This meter’s snappy! What say you?
Its parallels are far and few!
At midnight, dawn, and twilight too,
an odist’s comrade through and through!
In truth its cadence is a bore!
It’s more or less an age-old snore.
Please put away this “two and four”
and just write!
no key
on your person,
freezing under a tree
endlessly praying for someone
to come
Fall Foliage in Tachikawa’s Showa Kinen Park/Japan
2018.November.15
her hand in your hand
weeping into my daydreams
I weave the cord as I can
tether me quickly
but sweetheart, in your own time
there are many cliffs to climb
Now, you might think I’m course and rude,
my language blue and sometimes crude,
but I could pen a verse for you
more delicate than morning dew.
2018.September.5
Tokyo, Japan
Dilapidated pockets, presently pushed but sometimes pulled,
invisible to the revolving golden foci
critical to London life, long for the bucolic
kingdoms that live on fairy tale stages, hoping to unlock
evening’s peace with dreams which cannot be.
Neither wind nor rat stop to consider the shorn
shadows who cluster like clouds in fetid backstreets.
If you had eyes, you would cry the Nile
until your mane was streaked with dusk.
Instead, you stand like a stone,
unmoved for days on end,
blind to the lush fears
that grow wild and
free beneath
nightfall’s
glare.
Images from the Asakusa Toro Nagashi-2018.August.11
A Toro Nagashi is a Japanese ceremony in which people float paper lanterns
down a river to commemorate the souls of the dead.
Such whims you must expunge with every crumb
of heart at hand, for nothing but unrest
would prey upon the pride of those who slump
forth, called to be old outcasts, two abreast!
Remember days of mustard dust and nests
of grievous vultures, pecking ‘round your door?
To yell to hell with palms outstretched, compressed
by dappled fabulists whom you abhor,
is Thebes’ thistle—nothing less and nothing more.
sundry folly 