Category: dissatisfaction
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This evening the old ghosts have returned.
They inhabit the edges of my vision
whispering their tired secrets to the past.
Like scions of privilege hang in cafes
deconstructing last night’s party gossip,
The ghosts wail their sad regrets-she never said,
nor he listened- Even in death they cling
to their moral shortfalls like life jackets.
If there’s a hell, here is where it festers:the exhumation, through exegesis,
of dead variations left to decay
like tattered banners along the ramparts
pretend the siege was easily broken
and the dull ashen smoke never smoldered.
(May 25, 2026)
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storms rage without rain
like shrouds across the dry earth
trees drop their dead leaves
each night grows longer
one more minute of light less—
incremental death
i’m tired of trying—
too cynical to pretend
darkness has not come
it is ironic
with the weight of centuries
nothing can be done
the sycamore’s branches fallI fear spring will not return
(October 21, 2025)
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Ashes to Ashes
I watch the hollowed out building burn.
Sections of roof collapse into the flames.
Smoke occludes the sky like a prayer.
I am complicit.Smoke and ash smudge my hands and face,
a negligent guilt through willful ignorance.
I am at a loss: I call, I write, I vote;I make signs for marches.
The flames burn hotter.
They buy more gasoline and matches,then dance unimpeded down the road
to sing gleefully around the next bonfire.
(April 15, 2025)
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The thing is you won’t live long
anyway
the thing is to see where you are
While you are—
—George Oppen
fool, look out the window
And write
—George Oppen
You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
― Samuel Beckett
I made the mistake of looking at an old “manuscript” from about 15 years ago. I made it about 10-12 pages in before I ran across a couple of lines that I could call good enough to be poetry. There are about 40 more pages to go. I hesitate to go on. I have always over the decades cycled up and down in my opinion of my writing. I know, every writer has doubts. But that does not make it any less depressing when I am plummeting, nor any more justifiable when I am flying high. I remember Robert Frost saying somewhere that he didn’t write experimental poetry, because experimental poem was another name for failed poem. The poem either worked or it did not. If it did, then it was not an experiment; if it failed, then it wasn’t a poem. The old manuscript was not a poem—which was depressing. Instead it was a series of posturing hoping without hope to somehow adhere from one poem/stanza/blither to another without any real attempt on my part beyond “chance” in some misguided belief that John Cage’s ghost would descend to lead me out of the wilderness of my hubris. I take solace in the belief that I knew it was crap, because I put it away and never really looked at it for the last 15 years. I somehow knew without knowing….I am smarter than I let myself be (to use a mantra I said about my students on myself).* My current plan is to plow through the fallow field, and see if there are some living roots that can be salvaged. It will be a trudge. But then, what else would I be doing.
*They are smarter than we let them be.
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I approach a common ledge.
It was once, in a different world
than this, a waterfall cascading
to the half-hidden rocks below.
Oblivious, I would often sit,
feet dangling casually above
the water’s icy swirl, listening
close to the whispers beneath
the roar of the waterfall’s
incessant gush and rush.
For hours, I would watch. The mist
would rise and fall from soft depths,
beckoning me with seductive arms
toward an unrequited leap of faith.
Now, a clarity, weighted with remorse
and infantile regret to change,
whets the air with metaphor.
The rocks are dry and stark,
full of sharp consequences,
and vaguely permanent decisions.
Dust slips slowly among the cracks.
The contrast between then and now
cuts a razor line across thin skin;
blood beads like dew on a leaf,
hesitating before falling away.
Afraid to fail even in the attempt,
I turn away, once again lost.
(October 30, 2024)
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Too many old ghosts walk about today,
leaning against the walls, blocking doorways.
They lounge around the house, reading sad books
they’ve read before, never leaving their chairs.
I wave my hands in the air, futilely
trying to chase them away. Like house flys,
They vanish along the periphery,
only to reappear within seconds.
They are in no hurry to return home,
where their versions of the story can’t change.
They like the nebulous nature of life.
I’m tired of talking to their shapelessness;
I want to slough off their soft vaguery,
and cast them into the unanswered night.
(June 18, 2024)
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As I putter about the house,
each node, great or small,
where I failed
to be kind;
where I failed
others;
where I failed
my own measure—-
rages
like harpies
lifting their heads,
broken smiles coated
in dry blood.
(November 9, 2023)
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Over time my doubts
determine the desolation
my regrets and dreams
have brought to me.
It is not a stark moon rising
over dead mountains,
but fetid rot crumbling,
wet grain by wet grain,
into a tangled swamp
from which memory
rises unbidden
like will o’ the wisps.
Foolishly, I pursue them
lashing myself
with shame and horror
at what I did or said
in the smallest instance.
Until I am tied so tightly
to the past that I am,
that I am no longer
able to do more
than lie prostrate
across the ground,
afraid and unforgiven.
(October 31 2023)
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I feel my life tonight—
the weight, the textures.
There is no wisdom to create
an escape, no simple design
to relieve the recurrent terror.
Outside the wind grabs the trees
by the hair tossing them about
in an ecstatic frenzy.
I step into the growing night
and listen to the trees whip
the pale sky into the dark.
What control I thought I had
flees from me, abandoning
the promise of the light to come.
(April 11, 2022) -
Pathos
by
I am as inconsequential
as a joke told late at night
as the party is breaking up,
and I am left alone
on the couch, smoking a cigarette,
with the last sip of wine
from someone else’s glass.
(February 23, 2022)
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With a thick-cut slice
of buttered brown bread in hand,
I head out the door.
Traffic flows like a river
emptying to a dead sea.
(November 30, 2021)
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“till we turn to see
who you were, who you are, everpresent, vivid
luminous dust”
-Denise Levertov
Like wolves feeding on a fresh kill
steaming in the snow, each dead second
is pulled apart. No matter the effort,
time disallows the past to continue
fully formed. The future devours us
leaving little tufts of fur and bone bits
to decorate our current troubled paths
and explain away our broken sorrows.
I am hungry for something I don’t know,
a freedom from imposed obligations,
an escape to a place I am not known.
Yet, where I am, and who I’ve been tangle
like the strings of old puppets in a crate,
waiting for someone to haul them away.
(September 28, 2021)
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“but little thought”
—W. Wordsworth
today as I drive past sorghum fields
on my way to work I recall
a train in the Netherlands
decades ago moving through tulip fields
long strides of red and yellow
that stepped toward the horizon
(December 8, 2020)
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