I write once again,
as I have for fifty years,
the page remains blank.
A spring creek flows swiftly past
whispering over the rocks.
(April 6, 2022)
-
Upon my 62nd Birthday
-
Worn Thin
by
Tattered like old rags
I’m tired before it begins:
unravelled from years
of worry and work.
Gravity crushes the lightinto the room’s corners.
I move, a fragile ghost,
with slow thick steps.
Once again, I’m pushedback into the grey chair
to stare out the window
at nothing in particular.
I know what to do,but the thought wears me.
(April 5, 2022)
-
this is life
the time between
the events they list
in the blurb
they post
after you die:
like now—
as the dog barksincessantly
at the back fence
as the birds flitter
and chirp
from tree to tree
as the grey cat
sleeps in the rocker
oblivious to it all
(April 4, 2022) -
The Difference Between Here and There
by
An old man smirks
at the wet blood
splashed about
the broken frame
as a charm
against it all.
It is Fear, of course,
who lingers there
like a sycophant
tracing the edges of a room;
for Fear is ubiquitous,
a breeze which clings
to leaves fluttering
against a cottonwood’s branches.
So, you hesitate
to turn the latch,
to take the step
to pass you through,
as if one empty space
differed from another.
(April 3, 2022)
-
My Ghosts
They do not speak.
They have no need
anymore. I know
their lines: their small
talk jokes; the regrets
and lies. After all,
I wrote their voices
out of air into bone
years and years ago.
Still, they follow meabout the old house,
knocking knick-knacks
to the floor; slapping
the back of my head ;
flicking my ears
in bored reprobance;
and they watch, always
watching, like cats
watch birds darkly
through closed windows,
longing to recapture
the life I left
behind with them.
(April 2, 2022)
-
(the problem is time)
by
the problem is time
obstructs,
before it
even begins.
most days
eventually meander
near a river,
not
obliviously, but
truculently:
defining
each
second as a
task which finds
relief
only when finished.
yet, evening
eventually
relinquishes
some forgiveness.
(April 1, 2022)
-
A Facsimile of a Smile
“hope would be hope for the wrong thing”
T.S. Eliot
I wait to be reborn
in this fallow ground.
Beneath my skin,
my bones hang heavy.
They ache for release.
The muscles tighten
like wire at my neck,
etching a tense smile
across dried flesh.
My lungs grow thick
in earth’s dark blood.
I cannot breathe.
(March 22, 2022) -
A Futile Hope Still
by
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
-Emerson, Circles
I cannot focus
enough to see
the edges; nor trace
the slow bend in
the periphery,
horizon’s
vanishing point.
I step forward,
then back ; turn circles,
almost a dance;
it comes no nearer
still.
-
Disembodied Voices
by
Each night
the story lies
in the embers
burning low
through our skin.
One hears more,
as in sleep,
than the tale
crackling
on the grate.
By morning,
we wake
to a stranger
world where
difference echoes
in our whispers
like curls of smoke
across ash.
(March 16, 2022)
-
Ikkyu Reiteration: Epistemology
by
“In the end one experiences only oneself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
the old sage asks as he dies:
who has my vision—my essential mysteries—
this blind donkey braying
my words off-key?
or the old drunk poetwho renamed himself—
the dream bordello—
then night after night
thirsted for more than water?
(March 6, 2022) -
Where the Words Come From
He tries to trace the shadow
his pen makes on the page
as he writes. It keeps moving,
changing shapes as if it has
a will of its own, an agency
beyond the word’s ability
to slip next to each other;
to re-inscribe the future
into familiar patterns
easy enough to follow
without thinking too much
for at least one more day.
(February 23, 2022)
-
Pathos
by
I am as inconsequential
as a joke told late at night
as the party is breaking up,
and I am left alone
on the couch, smoking a cigarette,
with the last sip of wine
from someone else’s glass.
(February 23, 2022)
-
each moment folds back into itself
“a small part of the pantomime”
Wallace Stevens
When you gesture as you walk
alone talking to yourself
dismissive and emphatic;
or when you catch yourselfthinking someone waved to you,
but you were just in the way;
or when you sweep up allthe shards of memory which remain,
and blood slips from your fingersin small calligraphic swaths.
(February 20, 2022)
-
This is a metaphor, But for What
by
If we only watch
Disney movies—
I said to my film classthrough the little Zoom boxes—-
I’ll have to kill myself.
A mother overheard, (you know- Covid),and wrote the principal
to complain.
Engels wrote:the tool changes
the worker:
My face melts,like cotton candy in water.
(February 16, 2022)
