Flying free
through the blind night,
bats,
with their high lyric cries,
justify
the walls around them.
(July 19, 2021)
Metaphor’s Comfort
Category Archives: lit theory
Narrative’s Default
whose story
your story
my story
some other
someone speaks
some listen
some believe
some obey
here the page turns
hear the page turn
slow whispers
form a deaf ear
control’s the word’s
darkest destiny
(August 13, 2020)
Taffy
I tell a story:
I am a part
as are you
being pulled
apart, each
part one.
The horizon’s shadow
flees before
I write this line,
a demarcation–
this path
versus another,
which word
takes us where?
(November 5, 2019)
Obstacles
as in rain
arms out
head back
laughing
only my voice
in the way
I open to silence
(July 23, 2018)
scanning library shelves
seeds of interest
embedded within
the words sprout
tendrils in swirls
to push dull earth
aside until light
dawns entire
to bathe us all
into redemption
(October 6, 2016)
A Part Apart
A story’s comfort
comes in retelling.
The pattern laid out
like a blue quilt;
each square tightly
stitched to someone
else’s contribution,
someone’s scraps.
It’s taken time
to listen close,
to follow a thread
from knot to knot;
until I, too, am
woven whole.
(July 9, 2016)
Read For This: a Lecture
Past words pirouette off the page,
like apparitions at their stations,
to reanimate an old thought
into a different mind’s age.
A pithy phrase or sensuous line
catches the ear in a whisper,
slows the thought to a clarion
even this reader might hear.
To know what happens, look
at what remained: the tattered book,
the cited scrap, one has saved
to write through the bookish dark.
What drives us to our age
resembles what drove us before:
to slip past the smoke and hate,
to sway in the dancer’s slightest gait.
(July 4, 2014)
if everything is art, then nothing is art
“nothing comes from nothing”
William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1.1
an arrogant yet thoughtless
aesthetic with only elan
and a memory for names
to bastion his opinions
against irrelevance’s
mocking laughter
(December 7, 2013)
subtext 