Published Nov 26, 2024, in Festival for Poetry

Norwegian Wood

Are these not just excuses to not connect. Our differences are irrelevant. To only name the flaws. - Bjork

Perhaps it was wrong
to burn him in my bucket of ashes.
Perhaps raising fire
was only code for my incompetence.
He is a fine musician, he hears notes
better than words.  I hear
the keys and chords of an unknown man
and my hunger looks for answers 
in blue notes and echoes. 
Words dry up. They always have.
But words are kindling too.
*
Sandalwood oil cools on the tabernacle of your wrist.
No sandalwood grew in Oslo.
Yet our little love nest on the fjord was full of sweet scent
and strong hot tea.  I loved choosing furniture
for you. I loved dropping mint and sugar in your tea.
I loved singing a third above your melody.
You did not notice. You kept singing your lonely song.
*
How many tables did we construct? 
How much experience can be stretched on them 
now for examination?  And how many conclusions 
wow us then are moved like chess pieces?
The usual gambit
grabs your body from my memory
and I anele it with aloe and myrrh 
as scripture demands. Ashes to ashes, you know.
So I clinch the white ash and a checkmate
from plane crashes, canals,
and ransomed songs foreshortened by history.
But the wooden hut we cobbled together
outlasts us. It outlasts even inept love.

 To published by Lotus-Eater Literary Magazine this winter, 2025.

Morning

the ragged wolves return at dawn
collecting what they’re due
you don’t remember when
they went away --
you do remember 
you made the wolves
by seeing them 
and you remember the stories you told
sheltered them from slaughter --
those parables of salt
made a world 
they savored in your skin
then at night you promised them
the wounded moon 
perhaps you promised too much
and now the night passes
and the wolves in you
get seriously pissed off

*
before their numbers 
were great 
and hungry packs
chumbled on the hem
of your rough robe
folded on the shore
there you sat on ancient rocks 
by the blackened sea --
and wanted 
a whole night’s sleep --
wanted to be warmed
by a fire of dry grass 
sparking on red coals
you tired 
of making them prey
so you struck a deal --
blessed are those who sharpen teeth 
blessed are the raw 
blessed are the outnumbered
for they will seek shelter in the broken laws
you thought they were multitudes
but it was only you
then when 
you stopped thinking
the wolves stopped
and the night returned
to night

*
whatever beatitudes 
you sold them
must have left 
outstanding debts
you remember sitting
between the wolves’ darkness and teeth --
counting your habits
as the smoke
on an alien shore
rolled across the water
into you
you planned habitual escape --
the migration of wolves
out of your eyes

*
plans are lies
and lies harden your debts
perhaps the many wolves
were also born by the war in your head –
you hoodwinked them
and then promised relief
by silence
but they got history instead
and history would piss
anyone off
your shameless mendacity 
will not hold the pack -- 
wolves pour out of the cut
in your chest
shadows scratching 
at the cockcrow’s windows 
as day insists you open
your eyes --
night’s end framed
in willows and skin
you and they did love the moon --
but dawn stops
the tracks in you, in them
the morning wolves are cranky
they are wet with your blood
and howl at the luminous emptiness
there’s not enough coffee
for the pack
but you remember the story
of loaves and fishes
and how baskets filled
as long as the hungry
surrounded them
so you pay your debts
for free
and the tribes of wolves
lick your hands clean of blood
in a windy sunny morning
by the sea
by what you refuse
by what you forget 
in your body 
still wild enough 
to make good news

 To be published in December, 2024 by Periwinkle Pelican

 Loki and His Law Practice

The world is left in our hands.  Its muddy clutter, our clutter, drops on our doorway at dawn.
 
There, the highways,
early in the day,
fill with the delivery trucks:
Pantalla Inc. responding
quickly to the human
need for more,
for anything
that disrupts
any thing the
1,000 anxious eyes set.
 
Boxes of cameras
are left on stoops
captured by cameras
and laws are not
the only thing broken.
 
Delivery isn’t freedom
for our members.
It kills.
 
Loki’s business model,
his scheme of felonious rebellion,
is to sell us on this practice:
 
Smash every screen.  
 
Do not
simply turn them off,
unplug, nor employ
the temporary discipline
of your virtual selves, 
reducing use
in the brainspace’s 
“appropriate use” naming. 
 
Smash: VERB
violently break (some thing)
into pieces.
Then wash the threshold.
Fix the eye on the sun; 
it rises one more time.
 
Loki plans to teach
that in such pieces
we can become whole again.
 
