Spinach

Here is stuff the one-eyed sailor chomped
to pump his anchored forearms in Mozartean
percussive “strokin’s” every time he stomped
the roadhouse where the raucous crew were partyin’–
a Can o’ Donnybrook, and L’œil was tromped
by spinning pipe and fisty cuffs Descartian.
Or was it “sin” propelled the Popeye’s coil,
the acid green one soaked in olive oil?

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Through a Glass Darkly

I’m planning, you see, to try to confine
myself to the truth–Ingmar Bergman

Contemporary masterworks run backward-spoken.
Wrapped around the axel mast of Western thought,
the images that come across are badly broken

fractals on a monitor, a raft of token
rhymes. It’s everything the Penny Public bought.
It’s temporary poetry. So backward-spoken

into open mics from Athens to Hoboken
flow the line of hooks, the words we haven’t caught
and images we come across. So badly broken

roll our showboats on the rivers that we soak in.
Mississippi confluences, polyglot
conventions at the Theater von Hintersprochen.

Who loves a wall that keeps us from the killer joke in
foreign film? The lexicon of light is fraught
with images that come across so badly broken

that we drink in semi-darkness from the oaken
cask. We spew it back, an undigested haute
couture, a tendency in art quite backward, spoken
to an image on a cross so badly broken.

In Appreciation of the Youth Vote

On Prospect Hill

Decaying leaves and hearthsmoke scent the air
where Autumn maples bleed upon the earth.
Vermilion stars obscure the Date of Birth
on marble footstones, nestle in my hair
and bristle on my coat, on my beret.
Each tree cleaves to its mark on Prospect Hill,
a chorus done with rage and mourning still
gesticulates against the smoldering gray
of moon and clouds. I find a date of death
beneath the crispness of an ochre shroud,
the adamant inflections—Daughter, Wife.
I learn the family name, recite aloud
the chiseled prayer in saturated breath
that tastes the temporal elements of life.

Recent Publications

I have had a run of luck with my Spring submissions, landing poems in three online publications, two of them with recordings of me reading the poems:

Unsplendid
Soundzine
14 x 14

I also have two poems in Envoi, a magazine published in Wales. Here is one of them:

Song

A gust of wind, a breath that moves, a god
in preparation sing the only song.
The startled cry is nothing. We are wrong
to fasten meanings, count the items, log
our bright epiphanies. The wind, the light,
the silence fill the trees with song, the seas
with bars of alternating motion. These
you have in morning, afternoon, and night.
Lean forward when the music comes
and gather nothing. Mastery of sums
and calculation cannot gauge the stark
enigma of a cloud or weigh the sky.
Be still. Communicate, create, and fly
into that choir ineffable, the dark.

Interlude