August 2011
1 post
I spit tar from my lungs
The sun shames me as it rises.
I’ve been disappointing him lately.
Hiding.
Drinking grapefruit soda and watching old British detectives on TV.
They search for something,
I search for something.
They pick through bags of tea and old newspapers.
Me: Through leftovers. Empty vodka bottles.
Searching searching.
They always find their man on TV.
I’m looking for the culprit, too.
...
July 2011
1 post
One day I’ll feel it.
One day I’ll know what it is.
It will fill me up.
I’ll glow.
Things will be better.
Or at least feel that way.
I’ll peel it back.
Reveal the underneath of it all.
That thing that hides.
And then in a corner of the room it whispers.
Whispers that there’s nothing there.
There’s nothing to feel.
Nothing to fill you.
There’s...
August 2010
1 post
In the Last Hours of Mystery
Before the tumblers hit the lock and the door swings and a woman an a boy stumble in from the heat and mess of the outside. In those moments. What am I? I figment of my own imagination. A passing thought of something bigger. A man, alone in an apartment. Checking email. Walking dogs. Nursing a dying cat. Looking for inner meaning in mindless television. Jumping at a knock on the door....
July 2010
2 posts
I'm back, by the way.
It’s towards the end of july and the gloom still hangs.
So we all wait.
Wait for what?
There’s a groaning garbage truck, a cluster of birds.
Waiting.
The chrysalis cracks and the wings dry and we fly away but when?
There’s a box of kittens given away. New lives begin.
But when?
The start is me.
That’s what you’ll say.
Raise the rod and deem it so.
I have...
May 2010
13 posts
So,
All of the last, say, 17 previous posts were supposed to be published throughout the day today but my “queue” function decided to take friday night off.
FYI, the queue function is an orthodox jew.
Thus ends April PAD.
Good riddance.
Do you remember the time we built a fire on the roof? We lived in some huge short fat apartment crowded in with a hundred others. Right where the buildings met the highway. We found a way to the roof one day. There was a thin stairway through a nearly fallopian hallway to a tiny door. It opened to the roof. A microscopic undiscovered country. No one had been there for years you could tell. ...
Then it was a small field that I came to. Green, tall grass with yellow tips. Trees hadn’t moved into this patch. Out of fear or respect maybe? I strolled into the outskirts of the grass. The sun was low on the hilltops. The grass moved around my waist and brushed against the knuckles of my hands.
There was something there. On the far side of the field was a figure moving. Not...
April 2010
14 posts
Okay.
Playing catch up here. I’ll be posting the poems I haven’t posted yet for April PAD for the next few hours.
Yes, I've been messing around with rhyming. It...
City Lights
And the city lights burn,
from night till morn,
and the city lights yearn,
to be reborn each night.
Snuffed out by the daylight.
Will I see you,
or will I search in vain?
In the city the lights always remain,
at night.
Snuffed out by the daylight.
The city light my companion,
the only one that stays with me.
true it’s not a lover but we have a better history.
For city light...
Starships
Pretty lights on the field outside,
and the morning’s cold.
Moving down to earth I hear you wake.
“I’m feeling old.”
The Empire Buildings
raising higher.
A secret language,
growing dimmer.
Here we are now,
saving ourselves from the race.
Watching starships,
steer us away from grace.
Forgotten again,
ancient secrets.
Remembering when
there were no regrets.
Bring us to the end...
Concrete River
Once again to the concrete river.
A scrap of bread in my hand for the ducks.
Coco foraging into the green slopes.
And the web of the world settles down onto the city.
The day’s direction settling into the groves of concrete.
We will meet this person. Miss someone else. The phone will ring.You might not answer.
The lines of other lives criss-crossing yours.
Plants in the window...
It's born.
The horse hair scrapes across the strings.
The world is born.
Out of the lava a rush of butterflies.
A world is changed.
Water falls from the sky.
Hisses down upon the rocks.
The world is old.
Hardened.
We all die again and again.
The world is born.
In the mixed streets of a cold city.
A world is born.
In hot deserts.
Burning seas.
Potato fields at dusk.
A world is born.
I am...
Barbarians
Suddenly you’re up before the sun.
Your morning filled with loud cartoons and apple slices.
Your refrigerator covered in magnets. Art projects about Abraham Lincoln.
Blue scribbles that he insists are dolphins.
Throughout the house are artifacts.
The flask that got you through comparative religion your sophomore year.
A walking stick that took you from the bottom of Great Britain to...
It finds a way.
It finds a way.
The river is concrete and littered with human runoff.
You can hear the spattering of sewage pouring into the rivulets of moss.