So practice freedom
from suffering. 
Ungraspable smashing.
Smash the open sky too
before it fills with riddles.  
 
We are so close to losing it all.
The lights in the rearview mirror
are not cops.  They are
an ambulance.
 
How’s that for a broken punch line?

A prose poem to be published November, 2024 in Unlikely Stories 

Sisyphus Invents Justice

Chill dawn breaks a wound in the sky. We wake where the harbor stopped us.   Here a dark sea fills barks of air with salt and sharpened steel. We wake from one sleep to another.
 
There’s no breakfast for us:  the empty iron plate is a last meal. Creosote and gull shit; blisters on our hands. We’ve no rope left to lift the life we did not plan. That life was a dangerous blade made of our minds.  Greyed stone grown in us, of us,  has cooled to the touch.  We reach up to it… from this, the tidal trough. But Providence panders again— we will not last this one and final day.                                                                     
 
Yesterday’s labor emptied us and we fell at night spent on the moldy straw mulled between warehouses on the wharves; we fall off with splinters. We, the army of hills; anabasis again, rolling rocks from the shore. We were convicted of the crime of life.  It’s winter; we make our jury of just gods, paid subscribers all, recruited from hinterlands with jade and blood sports. We named them so they could name us.
 
But the labor’s lost. The misdemeanors broke their rock all day. We felons pushed ours up the mountain of our crimes. And there at the summit the setting sun swallowed us. Even imagined prisoners need rest. The body has limits; bones obey the dark law.  We fell back to this ancient port.
 
Tonight will plug cotton in the nostrils and lay a copper coin on each eye.  So best to stop arguing the case – bloody handprints dry on the cruel rock. The evidence accrues. Punishments hew to the lunatic propensity to name things and our reprieve loses itself in moons.
 
Too late in our day: we’ve been condemned to the guillotine. So our every step up the stairs is pristine awareness, our head positioned just so is luminescent attention, our eye contact with the executioner is sweetly empathetic -- we know how hard his job is.  It’s just the water our gaze tells him & just let it all roll downhill
 
If he does his job our hands won’t need to push the stone ever again. They only need to catch our head now, tumbling freely in the air, dropping further into mystery, losing names as it falls. The day falls too, down the hill, back to shore, a withered moment stumbles and struts –gravity smirks and wants more. More of the sea washing on these old pilings -- a shelter of human sadness that’s become our scaffold to climb. Now, this morning on the pier, exhausted from breathing, we muster with pebbles in our pockets waiting for our slavery to be sold. We expected reprieves – that’s not how it works.
 
We want to choose another myth. We want to execute the plan. We learn the plan is our execution. We look up to the hills –  the help is empty and a feather is carried out on the tide. We wait between land and sea, day and night; we wait for the sharp edge
at the end of gravity
to render
justice.

 To be published in the Ouch! Collective Vol. 4, February, 2025.

S’s Complicated Relationship with Gravity

Waves of gravity line up for government cheese.
The sons of gravity itself roll out of cardboard boxes.
The gods we marry are exactly the gods we aim to please.
 
Turkeys on the hillside hide from hikers in the way –
lizards slink away in the underbrush, quick, quick,
and the cops look away from the menagerie at play.
 
Oh yes, both streets and hills are full tonight --
the son of darkness itself is the apex predator.

S can’t resist him.

To be published Sept. 25, 2024 in Black Horse Review. (Some details from, and the poem is herein dedicated to, Jascha Kessler, my poetry teacher at UCLA 1972, who was a friend of Jackson Pollock in a legendary New York in the early 50s).

Without Measure

 
My days scatter sums
in the long gallery of matter.
 
They drop on a scattergram
like paint ripens a Pollock canvas,
 
tabula rasa newly stretched
and waiting on the cold studio floor.
 
These wet accidents and raw intentions
are hung too soon in the Palace of Thinking Arts.
 
The show, in fact, is called “Soon”
and its catalog is blank too – empty.
 
But my canvas stays down, ducks for cover.
I guess I’m blessed to track the inchoate picture
 
of those bar graphs, x & y axes
carefully plotting a colorful existential dialectic.
 
Time is the sweetest mystery, solve for X
(though lately the brain refuses
 
to retrieve the name of Jackson Pollock.)
The body’s incomplete artifice; too late to live on pure spec.
 
The algebra of fame and its 21 grams tricks the light;
we weigh the emptiness and show how we got the answer.
 
