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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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  • Sonnet

    by

    borders, delusion, meditation, poetry, sonnets, tired, ways of knowing, words

    My voices echo within a labyrinth.

    Scraps of some other’s stories without form

    return as someone else’s dark whispers

    where all our monsters are of my making.

    My lies breathe wetly in the dark where

    I take up my veins like a woolen skein

    to braid these lonely secrets from my heart

    to some broken cross I drag though the night.

    There are not any guides to trace the way,

    no straight lines to unravel  obliquely

    as if some kind of redemption were there

    waiting for love and forgiveness for all.


    Hope is the final lie, the last true lie:

    the sun breaks over the trees without us.

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  • Balanced

    by

    abstract, liminal, poetry, sentence

    The fences were in need,

    as always, of repair, 

    not mended like Frost’s, 

    but more of a courtesy

    to recognize an accord

    with a tone of enmity

    slipped in like mortar, 

    or a knife beneath bone,

    as an acknowledgement

    of a division where X 

    does not equal Y, 

    even in the abstract.

    (July 27, 2022)

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  • Self-Portrait as Someone Else

    by

    awareness, change, clarity, despair, identity formation, life, middle-age, perspective, poetry

    Late at night when you cannot sleep

    and you step silently through the house;

    or lost in thought driving to work

    and you do not notice your normal exit,

    then the niggling whispers gain a clarity

    that cannot be partitioned or pardoned.

    No little boxes filled with secrets to be

    placed locked in other larger boxes

    appear to safely hide your face within. 

    When all your variant stories disentangle,

    and fall away like petals on a dying rose,

    how do you begin to confess the lies

    manifested through accidental negligence?

    How do you begin to open the sarcophagus 

    you have for so long hidden within? How do 

    you even begin to begin to live again?

    (July 23, 2022)

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  • Ikkyu Reiterations: As Above

    by

    abstract, borders, cycle, death, delusion, dream, ikkyu, paradigms, pessimism, poetry, truth, war, ways of knowing

    There is no truth to face;

    these circles are closed and reflexive.

    War is endless: we walk blindly

    through one blooded field or another.

    Nothing matters. Her one endless song

    is too full of flowers and mockery.


    *


    I float between sleep

    and dreams of sleep. 

    With no other joys,

    no other pleasures,

    I sink beneath

    waves of dry tears.


    (July 18, 2022)

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  • Ikkyu Reiterations: Your Eyes

    by

    beauty, clarity, love, muse, poetry

    I am lost,

    my sweet love,

    in your eyes.


    My broken

    words cannot

    encompass


    such sadness

    their beauty

    opens to—


    (July 13, 2022)

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  • Ikkyu Reiterations: Relinquish

    by

    aging, attention, eros, ikkyu, love, lust, poetry, traces

    I stop at each blade of grass,

    stare at each tree’s leaf’s tremble,

    stir at your slightest touch—


    I am a ghost lost in the wood.

    (July 11, 2022)

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  • There Then Here Now

    by

    change, communication, erato, ikkyu, loss, poetry, regret, relationships, traces

    I talked too much, saying little.

    Then a decade of unbroken silence

    followed without your laughter.


    Yet, I still felt the silent trace

    of your fingertips along the length 

    of my bare arm, as you spoke.


    Our intentions were never clear.

    Then we left, each to our ways;

    and, I became a ghost to you.

    (July 10, 2022)

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  • Ikkyu Reiterations: Late Autumn Night

    by

    aging, cycle, erato, ikkyu, love, poetry

    Returning to the mountain, I ignore 

    the bitter taste in my mouth. Forgetting

    my grey beard again, I shamefully fall 

    in love again, as I listen to her sad songs 

    late into the lengthening autumn night.

    (July 8, 2022)

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  • Ikkyu Reiterations: The Sacred and Profane

    by

    borders, dream, erato, eros, ikkyu, muse, poetry

    Summoned from Shaman Mountain

    as his lover for the night, she steps 

    lightly from dream rising on waves 

    surging from a storm. The flowers 

    give way beneath the plum tree’s 

    branches; and, the scent of narcissus 

    lingers like the moon before the dawn, 

    as she wraps her thighs around his hips.

    (July 7, 2022)

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  • Ikkyu Reiterations: Practice

    by

    acceptance, ars poetica, attention, creativity, home, ikkyu, meditation, patience, poetry, process, ways of knowing, writing

    “If I knew what I was doing, I’d be doing it right now…”

    —Radney Foster

    Another morning sun trickles

    through the cottonwoods. Today,

    I have time to write. Instead,

    I watch the cardinal pair twitter 

    from branch to branch, fluttering 

    like drunken dancers in love.

    I have nothing to say; yet, today

    that is enough. The cottonwoods

    slowly clatter in the soft breeze,

    while the grey cat purrs at my feet.

    (July 1, 2022)

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  • Ikkyu Reiterations: Samadhi (2)

    by

    creativity, ikkyu, literature, meditation, poetics, poetry, response, time, writing

    Each day I shuffle about the house

    lost within the duties of the day.

    I wonder: all these poets with their advice

    full of absolutes and disdain for others—

    when do they find time to write;

    to sit alone with their words;

    to scrape the burnt rice from the pan?

    (June 30, 2022)

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  • Ikkyu Reiterations: Samadhi

    by

    attention, awareness, ikkyu, meditation, poetry

    In the early evening silence,

    cicadas and doves, hidden

    in the trees, whoo and trill,

    as the sprinkler fans the grass

    with artificial rain.


    This is enough,

    as the sun tips the tops

    of the tallest trees

    with a light-green fire

    before it sets behind the hills.

    (June 24, 2022)

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  • Personal Koan

    by

    aging, attention, awareness, death, life, poetry

    Which part of death

    escapes me,

    the beginning, or the end?

    or the moment in between?

    (June 23, 2022)

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  • Ikkyu Reiterations: Who Knows?

    by

    attention, education, ikkyu, ways of knowing, zen

    While degrees

    prove persistence

    more than

    knowledge gained,

    one cannot pretend

    through screams

    and violence

    to know anything.

    If one attends

    to each breath

    and stumble along

    the garden path,

    one’s practice should be

    enough; yet, life

    disguises wisdom

    in each rose’s bloom.

    (June 23, 2022)

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  • Ghosts’ Stories

    by

    agency, choice, definition, dream, identity formation, patterns, poetry, prose poem, social construction

    The ghosts enter my dreams again. They dislike the arrangement of the furniture. So, they move the leather couch to the opposite wall, reset the clock, close all the doors, open all the windows, letting bugs get in, and finally turn off all the lights except the one over the kitchen table, which glows eerily as if in a noir movie from the 1950’s. I have to admit the new arrangement of the room makes for a better flow overall, yet something is still wrong.  Although I see all of this, I am not there. I am somewhere else, disconnected from my life like a mirror. I try to speak, but the words come out backwards, the syntax jumbled and slurred. The ghosts look perplexed, but as an act of condescension, they don’t pay any attention to me. They serve themselves tea from a fine china teapot into matching china cups. They speak to each other nonchalantly, about memories I recognize as mine, but do not recall well enough to contradict the revisions they are making. After I wake, and then through the rest of the day as I wonder about the house, I pick up scraps of what was said, and try ineffectually to sew my desires back together as if they were a patch work quilt collectively stitched on a Sunday afternoon over gossip and prayers. Yet, something is missing: I think it might be me.

    (June 18, 2022)

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