Poem of the Week

Comments? Write me!












Weed Honeyt



Choose yourself
from the fullness of the day
and the overflow of life,
encompass all within;
be last, and be lost.

Be what you have already known
with the solitary delight of a child
fetching honey from every small beauty
as the bee gathers sweetness from weeds.

Breathlessly buzz
toward every flowering stem
be ebullient in every experience
with an upwardly beating wing,
and heart.








(click back for menu)
















Woodsmoke and Cabernet



Permeated
by the scent of woodsmoke
and cabernet,
how beautiful you are,
and how far from a fool
I am in loving you.








(click back for menu)
















Pigment for Parchment



A work of art
is best created in abstraction,
connected by a distraction
of limitless superlative seclusion
in turn creating penetrating
patterned notations with which
to mark the margins.

Thank you for this
insightful affliction,
this profligate container
of could be, and
your little criticisms which
point out my blemishes
with such fine flourishes.

This us was in gestation
curled like a question mark we
craved precipitation while
mediating upon shriveling
moribund on the vine
never to be wine,
but blood colored still,
now fodder for prose,
pigment for parchment.







(click back for menu)
















She is Our Soul



What stones
have been hurled at her heart,
how many miles of shattered glass
have been traversed
by fatigued and bleeding feet?

Who has carved
the bottomless canyons
of her fluent eyes,
and etched the scar
across her fragile facade?

Who would not
smite them like a God?

See her soul?
still it shines,
a light to bright to miss
that battles as an ant
transporting a bay leaf
across a morning desert
of fiery stones
to season the soup of life
to spice the watery agony
of violent memories.

Who shall spread a carpet at her feet?
Blossoms of rubied purple, and dawn tinted saffron
should clothe her in softest cotton and silk,
for she is our soul
and has suffered so,
but will rise
like a molten mountain
to the stars.







(click back for menu)

















poetry to heroin



as poetry
to heroin
an unlikely

metaphor
as dubious
as us

two similes
too similar
this match

needs flint
not sulfur







(click back for menu)


















Hearts and Honeybees



With a face like buttered bread
Old Aunt Alice
is a sturdy thread in humanity's seams,
she knows the motives and movements
of the human heart,
and is often lonely.

But who is not?
Lonelier in the heart of the city
than sitting in a field of weedgrass
and wildflowers, surrounded
by the tumult of honeybees.

So she lives
by the bending wheat fields
humming like fiddles,
heart like a folded handkerchief
starched flat
bleached white
and close to her breast.







(click back for menu)


















rictus of misery



This grimacing rictus
of misery spreads moonlike
across the land's face
filling the abysmal crevices
of sorrowing streets
scattered with broken children
and their cargo of sighs.

Why woman, do you
will them to this world?
yes, I blame you,
every time your voice shrills
I hear the squeal of death,
and I blame you.

Every time a hand slaps
etching across a small face,
or an impatient voice cracks
like a gunshot in the night
slaying another child's dream,
I conceive them better
never to have been born.







(click back for menu)


















Fettered



she walks with fettered feet
hobbled by myriad unforgiven wrongs
real and imagined

on needles and pins
tangled in the threads
of her unmended dreams

saving face she
wraps herself in a counterfeit smile
tolerant and serene







(click back for menu)


















Rilke Said



To write is sex
in the broad clean sense
free of ecclesiastical error.

An insistent instinct for release,
a blameless rushing forth,
but not always without pose.

For the heaviness of old prejudices
may weigh, too full of narrowness
and consciousness,
uneternal, and ambiguous,
diminishing the forthright phrase.

I leave this to your possession
no human can answer your questions
but if you turn to the simple in nature
the inconsiderable things that no one notices
you will find veracity enough.

Win the confidence of what seems poor
be patient toward all unsolved in your heart,
loving the questions.

Train yourself to pure and happy living
be not influenced by convention and custom
search not for the conclusive future
but revel in the great unceasing interlude.

Do not squander the experience of ecstasy
applying it to the tired places of your life
as a distraction.

Let it find so pure a soul as it requires
unsuspecting of its own best virtues.

Come together in the night
entwine in vibrant delight
gather sweetness, depth and strength
and unbewildered by surfaces,
rise and write
of ecstasies beyond telling.







(click back for menu)

































Big Veined Years



As I looked down, just now
my hands surprised me,
attached as they are to this
familiar frame.
Hands, so much like my mother's
and her's before her.

