hiding under tables,
behind windows on beds,
face to the floor
because there is nothing above you,
hands together,
staring at dirt
Category Archives: free verse
The Evening Post
Letter in your little lair, come caress my
fingers. Whisper your words, soaked in
oceans wider than my wounds.
Swans on sorry silver, flap off into this night
of Nyx. Seek out the hungry thumbs that
gave you flight and love them once again.
Brain Swimming
Snow falls slowly like
driblets of white molasses,
buying depleted time as
they drift down to
impenetrable ground.
Snow white pillows,
two for the taking,
bear contrasting forms,
come to their graves
at separate strokes.
Hair, black as chimney
gut, cover frozen feet,
now, forever untethered
from ballroom floors,
glittering under diamond eyes.
Hair, blue as heaven’s
head, knows not bold breeze
or branch’s balance, wings
unmoving–heart unfeeling,
all in one morning blink.
Unlikely companions in
false memory’s kettle, fade
into recesses of fable and fancy,
perceiving nothing save what I
have imagined.
Holding the Moment (a cento)
Little Birds are hiding,
where statues remember me youthful and blessed.
No birds. No blossoms on the dried flowers.
So, art thou feathered, art thou flown?
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a grief that may not die.
When night comes on gently,
the larks like thunder rise and suthy round.
This entire poem uses lines from other poets. However, I did replace Yeats’ “sadness” with “grief” in L6.
L1: Little Birds (Lewis Carroll)
L2: Summer Garden (Anna Akhmatova)
L3: I Don’t Remember The Word I Wished To Say (Osip Mandelstam)
L4: The Fledgling (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
L5: Sonnet 30 (Shakespeare)
L6: The White Birds (William Butler Yeats)
L7: Dream Variations (Langston Hughes)
L8: The Autumns Birds (John Clare)
Flying Around My Back
A down and out vagrant, silently singing the
blues through scarlet eyes, weeps upon this
lustrous silk lap while we wait for her highness, who
sits on hands dripping with egg yolk.
Painted cheeks and impeccable hair—nothing short of
an illusion. We perform for them, for you, and for
us, but not for me.
Never for me.
Louisa
Sitting in the sunshine, softer than silk,
copper braids resting against her back,
she knows nothing (yet) of knuckles that
bruise scraps of skin in midnight rooms.
Curtains fly up in rosy rooms.
The day goes down with a lavender bruise.
Champagne lace sticks to that fragile back
as she offers up sweet stainless silk.
:::when I stop:::
Thirty-four before seven, but
twenty-six after six.
In a bewitching mist, bodies
are exchanged, old for young,
clean for soiled–male for female.
Half past six, but
thirty before seven.
Shoulder blades come undone.
Ankles turn into fat drippings.
Water, flushed with flesh,
absorbs bucolic knots, along
with the sweat that girdles them.
night walk
Now and again, the clocks that we’ve
buried offer us calloused palms.
Dressed in weary bandages of dry, rotting
earth, weeping hands reach out from biting
mire with time on their skin.
They do this so that we may know the
frailty of our faces.
Household Songs: The Brief and Unremarkable Life of Joseph Clarence Strauss/XII
Hands–puckered, pale, and patched–
slowly grow stiff
in the geometric sea that once kept
them warm.
All branches are struck by
time’s uncontrollable thunder.
Incomplete trees line landscapes, clinging fiercely to
shifting earth.
Broken Bars
Empty as David’s seat, a befouled mouth shrieks
at high Sturgeon Moon, gasping for air–what
little can be had–within an offensive red sea,
which swirls malevolently throughout multitudes
of calloused feet, taunting us with decades of
dying heads.
Wrenched from ancient jaws with unremitting
brutality, sovereignty–smoother than pink root
and whiter than snow–gallops away from smoldering
earth around thick, sinuous necks.
Faithful soldiers, once unyielding in their loyalty, vanish
into a sylvan embrace, forever silent in their surrender.
sundry folly 