I enjoy writing poems—
but I’m no poet.
Words appear in my head
never making it to the page.
Once the white canvas
does fill with grey etches,
the eraser of my number two pencil
quickly diminishes.
Poetry helps me find my voice
while losing my mind.
Time is thrown into the trash
as I perfectly ruin my
criminal masterpieces.
she always told me
that women were
all trouble and
no love left in them
that they would
take and take and take
but looking back
at those women
and what I did
and what they did
she had it all wrong
there was that white-hot flash
riding an end of the line
train
and we did
our best
with what we had
but I was a man
that was too hard to love
so it always ended
like I knew it would
with the blood on my hands
and sorry lodged in my throat
with a confused hurt look
coming from them
from far away
but there was no way
I could ever explain
that I did them a favor
Strum and Lull
Luna Moth
Radial Symmetry
The Air Around the Butterfly
Translating Silence
That Reckless Sound
Weight of the Ripened
Second Skin
Broken Tulips
One Hundred Hungers
Composition Studies
Down Deep
Splitting the Soil
Weaving a New Eden
~ Created from titles of chapbooks and collections, in order of appearance (including title): Phoebe Reeves, Taunja Thomson, Jerry Judge, Katherine Larson, Katerina Stoykova, Manuel Iris, Colleen S. Harris, Gina Ferrara, Katerina Stoykova, Jeremy Paden, Lauren Camp, Annie Hinkle, Mary Anne Reese, Rosemary Rhodes Royston, Sherry Chandler.
I saw a man shadow boxing in the shade of a broad oak tree.
His face curled with concentration as his hands machine-gun jabbed
I wish I could stand in front of him
to catch an imaginary punch along my clenched jaw
and unlock the tension it has carried for too long.
The grass outside is freshly mowed
A newly overcast sky cautiously testing
How quickly a few drops would evaporate against a hot sidewalk
Blue and purple hydrangeas
weep petals to rot in a fountain of browning edges
Sickly sweet in life and death
Ink and old paper
fresh wood and lacquer
A hopeful investment breathing chemical newness.
And me, tucked in a corner
book open in my lap
eyes following a wasp on the open sill
industrious and dangerous
Determined
Sculpting old sawdust into something more
It paused, head tilting
Watching me in return.
Another petal drops
A faraway lawn mower sputters to a stop
And the rain
Arrives.
I have kept watch over my emotions
like a broody hen who sets on,
to protect, her clutch of eggs.
She will pluck out all her belly feathers
one by one to keep them warm,
that her raw skin will come into
contact with them, and she
swell up like a puffer fish
if she perceives the slightest
threat, indeed she will lash out
as if her beak were full of venom.
Otherwise, she barely eats or drinks;
one might mistake her vigilance
for lethargy, a moody melancholy.
With narrow slits her eyes mark
the approach of anyone
who might dare to broach
the matter of her discontent;
I tried to sneak another egg
beneath her and she bit me.
I knew exactly what she meant.
You don’t have to believe in God.
God is life, the enduring consciousness
with which we experience the world.
It’s all about semantics and the peep hole
through which we view the universe.
my tires slid
off the road
and i pictured
you
do you think
of me
in tragedies
too?