Grandma had bones
porous as pumice stones
lavishly formed and fed
by generous azure aqueducts
that strained beneath
her translucent skin.

As a child I thought her hands
were more than magnificent.
I would smooth a big blue vein
from the top of a wrist,
toward a tremendous knuckle
watch it disappear, and
reappear when I released it,
marveling as it plumped back fast,
grand and wondrous.

Does it hurt?
No. But these old joints do
sometimes, when it's cold.

Now, as I slowly stroke
the blood pumping beneath
my own thin sheath
I'm still surprised
that the big veined years don't hurt,
and that these hands
remain strangers
to the face in the glass.





(click back for menu)

































The Defendant


abstracts herself
which renders her oblivious

to the Gods honest truth
he's just as old as she

yet she thinks herself less
her eyes clouded to her radiance as they are.

This cannot be as dismal as it seems
and he must be the same prince she married

and certainly, he cannot intend in a literal way
what he said last year, or night, or it's all the same.

In her search for meaning,
for clarity in this muddle, she supposes

this melancholy world must be a backdrop, an indication
of something going on elsewhere behind the curtain

and she would rather settle for a pattern
for some kind of reassurance of her worth

so she invents a grim god
who appreciates suffering as sacrifice,
to thank, for this routine despair.




(click back for menu)

































Walking God's Canvas


A thick mist beguiles the city
imagining the valley of trees
while winds at the summit, blow
and suck, a roiling giant's breath
ascending, descending.

Fine scalpels of rain pelt the skin
and the cold startles, like
too much ice cream, too fast,
a prick of pain from pleasure.

A trail rises,
passes the luscious pasture,
and a mammoth Oak

limb severed
as by the drunken surgeons knife,
unclaimed and decaying
an appendage
on a Cyclopean battle field.

Delicate and glabrous
Leatherwood, Rhus, then
a meadow of Arroyo willows
gustily promise abundance.

Petite white catkins
wave in the air
as nearby purple thistles
proclaim themselves, shivering
with pleasure.

The creek tingles and sighs,
diminutive, in counterpoint to
the whispers of wind.

Scarcely contained by the
glittering frame of rain:
a road to the horizon,
a floating sky, it was

God's potent canvas,
rendering the primal spring.




(click back for menu)

































Soft Center


Having been banished
from the liquid
place where nothing
touched my edges,
pushed to an edge
then extracted,
wrung from a
delicious silence
into this shouting world

the door
to that elegant labyrinth
forever fastened.

I bang these bloodied fists
against the rudeness of the world,
tangle in witty phrases,
strangle in clever verses,
so far from you.

Still, I touch flowers
unwrap their gentle essence,
marvel at their colors,
and the way they sup sunshine
to their sum and substance.

Stroking the soft centers,
marveling at their graciousness,
rapturously, I pull them wider,
longing for a door.




(click back for menu)

































Craving Sustenance


On days such as this
when joy becomes consumed
by the persistent
and mundane intrusions
of this terrestrial existence

I press against
the hostile certitude
that all
eventually
becomes torpid
and tasteless

except for this
vivid trembling
when your worlds
fill me.

Your awful truths,
your disquieting,
stormy beauties,
satisfy

Still, I crave more
than your distant,
delicious metaphors,
and this hunger
for a tongue,
lavish, astute,
and living

infuses
my insatiate anima
persistent,
as the wish
in a coin
thrown long ago.





(click back for menu)

































Here



among
the eternally dispossessed,
stiffened to history

between unseeing
eye stones,
bald and sulfurous

the creviced faces
of puzzled,
half smiling corpses
blink, uncomprehendingly

their brittle protests stifled,
chewed and swallowed,
behind hermetic lips

here, there seems
no recourse, for the transparent,
aging multitudes, perplexed

that their good deeds have
not been remembered, that

the utterly untouchable angels
laugh in their marble wombs
while life sits
in her corner
unknitting busily





(click back for menu)

































Winter Bus


When the last man left,
we felt
a palpable, assenting
expulsion of breath
tasting of sweetly
abrupt safety.

Past Market
an unclenched hand,
on Haight
a liquid closing eye,
crossing King boulevard
a blue-spiked crown
expands.

Across the seats
the perfect, wrinkled
and myriad colored canvas faces
painted with spider veins
are iron hard,
no longer.