Two overturned shopping carts submersed in the muck, rust eating away at their bones.
Somehow the door of a car.
I’d like to hear that story.
Long ago this river rose up and pulled 30 people into it and flushed them out to sea.
They...
Bathtime.
The drama unfolded at sea.
A dolphin and a devil ray joined forces against a trio of baby ducks that had taken control of an entire corner.
The odds were against this dolphin and this ray. They knew full well the power of the duck triumvirate that held the waters in a vise-like grip.
The were brothers, these two. Though one be a mammal and one be a fish, their love was as powerful as a rod of...
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Zoo.
I should’ve known it was all going to shit when he broke down at the sea lion tank.
There was no place for him to press his face against the swine-flu laden glass and glare at the sea lions as they taunt the children with their twirling.
On to the alligator: Ruination and misery.
No interest in the flamingos.
Sidebar: have you ever smelled a flamingo?
Don’t.
Onward to what?
The...
It happened to me.
The hair was a forest and the face beyond the cottage deep in it.
The hands were cracked and worn, the fingernails perfect.
The eyes darting back and forth, nailing each thing to the ground.
The feet were curved. Pointed at the end.
The toenails were blue.
The spine cut deep into the back.
Water would funnel through the basin of the spine and down into the drain.
The hip-bones were sharp.
...
March 2010
1 post
And the universe was lonely.
Look at all of this. Galaxies pouring into one another.
Exploding stars.
Clouds of luminous dust.
A flower.
A rock.
A tree.
What will I do now, it said.
The universe is lonely.
And so,
on a little rock around a yellow star.
I’ll make someone to see it all.
People.
I’ll make somone to turn
and look
and see all that I’ve done.
And most of the time they’ll...
January 2010
1 post
Biography
I used to live in rainy kingdoms.
I went there not knowing why. But one day my car turned north, and I drove into the wall of rain and disappeared.
I thought I’d never come back.
I became a part of it.
Moss on my shoulders.
Damp shoes.
Pale skin.
I became someone else.
Drank the wrong things.
Loved the wrong people.
Loved myself.
For years.
Then one day the clouds parted and a...
December 2009
2 posts
Then Gone
This morning I walked the dog.
The neighborhood was quiet.
The air was cold,
Or at least as cold as it can get in a sprinkler-fueled necropolis like this one.
The dog wandered from leaf to leaf, from pine cone to pine cone, anomaly to anomaly.
And then a leaf fell.
But it didn’t spiral down onto the ground.
For some reason,
the fates had crafted the leaf so perfectly,
that it flew.
...
Down the hall the dryer is running
It makes a perfect rhythm.
Thump thump thump.
I walk past it down the hall and try not to let my steps fall in time with it.
Thump thump thump.
But the rhythm is so perfect that it’s hard not to. I have to concentrate and step in odd times.
Thump thump thump.
And what am I doing? Why is this a war I’m trying to win? What’s the endgame? Am I going to be the lord and...
November 2009
1 post
The House is Quiet,
It’s sunday and I didn’t get any sleep last night.
I had to have a second cup of tea in the afternoon.
It’s made me jumpy.
Anxious in the quiet and the stillness, in the occasional rushing of one car down an empty street.
And for some reason, right now, I’m thinking about when the Marsalis brothers played Mozart at carnegie hall.
Everyone went for the novelty, and then...
September 2009
13 posts
God’s voice-
Amidst line three,
my pen runs dry.
Sunday
On sunday I trim my beard, water the indoor plants, start to drink a little earlier.
I test the windows and doors to make sure they’re firm, make sure they’re strong.
There’s a whole week on its way, with yes’ and no’s and maybe’s (the maybe is the worst).
I have to prepare for that.
Like a deluge, like a monsoon, the week comes in waves and if you...
Moving towards the deer-
When he looks up,
I am a tree.
At heaven’s gates
Published poems
do not count.
Bank teller-
false nails click
on calculator buttons.
Writer’s block-
in the silence
my pen clicks on and off.
Her apartment
a block away.
How far really?
Piles on
There’s a stack of magazines at my feet full of people’s accomplishments.
I can’t bear to look at them. They keep arriving in the mail and collecting under my desk.
I don’t know what to do with them.
I read of the worlds of others and there’s this shadow that grows longer and longer across me.
It’s hard to live in that,
to do anything in that.
I...
Math problems
in his heart
have now been multiplied.
Stormclouds coming-
the birds shout madly
trying to organize.
Parking lot traffic-
A tired woman
A fighting couple
Last place-
The runner
enjoys the countryside
Extra toothbrush
Messy sheets
But she’s gone.