by
After wandering lost,
circling familiar trails,
I brought us here again:
a reflection in a mirror
of a mirror’s reflection.
If I turned to you now,
my face in your eyes,
your face in my eyes,
and supposed
a vision of love,
would much change
from what it was,
or what we have become?
(September 26, 2024)
by
Still Life: Trust as a Form of Truth
In the wooden chair
we use on occasion,
next to a house plant
I forget to water;
yet has lived for years,
sits an old guitar
I cannot play.
It’s out of tune,
I’ve been told;
which could be true—
but how would I know
any more than this?
(September 21, 2024)
The chihuahua pup desires in again.
He curtly scratches the sliding door glass,
then stares impatiently into the house.
His alert ears twitch and turn like radar
testing the distant reaches of the house
for his dull-witted human’s slow approach.
Then there I am. He wags his approval
then prances past to quickly patrol the house.
My slow days consist of subtle patterns,
mostly woven through the minutiae of
the dog’s daily routines. He calmly herds
me about as I move from room to room,
sitting patiently nearby as I read,
or attempt to write about happiness.
(September 19, 2024)
by
“We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.”
–William Carlos Williams
As the fires slip to embers,
the cave walls grow close.
Only the oldest visions glow
with clarity enough to divine.
Fear was ever the chain
which bound us to the floor,
eyes fixed upon the shadows
eager for tranfiguration.
Outside, the sun has set. It’s dark,
too dark to see our haggard faces.
The new moon has yet to rise,
and heavy clouds obscure the stars.
We huddle closer together, afraid,
whispering our secrets through the night.
(September 17, 2024)
all the meanings, values, irrefutable
definitions we’d/ given ourselves
peel away into broken abstractions.
We have assumed most of who we are,
little of which is true, though believable
within the confines of childhood stories.
After the particulars parade past
with their horrors and delight lost in flames,
we seek solace within our curtained rooms.
Our pets peevishly crawl from the corners
to protect us from the expectations
which cling like the aftermath of a fire.
The shapes and textures of these words matter
for there is little which cannot be burned.
(September 14, 2024)
by
I should go, but I don’t.
The silence is too loud
to mask my good-byes.
I pour more whisky,
swirl the ice idly,
then swallow it.
Of course, you arrive late,
in a flurry of hugs.
“I’m surprised you’re here.
I’m surprised as well.
We should talk, I think.
But, of course, we don’t.
I leave the party soon after—
uncertain, why I am here.
(August 31, 2024)
by
it is difficult enough to speak
while living, to say what we must
and still be honest and true;
the compromises and small capitulations
that allow us to breathe, too often
overwhelm, rendering us speechless.
at best, we blandly whisper behind
set smiles, conditioned over decades
to say only what is expected to be said.
to use the last words left to us,
without vague shades of nuance,
and shape them to our heart
becomes the imperative
which silently devours us all.
(August 26, 2024)
by
And the day begins again—
I feed the dogs, then let them out
to patrol the back fence line.
With everything in order,
they tumble into the house,
obliviously happy.
They settle about me
as I read the day’s news
full of deceit and death.
(August 24, 2024)
by
Despite what I say
I am happy mostly,
but lack permission
to be so.
I cloak the day
in jaded irony
to mask contentment
against doubt.
Too often fear niggles truth
into a lie incongruent
with the line I follow.
Here is where the metaphor goes
awry, like a compass near a lodestone:
I know where I am going,
but am offered other models
best suited to other’s destinations.
A purpose to my wanderings
is defined along the way,
like butterflies descending
momentarily from their migrations
to alight with a random grace
upon the blue flowers
blooming in our backyard.
(August 20, 2024)
by
What do you enjoy most about writing?
The process of the act of writing. The meditation of writing
by
there should have been flies
but there were none—her mouth
open in perpetual shock
even now sixteen years later
I can hear her whispered
tongue form words from guilt
to be inlaid on my skin like mahogany
and rosewood carpentry designs
embedded across her casket’s closed lid
my life has become my response
exhausted with little left to say
I wait, finally silent, unvoiced
I should have been surprised
how even the flies stopped
(August 17, 2024)
by
it’s enough now
in the late evening heat
to watch the trees sway
in an exhausted breeze
like two drunks in a cowboy bar
as they shuffle desperately
around the dance floor
to a final slow song
longing for some kind of love
before the night falls away
into another morning
where routine smiles
and office chit-chat
mark the passing of time
and no one hears
the chains dragging
slowly through the dust
or the grackles caw
as they settle into the night
(August 12, 2024)
by
It’s easy to think
one can change
forty years
of momentum;
that love matters
more than pity,
and time speaks
in seductive whispers.
Yet laughter, always,
is a self-reflective
evisceration
with dull knives,
and what one sees
is only what one thinks.
(August 10, 2024)
“So,”
the writing teacher asked the class,
“who is the ‘you’
in this poem?”
I knew, of course,
the you was me.
When isn’t it?
But who wants to confess
that
in a grad school
poetry workshop?
Too much insecurity
disguised by arrogance
and pretentious blather
to speak to any truth
in writing. It’s just easier
to shift person, than
to use the all seeing I,
even when cloaked
in irony and unreliability.
No one believes that crap
about the speaker and the poet
anyway. Everyone knows
the truth, but won’t admit it;
because then the expectation
would be for the writer, you,
to explain ad nauseam your poem,
that no one understands,
(Not even you). This unraveling
of the poem tediously happens too often
in poetry workshops. I blame
years of literary analysis
for this phenomenon:
What else does one do,
but explain poetry?
So,
please tell us the vaguely ordinary event
that you turned into vaguely
poetic phrasing
which you are now explaining
in a vaguely ordinary way,
so that we may say
we share the extraordinary
epiphany you experienced
in the most mundane manner
and during the most mundane event
of your extraordinarily mundane day
and that you— truthfully, when
all is said and done, which sorrowfully
will not be done soon enough—
,you did not in reality have.
Are you
as tired of all
this subterfuge
as am I?
You are,
And I am.
(August 6, 2024)