These scripted souls, protected
by the hard wired jaws of vigilance,
abandon apprehension
for a moment in time,
and caress the tranquil,
ancestral memories

of warmer winters.




(click back for menu)

































glasshag



passing mirrors
painful
in a summer of falling down days
the glass intrudes

reveals
deepening lines
nexttonose
templetotemple
and there!
a flaw!

red vein extending
the blade grins
thumb / finger
guide him in the

sea / saw

anguished past
gushing
crimson

attempting
strategies of everlasting youth
squeeze - deplete - replenish
tweeze - release - diminish

hair
water
falling
life blood
dripping

pain - behavior - again
redemption - age - exemption

wondering
as straining flesh separates
in,adequate
acceptance
of a supple past
now over, and
over


Who is that glass hag?






(click back for menu)

































It was?


You said it wasn't me
but never what
it wasn't.

My mind thickens with ideas -
is it what it could
have been, or
what it was, or wasn't?

I suspect some history,
possibly yours.

What was it
with you
anyway?




(click back for menu)
































Stone Woman


This quarry stone
carved to a living form
survives as its own creation
an odd stranger to most
who will end as rubble
no lesser for the effect.

There is no room in which we learn
how nature is greater than art
yet, this stony statue proves it so.

Grant me amnesty from the ordinary
and a potent longing to survive,
by choosing the dissimilar
stone or color,
and faces unlike my own.

When I am dead a thousand years,
I hope to still remember
how beautiful you are
and how far from a fool
I am, in loving you.





(click back for menu)
































The First Argument
(Holiday In Hades)


are you my m/other?
e/quality, im/possible!

easy illusions?
needy allusions!

always strangers?
menacing marriage!

evasion?
invasion!

familiar flesh
becomes value
less recognized

metaphysical?
physical!

psychic?
bitter physic!

yet
better than
the terror
of alone?


haltered s/mothered
passion falters

resistance incarnate
insists on
inarticulate dissidence

becomes the augmented distance --
the slaughtered pomegranate
of desire





(click back for menu)
































Toaster


The sound of a toaster spring coiling
can still stir the bag of memories
of a bristling, angry morning face hovering
over a small bed while
mother makes hot hard bread in the kitchen
and turns up the radio to drown sad sounds.

She dreams the same
persistent nightmare
unable to run
stalling in space
world out of context
air like bread dough
sharp ceiling fan
hangs too low
threatening
to separate self from head
almost done
ready to rise
run away
close your eyes
pushing on through thick air.

The woman now lives
with the little heart that coils
perpetually ready to spring

The red face still
hovers over her life
and small hands cannot
press hard enough against the sounds
when they arise from within
burnt and hard.

Encased in the grown body
the little one
still listens for the sounds
which set her heart to hammer
and watches as the brutal black boot
daily stamps the life
from a small green bud.

The brown morning has come again.




(click back for menu)
































Suffer the Children


The temple is a body
The little children suffer
Be good and wash behind your ears
Before you come to supper

Elbows off the table
Feet go on the floor
Think of the starving children
And the ones who die in war

Be grateful for the food you get Eat up all your greens If you don't you're a bad child
And you know what That means

Floss them or lose them
Be quiet, quiet!
Because that's what One does
So don't try to fight it

Do it cause I said so
I saw what you did To bed with no supper
You're such a bad kid

Well, that's a nice hobby
But be sure to learn business
Do now what I say
Or there's no gifts on Christmas





(click back for menu)

























What She Wants


he wants her twisting beneath him
a photograph, taken, like a real woman,
a warm fluttering angel

she wants vibrant thunder, temperate rain
and delirious release from the pins in
her wrists and ankles

he wants her dependent on his muscled forearms
and will occasionally pound her, so she
will remember his power

when it is finished, she wants warm bread,
takes flour and bowl from the cabinet, and
raises the ritual loaves

when he is finished, he wants her in a high collared dress
and the slight satisfaction of broken mirrors
his newest invention

she sifts salt and soda, stirring slowly,
sips a glass of cabernet,
caustic in her mouth

he comes in barely tall, puts his lips to the yeasty
smell of home and hearth, all that he owns,
and calls it good

while she pounds dough, digs fingers in deeper
needing and needing to stand over something
more malleable than herself





(click back for menu)


























Prolixity


All this
prolixity
is wastful

I do not
love you,

that's
why.






(click back for menu)