Tut mir Leid, für die lange Verzögerung.

Here are the poems I have kept buried in my notebook. I hope you like them.

Music Box

A camphor rag
[Dance the dreaming dance
For the ever-coming dawn]
Laid across the forehead
Smell the sick--
The dead,
The living--
Cut off the swollen calloused foot
And the head will survive;
A bobbing cork adrift
Upon a placid sea.

"Leave your red padded shoes behind the door
Can't have muddy tracks across our floor.
We're all barefooted dancers here!"
Chained to the wall
Spinning like pulled tops

But I, we
A coyote from the steel-trap
Tooth marks on the dripping bone
Limping towards a still
Silent paradise.

O death,
How long thy fangs have grown
O grave,
Restless patience has become you
Beyond the buzzing fence
Pacing like jackals knowing,
While glutting itself within
The greater beast, on entrails.

-April 2007


Bananas, figs, and hothouse grapes

Grey worms, beside the red brick wall
Swept in heaps upon a sodden pyre,
No more to drown in earth
Only air, and death by water
Perhaps be ground into a sole
And wiped again onto the green, damp
Grass.
Flame does not catch--
Wet ash piled on rot-grey flesh--
Earth cannot consume--
A kinsman's hand against the pine--
But I still do not have the spine
To bear the weight of your support
As I watch the jhator of worms.

-April 2007


...now for something completely different!

Mother Earth [hehe]

A tree sprouted from fertile soil
May faster grow and wilder;
Sooner it will reach its limbs
Up and out to catch the sun--
Each varied ring surges upward
Further from the womb of earth
That kept it till it germ.

But for all its height and breadth and strength
A tree must draw its life up from the ground
And cannot leaf of anything
The earth has not supplied it.

A copse of pines upon a sandy hill
Will grow in anything. It shows.
Soft, white wood, fit perhaps for starting fires
But un-withstanding any wind
And simple drift of snow will snap them.

But an oak alone amidst a lovely clearing
With flowered ground to prop it up--
Dark and gnarled, but sound and solid through--
Can better suit the craftsman's hand
Or keep a quaking body warm and cheered
Throughout the dark and bitter night
Or stand amid the laughing waves of grass,
With leaves that whisper tempered joy,
That makes you itch to rise and walk among
Violets in the fragrant loam.

-for my mother, 13 May 2007



To a cross-eyed wife

I love your lips upon my cheek
Just left of my words
And the trailing smiles tat tango
Wild about your nose
Where others waltz in practised steps
To a dozy three-four plod.

Oh, do not wear those windows
That put up walls between us
And lay my poor words naked
Upon a single pallid sheet
Oh, do not wear those windows
And cut your blanketing heart
Where I have only one mouth to kiss,
You have two.

-April 2007

...don't ask. I don't know.