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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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  • Teacher Appreciation

    by

    life, teaching

    Context: I’m stuck at a light on south 183. I’m tired from the end of the semester and grading final essays all afternoon. The car’s windows are down; I’m listening vaguely to Tom Verlaine’s rambling guitar on “Days.”

    Situation: A man in his mid-twenties in the next car is yelling “Hey, Hey” out his side window at me. I look at him confused, thinking he is going to complain about the music’s volume.“Hey,” he continues to yell out his window, “You used to teach at Connally. I had you when I was a senior. You were great. You really knew your shit.” “Ah, thanks.” I said as the light changed and he drove off.Such are the weird rewards of teaching.

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  • Lost to Myself

    by

    abstract, acceptance, aging, identity formation, meditation, poetry

    I cannot be anymore

    than I am;

    yet, I am

    someone I can never be,


    like winds bend through the black trees

    without airs

    to pretend

    they are any more than air.


    It is not sorrow that turns,

    nor regret;

    but old fears

    which tighten their thin tendrils


    until my voice is contained,

    and defined

    by others

    unafraid of presumptions.


    Brick by dry brick dead walls form

    sealing in

    the remains

    of my childhood’s laughter.


    I walk through this miasma,

    this darkness,

    each blue day—

    discomfited in the rags


    and cliches draped upon me,

    like cold rain

    which washes

    all the burnt dust from the air.

    (December 17, 2021)

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  • Here and Now

    by

    attention, friends, gratitude, life, meditation, poetry, ways of knowing

    Listen to your friends

    as they laugh with you at lunch,

    so sweet and so tart.


    Every second passes

    from nothing into nothing.


    (December 17,2021)

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  • Palimpsest

    by

    abstract, erasure, interrelationships, metaphor, poetics, poetry, sonnets, translation


    Soft layers scribed over

    erasures, poorly scraped;

    a velum saved for use

    as if it were a silence,


    independent of any thought,

    original, and never spoken;

    emerging fully formed, 

    like Athena, into the world:


    I am my own metaphor,

    a translation stuttered

    from a transparent other

    which I will never know.


    My words hover over words,

    like mist over a graveyard.



    (December 11, 2021)

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  • Prompt

    by

    ars poetica, education, poetry, process, students, teaching, writing

    Write what you know.

    Write what’s in front of you.


    The obvious obviously:

    Pay Attention!


    The world is around you;

    You are in the world.


    (December 10, 2021)

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  • Poem

    by

    creativity, difference, doubt, life, poetry, writing

    I lie to myself most of all:

    That I can write, or

    I know who I am,

    As if there were a difference.

    (December 9, 2021)

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  • Only in Reflection

    by

    abstract, acceptance, borders, change, life, liminal, meditation, poetry, ways of knowing, zen

    You see a mirror;

    you are not there.


    Upon reflection you think,

    as countless doors open.


    Nothing’s behind you,

    except a mirror.


    You are alone as I;

    another door closes.


    You are a wall,

    separating away.


    You are the way

    through nothing.


    You are the door.

    You are the mirror.



    (December 5, 2021)

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  • Another Sunrise

    by

    life, meditation, poetry, ways of knowing

    The courage

    to walk out the door

    is too much

    too often to flee

    to the streets;

    to leave the house,

    this life, to wander

    free, to live

    without 

    this constant fear.

    So, I stay put,

    puttering about

    my place

    and await

    my next breath.

    (December 2, 2021)

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  • More Light Than Dark, But Still There is Dark

    by

    abstract, breach, poetry, reading, writing

    Often as I read or write

    a poem, my mind wanders

    unable to track the line

    across the page, or leap 

    with a dancer’s grace, as

    the line breaks a short hop

    down the page. I drop, lost, 

    between the melted words 

    as if in an antarctic crevasse.

    The whiteness widens, and 

    I fall through my thoughts

    randomly cracking my head

    on a word which spins me

    along a tangental arc

    deep into the uncharted dark.

    (November 21, 2021)

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  • To Work After the Holiday

    by

    acceptance, borders, dissatisfaction, life, poetry, tanka, transition, work

    With a thick-cut slice

    of buttered brown bread in hand,

    I head out the door.

    Traffic flows like a river

    emptying to a dead sea.

    (November 30, 2021)

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  • My Hands

    by

    aging, family, fate, identity formation, meditation, patterns, poetry

    These are my mother’s hands:

    wracked with worry, the veins

    thick below the skin, soft

    like worms in loam.


    These are my mother’s hands:

    holding my face, stunned

    that I am still alive

    to walk through another day.


    These are my mother’s hands:

    kneading the bread dough

    for another Thanksgiving,

    one more meal together.


    These are my mother’s hands,

    empty like bones in the ground.

    (November 28, 2021)

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  • Presence

    by

    acceptance, aging, haiku, life, meditation, poetry, response, time, ways of knowing, zen

    I breathe in this world.

    A rose blooms in the backyard:

    Today is today.

    (November 26, 2021)

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  • Reconciliation

    by

    borders, breach, interrelationships, poetry, relationships, social construction, sonnets, storytelling, truth, ways of knowing

    Unintended, random like dice, or love

    the stories fell into place, puzzle parts

    as remembered, and retold as punch lines

    to a deflected tragedy one night

    late after almost all had departed.

    You spoke into your anguish. I listened,

    troubled in my failed attempt at reason,

    for what you had said tore into my heart.

    How can anyone know the genetic

    strands of what we have said to each other?

    where the safe world we have constructed shapes

    us from the lies we have neatly explained

    until the only truth we know is ours,

    tangled in our hearts’ cold reliquaries.

    (November 21, 2021)

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  • Last Day’s Wait

    by

    aging, alone, death, end, memory, poetry, process

    He was dying slowly, and I

    was impatient.


    The bell, sewn on his pillow,

    called and called.


    All afternoon as it rang,

    I would go to him.


    He would whisper slurred words,

    as I leaned into his deaf ears.


    What do you need? What can I do?

    Water? Do you want water?

    He’d groan, his eyes lost

    somewhere in the distance.


    What do you need? What do you want?

    As if  I did not know.



    (November 18, 2021)

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  • I Try

    by

    aging, attention, life, lists, meditation, poetry, thinking, tired

    to be here

    to be happier

    more often

    than not

    to laugh

    without bitterness

    to disengage

    the past

    cut loose

    those chains

    to drink less

    to be less scattered

    to be less

    to not be afraid

    to not be

    here


    (November 16, 2021)

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