Yearning? Fuck, don’t you yearn for a time
when science took the knee to nihilism? When accident was sacred?
 
***
 
I guess I should have lived in the early 50s,
Greenwich Village, lending
Pollock pocket change for beers
and accepting No. 31
to resolve the debt.
 
Then I could have lived
in À bout de souffle
 
or walked rainy streets in Paris to/with Miles Davis.
Horizontal stripes on a sailor’s shirt,
 
cigarette smoke rising in straight edge from ashes to sky.
Half my day adds to crime, anyway.
 
***
 
Y plots how to break the screens
or otherwise survive erasure.  But this desire for another life
 
doesn’t give me a blank canvas
and the one I have
 
remains flat on what looks like concrete
waiting for another drop of time
 
without measure.
Temps perdu ready for a deep breath:
 
X axis in.
Y counts the number who will unplug.
 
Round off the mystery
and fold the test in the half your heart hides.
 
Show how you got your answer?
Ha, you’re shot in the street like a dog.
 
Frame it, graph it, measure it just so;
the wild resists, in curation and celluloid.
 
Don’t you lean back to avoid
reading the tombstone too soon?
 
Count on accidents.

 

 An elegy for one of my dearest friends, Layne Drebin Murphy, to be published in the Fall, 2024 issue of the Adanna Literary Journal

 She Walks Out to Twist the Plot

for Layne

You’d walked out this door
so many times. This last time
your walking made the dusk transparent. You walked
out barely catching light; I did not notice.
 
As always you were dressed
in rocket ships and perfect colors.
A lampshade on your head.
A purpose in your step.
A husband in tow in the passenger seat.
 
The night before your laughter was unfettered,
and your eyes confirmed your confidence
in unfinished stories.  Before you snoozed,
leaning on your human helpmeet,
we watched bad TV,
you anthropomorphized our dogs,
and then snored softly on your way
out of our lives.
 
Dogs, cats, llamas and Yo La Tengo in the safe box
of your carefully written stories.
You shoved those stories in your pocket
with each mortal step.  I did not notice.
 
Stories of barriers beaten down, artful struggles
of a righteous woman, though more comptroller
than complement in marriage, friendship, and business.
 
For the last time again, this time firm
and numinous and finally happy in your maturity–
you walked from one continent to another.
You walked with new steps,
exactly the person you thought you’d be.
 
And you took the incompletion, the glorious incompletion
away forever.  A raft of stories
floating in your secrets, floating in the space ahead.
Unfolding in the pages you will never write.
 
You walked out to twist the plot.
But with every possible glorious story
left open-ended for us.  Notable stories only possible
in the space of your bright absence.
 
A woman’s substance fading with each step.
An absence measuring what’s left of us.
Yet no presence speaks as eloquently as your absence.
No music so haunting as the sound of your steps
walking out the door, on the gravel, around the corner.
 
I did not hear that you were walking away.

 A prose poem to be published by The Broken Teacup in September, 2024.

The Green Coin

it's happened... we flip through a dark path of product placement and algorithms’ pornography and sound monetary policy where the young disinterestedly wait for the nothing left that’s documented to fall in their laps.  born with the spoon of acid rain and rising tides in their mouths, gagging against the wounded air. the pornography takes up their time as policy keeps queues circling the castle of abundance like a moat, while inside the fading elders pull rabbits from silk hats jeunesse dorre shuffling expired tags and rearranging the deck chairs on this interstellar Ship of Fools. 

what i knew no longer has legs. so it storms no barricades, gets filed.  i see the neo-communards impatient with my stare of longing and distance and so we both step away.  though their weight has primacy over air, the center topples inwardly, a three-dimensional mandala, linguistic circles and holding patterns, and there is no joy in the residual formula of this rabid shelf life of drained desire. the desires of impedance.  bloodletting returns and the circuits quit before any number of high noons.  rain rusts itself with the long lost promise of Consciousness.

crusty cassandra becomes a welcome paper rolled to slap the dog-blood snout as though discipline itself could raise a new song, hard luck hotels and schools uniformly loosen from the bowels of the city on the hill, the slippery slopes, the shadow under a bushel. the exchanges flattened and made roadkill by the crypto currencies, the zombie digitations and the market arsonists wearing Prada.

regularity where girls cut themselves off and on the arms, pull out their eyebrows and ApplePay, slow pitch, plucky but underemployed in the fried song they lament. lament?

regularity where boys face a jury of fractal peers, upsetting the runaway rejoinders, pushing all the buttons sold them to vanquish the enemies only alive in the screens in their palms, then they rest and press return in gonadal imitation, atavistic, alone and Copyrighted.

