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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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  • Listen to the Bells

    by

    communication, community, poetry, storytelling
    Each story an odd translation,
    each translation a person,
    each person bonded to each,
    Each story told, in which
    ever language, jangles
    a chord across bells.
    The bells, when retold,
    echo a stranger note,
    and each of us, hands
    to ears, tremble like glass.

    (circa 190-1994, from If this is a Comedy, Then Why Aren’t We Laughing)

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  • idle worship

    by

    irony, paradigm shifts, poetry, ways of knowing

    As if the tongues
                of self-flagellation
                            were not enough,
    hubris hammers
    my sarcophagus
    like zealots smashing Baal:
    I have transformed
                into a mockery
                            of myself.
    (June 6, 2013)

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  • A Path Through Hell

    by

    early work, liminal, poetry

    Follow me, but don’t look back to what
    has gone.  See, here my foot slips on
    rock.  Pebbles scatter.  With head bent
    I look down here at the edge:
    a gate with no path past
    the latch, the lock, where I stand now.


    (circa 190-1993, from If This is a Comedy, Why Aren’t We Laughing)

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  • Dream Journal #10: My Way to Work

    by

    acceptance, dream, poetry

    the school is a city
    like Venice or New Orleans
    populated by students
    milling in the streets
    I wander to work
    dragging my bag
    and a lap desk
    along the ground
    stopping frequently
    to adjust straps
    I see you
    behind me
    down the street
    looking in shop windows
    laughing
    I dance a half-step
    happy
    you are still here
    then enter an alleyway
    past hand-painted signs
    on  grimy bar windows
    to greet my class
    (June 5, 2013)

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  • Six Things I Heard

    by

    communication, fragments, life, memory, poetry, ways of knowing

    I think we are in rats’ alley
    Where the dead men lost their bones
                            –T.S. Eliot
    I have just one question:
    What I hear from you
    is be quiet,
    don’t talk.
    . . . but I’m
    trying
    to solve
    The Problem:
    there are topics           
    you don’t want
    to talk about.
    It’s –
    always –
    the same –
    Do we even like each other?
    (June 4, 2013)

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  • one problem with control

    by

    borders, language, meaning, obsessions, poetry, sonnets, thinking

    reins tighten the bit hard
    in the mouth to give direction
    to the words before they can
    form to a cloud of meaning
    within their own ambiguities
    where one’s thoughts translate
    through a permeable membrane
    a separation from one to one
    but no separation as definition
    as can be discerned along a line
    of clarity for a length of time
    to open a space where one forms
    enough solidity to call us home
    through the slow descent of dusk
    (June 2, 2013)

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  • rules of interrogation, or reasons I hate answering questions

    by

    communication, education, irony, language, literacy, paradigms, ways of knowing

    assume the answer
    imbed the answer
    in the question
    imbed the answer
    in two questions
    imbed the second question
    in the first question
    assume an air
    of casual interest
    after the third drink
    ask the question
    mention in vino veritas
    repeat the question
    with a patient smile
    allow for a different answer
    return to the first question
    Point out the answer was evasive
    repeat the question
    mention a social cliché
    as a distraction
    some mannered rule
    which was violated
    make a request
    to be polite
    make a request
    to follow the cliché
    repeat the question
    assume the answer
    for the second question
    repeat the rules of interrogation
    assume the answer
    the question is unimportant
    repeat the question
    the answer is a given
    (June 2, 2013)

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  • inexorably linked by fate

    by

    community, liminal, poetry

    like fractals
                of the river’s
                            delta flowering
    in reverse
                destiny’s connections
                            are always
    predetermined
                in retrospect
    as if
    umbilical cords
                link back
                            each of us
                                        to each other
    in minute chains
                of infinite birth
                            into newer lives
                minute by half-minute
    until we all join hands
                across the opened
                            gap collapsing
                                        between
                            the egg and sperm
                                        of the universe
    (June 1, 2013)

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  • problematic relation

    by

    borders, desire, irony, love, poetry, relationships

    too many dots
    without lines
    too many thoughts
    without words

    his stubby fingers
    press awkwardly
    broken colors
    against the page

    the lines resist
    the depth he sees
    his lines compress
    what he says

    too many words
    without the space
    to trace their world
    in time’s remains

    (May 31, 2013)

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  • The Circus

    by

    early work, poetry

    At first was confusion,
    a separation, a balloon
    floats above a child’s head.
    Connected by a tenuous thread
    logic strings posits in increasing
    convolutions, an incest of snakes.
    A division of cells:  the genes 
    split like taffy at a state fair,
    pull a membrane, a veil across a
    Moslems face, to separate, identify;                                              
    a Vedic god in search of company,
    a flood gate of names pours forth.
    Then chaos curls around, coalescing
    into a grammar which pulses blood.
    Each moment circles back like clowns
    on tricycles circling the Big Top,
    until all eyes, all thoughts stop,
    focus on a center; movement’s stilled.
    No logic, no faith, no constructs to fail:
    in union all systems fail, no cause to 
    no effect; being balances in silence,
    without even a drum roll to disturb
    this Houdini from his escape.

