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My Poetry and Commentary on Life

  • This Writer’s Beginnings: EarlyYears
  • Bread Loaf Influence
  • Rock and Roll High School
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  • Patience is Without Time

    by

    poetry, time
    When one’s flesh is on fire,
    one does not pretend
    truth waits outside
    a clock’s cold compass.
    I wait through
    the last minute,
    watching
    the length
    it takes
    to die in snow.
    As if life ends
    when one stops
    thinking,
    or turns upon
    a definition.

    (October 28, 2014)

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  • of course

    by

    conversation, loss, memory, metaphor, poetry, traces
    “If some longing goes unmet, don’t be astonished, we call that life.”
                            –Anna Freud
    bits of matter
    and they do matter
    alive and tucked
    into the lines
    traced now
    by soft fingertips
    like a child
    learning to read
    follows the letter’s
    sound which once
    echoed the claw’s
    scratch across
    rough cave walls
    or whispered
    conversation’s
    viscous flow
    about a fire
    grow
    unremarked
    from metaphor
    used to explain
    how we run
    along different
    routes the same
    course like streamlets
    slipping along
    estranged paths
    about the same
    rocks until
    they circumscribe
    our hearts
    with new words
    for love’s tattered
    remnants
    of memory’s
    more stable day

    (October 28, 2014)

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  • Write Into Myself

    by

    definition, paradigms, poetics, poetry, unstable
    Can I separate the strands between us
    as easily as one unwinds the marred
    tapestry’s pattern, a simple unraveling
    of time, until all that led us here is
    but a heap of thread upon the floor?
    Can such questions approach an answer,
    without putting, once again, pen to paper?
    What if I could write the correct phrase,
    the right words to square all my edges,
    or compose a flowing sentence to justify
    all that others demand of me, would I then
    be free of all the measured space defined
    within some other’s cramped, palsied hand?
    (October 26, 2014)

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  • a constant low-level anxiety

    by

    existential angst, fear, irony, poetry, unstable
    at the window
    the persistent clack
    of a harpy’s claws
    wakes me
    into a brighter sun
    my shoulders tense
    anticipating
    before the feathered
    shadow forewarns
    the sudden
    shriek and strike
    and I’m lifted
    into air
    my hands grasp
    into nothing
    as I’m dropped
    trailing my intestines
    like red ribbons
    across the tattered
    sky

    (October 26, 2014)

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  • stasis

    by

    acceptance, dissatisfaction, fate, poetry, unstable
    he
    hoards
    bits
    of repose
    found
    tucked between
    distraction’s
    bullying laughter
    and his cowardice
    which accepts
    it all

    (October 25, 2014)

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  • Bacchante’s Last Dance

    by

    acceptance, eros, fate, life, liminal, poetry, ways of knowing
    I will not see another day.
    My arms, heavy as stone,
    embrace the hollow air;
    if I lift them up,
    as in a dance,
    they will break and shatter
    across the ground.
    A shuffled step will have to do.
    My sandals send puffs
    of dust into the air.
    Embers pulse within
    the crumbling fire.
    The others have fallen deeper
     into the wood trailing
    laughter into moans.
    The wind caresses my hair.
    Dawn whispers her song
    into night’s vanishing sky.

    (October 24, 2014)

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  • Sourceless Tension

    by

    existential angst, fear, poetry, tension, unstable

    Vaguely omnipresent,
    it emanates
    and radiates
    at once
    inside and outside
    everything
    and myself
    like the universe’s
    low hum
    beneath millennia
    of ontic threat;
    it leaks
    between
    all permutations,
    flowering
    between our arms
    like morning glory
    tendrils
    turning
    toward the sun.
    I hold myself
    along the edge
    of permeability;
    neither a part
    or apart –
    a transition
    disintegrating
    obscurely
    like the last
    flourishes
    of a solar flare.
    (October 20, 2014)

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  • Dad’s Last Breath

    by

    change, clarity, family, poetry
    From decades of Tareytons,
    his breaths usually came
    quickly ragged,
    one upon the other,
    like the rough scales
    layered along the length
    of a red bass’s
    slick body;
    but this time,
    his lungs grasped
    desperately after
    the exhale’s rasp.
    Like a swimmer
    tired and falling
    beneath the relentless
    pulse of the sea,
    he gasped at an air,
    which was not there
    for him
    anymore.