my youthful dreams and indiscretions also fell too short.  my sense of an ending frankly corrodes.  i might have wanted the abraham lincoln brigade, but instead saw trotskyites trash maoists in the late sun at kerkoff…and then studied for finals with the australian criminal in the occupied buildings.  sendero oscuro. the choirs of Reason burned liberty like a wax log. we didn’t give in, we gave up.

too old to pivot in this protection you have in your white-gloved hands. too late to count on pinpricks through the syntax and asymmetry. too thick with grievance to track the crossing of the sun, the shadowlands caught in what looks like amber, the Golden Mean pragmatic to say the least. saying the least.  stopping speech won’t work either.

what Angel is not a terrible prayer, a matter of timing, a trust pocketed like a magician’s green coin. 

eight ignoble promises broken by the supply-side husbandry of the world. particles of broken stars adhered in our mind and in the generous mysteries and we still couldn’t keep track. we tore down the temple walls to find that tease Sophia, but got drunk with our power to destroy. we fell in love with destruction and lost her thread, so hand her absence to you as your birthright.  taglit the burning plains, the trees drying from spreadsheets and MBAs, all we leave you is the disease of appetites. the symptom of a season of facts. 

the hermit hides peas under walnut shells. the economies, austere or inflationary, skip rope over the human instance, now famulus only to carbon clouds. neither pension nor gold watch sentimentalizes the pocket change. we had fit and filthy lucre and the thousand things Lao Tsu promised, while you face the natural world’s cliffhanger, poised to douse the fake fires of human commerce, interest rates and physiologies.  bank on it. bank on it, o bank on it my mistake, my children, my next flipped patisandhi-citta of thumbs and regret

be my silent guests in springs of living silence.  let the end of days go viral.   logic seeded in the dizziness of hybrids. we left you absolutely nothing, and nothing absolute. the sun really did ask, do you feel lucky Punk? two out of three? what profit it a man to perish on cue. even this jeremiad that wants to apologize, and tell you I love you, wants what can never be wanted…

no ribbons for the third-place finish or honorable mention. it’s in the final air, spinning higher than our hands, opened now with the adorations.  Águila o Sol.

 

 Three poems to be published in Written Tales Magazine in Summer, 2024.

Limited Supplies

Finally I find
why wounds will
help. I put my hands
inside them, to
prove I am alive,
to verify the divine
in me until
it’s exhausted
and then perhaps
I’ll die in something
that looks like
prose, wrapped
in thin
white linen
as temporary
as skin.
 
Even doubt
has a beauty,
a purpose.
 

Can I Serve You Breakfast?

the ragged wolves return
to collect what they’re owed
 
you don’t remember why
they went away –
you don’t remember what
was promised
 
that day, you know,
their numbers were great,
and they chewed on the hem
of your seamless robe
tied to good news
 
tired of sitting
on a rock by the sea
you only wanted
a good night’s sleep   
to be warmed
by a fire of twigs
and be left alone
 
so you struck a deal --
blessed are the outnumbered
you were not multitudes
they were
but the beatitudes you sold
left outstanding debts
 
sitting between
the wolves’ darkness and teeth --
in the dark fur that would not leave
that singed itself with grief
your hand, asleep
 
grasped the ashy paw
you shook to forge
a new law
to tether wild-
shaming awe
and start the universe over
then open your heart for them all
and spill blood
 
signed and sealed
and scrambled like eggs
smashed and revealed
the lupine revenge
satisfied in blood
 
your blood shed was the hunger
though even a good idea, is only an idea
 
now the pack escapes
wolves pour out of the cut
in your chest
it’s for the best
the brutal rule
you brush against
scratches against the window
with willows and skin
to frame the end of night
 
you and they did love the moon --
and at dawn the sun stops
the tracks in you
 
morning wolves are cranky
they are wet with your blood
and howl at the luminous emptiness
 
there’s not enough coffee
for the pack, but you remember the story
of loaves and fishes
 
and how the baskets filled
as long as the hungry
surrounded them
 
you pay your debts
 

The Longest Suffering

Your depression
is doable. 
 
A quip, a backrub,
a breath chasing the sun
down the spine
and then silence in place of
either correction or
sympathy.
Touching your shoulder
that is so sore
from the grand weight
your mind entrusts
to you
and me.          
 
But anger?
I catch the fire
and we see
who can burn the house
down
first.