Like a stretched-out cat, she gazes into a
melting mirror but does not know herself.
Her reflection stares back vacantly, neither
offering insight into past’s predicaments nor
future’s footsteps.
Tag Archives: poem
2. Slang: EDandO
If we could rip away our skin
and love the blood that drips within,
this hate that soils our world with pain
would vanish like a morning rain.
Apricot Moon
That droning throat buried in
his fingers, cracked and tanned as
barren earth, narrates the tenderness
of our times.
Into the wind, from hoping souls,
agile lungs stain this burning night
with the bittersweet shades
of our days.
Somewhere past midnight,
but well before dawn, silence
falls betwixt brandied cheeks,
yet our hearts wail on.
Honey Girl
Eyes not yet open,
hidden in warm honey,
stare into comforting darkness,
searching for safety.
Will you look upon me,
or shall my face be your
eternal, distant,
advocate?
Eyes not yet open,
hidden in a flourishing orchard,
refuse to see the
dangers that await them.
Shall I look upon you,
or will your face be my
lone, unknowable, lantern
in life’s teeming tide?
neither shadow nor shape
To cast a shadow in
a land without light
is the fight of giants.
Blessed are those who
stretch for high heaven
to burned-out beacons,
unaware of their bite.
Nowhere to be seen, but
in the clouds, we shall meet.
In a Gale of Wind
Oh Rosie, run beyond the slope
before my blood runs cold!
I feel that clammy, wraithlike rope
assert its faithful hold!
Her feet fly faster than a hare
away from Devil’s ditch,
for scents of flesh float in the air
as Johnny’s eyelids twitch.
Dinah’s Day
Salt-smudged mud, square-toed Oxfords;
hard leather heels flap like blackbirds
through a New York morning swarm.
Time don’t wait for crusty-eyed snails
full of midnight gin and tipsy tales.
That green-fisted fiend snaps at her back,
whatever the score, he’ll beg for more.
Those chords don’t tweet for love alone,
but for now, she owns the throne.
old homestead
The shindig sheathed a shadowed year
in reams of cheese and streams of beer.
We stumbled home at half past four
and fell asleep upon the floor.
And I’m Doing Just Fine
A Christmas tree without the cheer
of kin close by to hold you near,
is just a mass of dying spruce
that lost its life in winter’s noose.
Return to Sender
In a tan station wagon, cruising up Fifteenth Street,
we were mere seedlings, aching to shoot up from our
earthen pots.
Bare bones in the breeze, floating on the back of a
Victory-8, murmur of deprivation from the
shadows of their lives.
Meet me by the streetlight next to the mailbox that is
no longer there (you know the one); I shall wrap you in
the balmy blankets of 1996.
sundry folly 