    (October 20, 2014)

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  • Map

    by

    borders, conversation, dream, paradigms, poetry, space

    “It took dominion everywhere.”
                –Wallace Stevens
    why do we pretend
    our moves determine
    so much as to what
    we allow ourselves to see
    like the harried tourist
    stopping along the way
    to gather the view
    into something known
    something  manageable
    something easily folded
    into a pocket and lost
    the wilderness flows
    without our definitions
    of control or of what
    we want the wilderness
    to be for us but beyond
    beyond the tight margins
    on our inscribed maps
    beyond dream’s awareness
    beyond what we pretend
    to grasp in translation
    stuttering each to each
    (October 20, 2014)

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  • with a stroke vision breaks

    by

    borders, change, life, loss, poetry, unstable

    his vision
    trembles
    like leaves
    with the first
    light touch
    of fall along
    the forest edge
    trembles
    in slow crescendos
    toward a worn center
    wave upon wave
    pulses the air
    trembles
    the walls
    the conversations
    the chairs
    like light dancing
    across the bay
    as day divides
    the horizon
    into sharper
    halves of blue
    trembles
    his resonate mind
    trembles
    until it shatters
    like ice
    (October 18, 2014)

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  • en passant

    by

    borders, chance, communication, desire, erato, loss, love, traces
                            “some
    conversations are not
    about what they’re about.”
                –Anne Carson, Red Doc
    she spoke of friends
    and their words
    for relationship and love
    watching her eyes
    he nodded pretending
    to understand
    what neither knew
    was the same
    as the other
    cross currents swirl
    erratically
    then part
    he wanted more
    he thought
    as did she
    he saw too late
    her passing
    move

    (October 17, 2014)

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  • Situations Without Asterix

    by

    chance, fragments, interpretation, poetry, teaching

    Reading against the grain of the text,
    we have kept uncertainties at bay
    by binding: can it be imagined
    how this mischief conducts traffic
    between?  As a daughter, I sense her
    hesitation between the role; I
    sense her assertion of a difficult
    liberty, agenda of negotiation:
    But we cannot make the world fit
    forever into that devoutly wished
    embrace, but then what is it to teach?
    *All words and phrases taken from pp.164-165, “Outside the Teaching Machine,” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
    (October 16, 2014)

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  • metonymy

    by

    definition, fragments, poetry, traces, writing
    poetry is no more life
    than air is breath
    a necessity
    by definition
    but a part’s
     never a whole
    except
    to itself
    genetic strands
    trapped in amber

    (October 13, 2014)

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  • where what’s unfolded

    by

    attention, life, poetry
    at a juncture
    an opening
    a newer door
    Where stands now
    lost within motion’s quandary
    indecisive as ever
    so hobbled by possibility’s
    endless expansion
    and narrow causality’s
    strict flower
    hesitant
    he enters
    again and again
    in pursuit of one
    moment which stays
    still here
    framed in eternity

    (October 13, 2014)

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  • What’s Why

    by

    borders, breach, desire, irony, love, obsessions, poetry, tension, time
    No reason to explain our reason’s
    details: truth remembers more
    than you, or my lost vows, past
    the fissured surface’s skin, into
    substrate’s fractured fault lines.
    She waits with patience to shift
    violently away at once; even before,
    my first tongued tremors play along
    the  length of your taut skin.
    Such tensions tune themselves
    in key to your determined wants,
    driving you deeper to mine
    the resonant scraps in my heart.
    I stand across your divisions, and wait
    for time’s breach to tumble us together.

    (October 12, 2014)

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