    (circa 1990-1994, from “If This is a Comedy, Then Why Aren’t We Laughing)

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  • into something more

    by

    community, conversation, language, life, meaning, memory, poetry, storytelling

    scraps of conversation
    and shapeless memory
    lay scattered about
    before me tonight
    like ingredients
    from a charnel house
    awaiting reformation
    beneath my bloodied hands
    I measure the heft
    of each bit which
    has passed
    between us
     believing
    in my ability
    to transform
    these humble leavings
    truth and memory
    reside within the hearth
    hidden in the ember’s ash
    waiting to be stirred
    until the words we speak
    come fully fleshed
    from our mouths
    as if to devour the air
    (May 30, 2013)

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  • End of School

    by

    obsessions, paradigms, teaching, thinking, ways of knowing, work

    “Sometimes I’ve regretted the time I’ve given to teaching, but not teaching itself.”
                            -Bernard Malamud
    In a couple of days, I will finish my twenty-fourth year of teaching.  Every year I wish I did something else; every year I think about what I will do differently in my classroom next year. It is one of the many paradoxes of my life that I love what I do for a living, while hating it simultaneously. I have come to embody the Malamud quote over the years. I love when I am talking to the students about the books they are reading, the ideas those texts spark in their heads, and the ideas they generate in their writing. The students are the best part of the job, and as I have said multiple times over the last decade: the students are smarter than we let them be.
    None of what I think is the most important part of my job matters: encouraging students to be, allowing them to be, and expecting them to be thinking human beings; none of these qualities seem to be valued in the education system. All value has been placed upon what can be measured in a very short-term reductive assessment system through which the students, and ever increasingly teachers, are summed up by the elegance of the single number. Your reading is 2100 so you pass; 2400 commended! Great job. What do you have to say? What do you think? Who cares? 
    Despite all the carping I do during the school year, I care about my students. So I want to quit every year because of what my students have to go through, because of what I have to go through for them, to protect them against the mind-numbing vacuity that is often passed off as instruction; and every year I come back to go through it all again. I am not writing this to be a martyr; I wish I could just quit, but I can’t. I am fairly good at what I do, I make enough money to live a fairly comfortable middle-class life; and I am too far along to start over in a new career.  And despite all the time it takes of my life, I enjoy when the teaching is actually happening. Sometimes a shining moment. 

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  • Speak

    by

    early work, hermenutics, language, liminal, meaning, obsessions, poetry

    start with the gate
    doors wait to be opened
    sufficient to have stood
    to have watched the procession
    doors wait to be entered
    a progress through nature
    but free, of course, to fall
    start with the gate
    between words a threshold 
    a transition between worlds
    a marriage of past progressive
    still ongoing, but silent still
    the motion affects decision
    the sybil’s leaves scatter wind

    (circa 1990-1994, from “If This is a Comedy, Why Aren’t We Laughing)

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  • Communication Theory

    by

    communication, community, conversation, life, poetry, social construction

    I  Unexplained
    The conversation can begin
    only after all the hellos,
    a slow movement of the hand,
    a slight shift in eyebrow,
    a glint in the eye.
    What with all these affectations
    of speech to learn,
    is it no wonder the length
    of time it takes to talk
    becomes an obstacle to thought?
    II Yet it happens
    Contact:
    Words click together,
    blocks in the hands of a child.
    The language is the construct.
    Theory is superfluous;
    words click together,
    a mason builds a city.
    Contact.
    (Circa 1993-1995, from “If This is a Comedy, They Why Aren’t We Laughing”)

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  • dancing by himself

    by

    acceptance, desire, poetry

    “I’ve acquired quite a taste
    for a well-made mistake;
    I want to make a mistake.”
                            –Fiona Apple
    he bumble stumbles
    across his life
    like a drunk
    across a dance floor
    the band is on break
    and he wants to sit down
    but the negotiation
    from here to there confounds
    so he stops his progress
    as it was and dances
    a side-step to and fro
    calling forth his better self
    and accepts he’ll never know
    any of the steps they show
    (May 27, 2013)

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