 80 poems in 7 months is a fairly phenomenal pace for me.
I will now begin to move forward with the third ‘stanza’ while collecting and tightening sections 1 and 2, in hopes that as I reread and work over the first two sections, the third stanza will continue the conversations, if you will, that began in the first two “stanzas,” and the themes and images will continue to echo and grow organically in section three.
A little obsessive, but then what about life is not.
(July 27, 2020)
subtext 