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My Poetry and Commentary on Life

  • This Writer’s Beginnings: EarlyYears
  • Bread Loaf Influence
  • Rock and Roll High School
  • About

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  • crossing

    by

    abstract, assignment, breach, liminal, poetry, ritual
    Language is how ghosts enter the world.
    –Anne Michaels, from What the Light Teaches
    the world’s collected
    nothing’s left but to wait
    on the dark to grow
    deeper into the dark
    until light which seems
    so far away and small
    as to never return returns
    slowly drawn along an edge
    as a knife opening a throat
    to sing blood into the wind

    (October 25, 2016)

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  • offering

    by

    erato, eros, love, muse, poetry, prose poem, tanka
    He held out his hand
    as a offering of love
    into empty air.
    What does one do to vanish
    like dusk into the dark?

    (October 22, 2016)

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  • Words

    by

    abstract, communication, definition, interrelationships, language, poetry, sonnets
    I place much trust in words
    to create the world whole
    to believe stones solid
    to build an aqueduct
    to flow healing waters
    to the heart of us all
    there’s little beyond touch
    to hold us together
    than the words we whisper
    to each other at night
    to salvage our troubles
    to find a salvation
    somewhere in the darkness
    between the words we say

    (October 19, 2016)

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  • Three Haiku with Cliché Themes

    by

    abstract, assignment, poetry
    As if he had walked
    into a solid brick wall,
    she was always there.
    *
    “All will go to hell,”
    an old man screams on the street.
    She tends to the poor
    *
    Synder wrote a poem
    echoing Ezra Pound’s phrase
    copied from Li Po.

    (October 17, 2016)

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  • stage directions for a deleted scene

    by

    alone, broken, erasure, existential angst, poetry, tension

    (left alone. off-center.
    pacing to and fro.
    the audience sits mute—
    as if they are not there.
    he speaks his parts
    in whispers and shouts.
    he suspects, gradually,
    no one has heard)
    Explanations aren’t enough.
    (he explains beneath his breath)
    What was that sound? (he barks.
    a murder in the wings.
    near the stage edge,
    yet not at the edge,
    he peers into the dark,
    a sailor lost at sea).

    (October 17, 2016)

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  • Melodrama Distracts

    by

    despair, erato, eros, frustration, lament, loss, melodrama, metaphor, poetics, poetry, romance
    Thorns prick his arms
    as he lifts her from his roses;
    blood droplets fall to pale skin.
    Fires leap from a pyre,
    like tongues crying to heaven.
    Flesh burns, and burns, and burns.
    Winds swirl her ash, a final
    embrace, before he falls
    exhausted to the ground.
    Why so many masks
    to disguise the end
    of what was never there?
    Oh, Metaphor!
    Conceal my desires!

    Even from myself.

    (October 16, 2016)

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  • Collapse

    by

    broken, life, poetry, unstable
    everything made sense
    before it fell into shambles
    and I took another drink

    (October 15, 2016)

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  • there is this desire

    by

    breach, charm, desire, erato, eros, love, lust, poetry

    I want a word
    as a breach
    through this wall
    a speech act
    to conjure
    out of sound
    a vision I can lay
    upon the horror
    in your silence
    I want a word
    not a small conversation
    some mannered wall
    a speech act
    to open my mouth
    towards yours
    a vision tonight
    to bring succor
    as if I lay in your arms

    (October 15, 2016)

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  • Attend to the Day

    by

    acceptance, attention, happiness, poetry, tired
    Red clouds spackle the sky,
    as I drive to work.
    I’m tired, but then
    I’m always tired.

    (October 15, 2016)

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  • direction

    by

    erato, haiku, lost, poetry, unfinished haiku

    so where to
    without you
    where with

    (October 14, 2016)

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  • Solve

    by

    existential angst, identity formation, lost, poetry, sonnets
    I stand perpendicular
    along the earth’s curve,
    an edge of someone
    else’s horizon. My shadow
    thrown into the dark
    vanishes on a foreshortened
    parabola like a coin
    flipped in casual disdain
    down an iconic well.
    My metaphors perplex me,
    numberless word problems
    without a solution for x,
    and all my empty spaces
    filled with other’s erasures.

    (October 14, 2016)

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  • the pattern I’ve become

    by

    acceptance, life, lost, oblivious, poetry, sentence
    The light turns,
    I shift, and change
    lanes, oblivious
    to what occurred:
    the grackles rose
    in mass like plumes
    of ash, only to settle
    back as a blanket
    shaken across a bed,
    a quick ruffle, then still.

    (October 14, 2016)

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  • where we fall

    by

    change, interrelationships, liminal, poetry, sonnets, transition
    without warning
    or with one
    which one
    would not notice
    without resort
    to metaphor
    we translate
    ourselves to an other
    as if to create
    in a difference
    a difference
    wide enough
    to know well enough
    one from the other

    (October 13, 2016)

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  • knotted

    by

    erato, loss, love, lust, poetry, silly
    me
    you
    you me
    me knot you
    you knot me
    you me who
    you
    not me you
    not you
    not me
    who
    not
    knot
    me you knot
    not
    you
    me

    (October 13, 2016)

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  • interactions

    by

    fear, memory, poetry, relationships, worry

    out of sleep you hear
    muffled and distant
    your name and wish
    I was there as you wake
    panicked and gasping for air
    out of memory and desire
    I describe from details
    never quite extant
    a different story
    where we might live
    out of necessity
    we weave out patterns
    without patterns
    as if hope were enough
    to justify our faith

    (October 12, 2016)

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