A prose poem 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.

 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.

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, 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 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 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.

(Three poems with an interview by the publisher Jen Knox published in February, 2024 issue of Unleash Lit) 

Escape from Belle Isle

in the prison of pines and parables and lost time
on mountains above the bay of shadows
you hunger for more than liberation
now you know that all bridges are lies
…you are stuck in the middle
in the mean of metaphors that darken custody
 
in such a cage you read your own palm
looking for a lifeline
 
the truth you long for won’t say its real name
and in the solitary confines of subject and object
you fake escape, you claim roots, with a faceted rock
you slough off the words rationed; you make new words
 
you wrestle an angel for ladders
 
in the canopy of tall trees
in the bells that ring the hour
in the tide below flowing with its rules
and in the simple conjuring
in the red notebook
you hold so tightly --
that truth, the soul’s truth, sets nothing free:
a metal key 
jangles
on a jailor’s belt
 
the tide rises to cover the narrow beach
a limb falls to the ground
pounding the earth with sorrow
the late hour closes every door to you
 
here, you learn that thinking you are a god
does not make you a god
these are the rules too
 
the mark of impermanence is on everything
and you only can lock yourself in such loss
you can only scratch the days passing on the stone walls
 
one morning in fall, in the cooling sun
a map falls from the notebook
you can get lost on this map
but a florid compass rose points directions
it is a chart to the northwest passage that surely
takes you out to an end
who knows?
you ask the sailor in the next cell
 
he says
“row, row, oh sweet and wounded pilgrim;
the oar in your arms loosens from the gunwale --
your body, too, loses chains
and sinks in the certain tide”
 
in this school for scoundrels
you learn not to wait for magic
for charts to secret islands
you learn the sacred improbable
has buried stolen jewels in you
           
            your shadow
            draws stickfigures
it is the author of your numerous mistakes
 
one line, two lines, cross four to make five
on the wall
in your notebook of thinking
in the deepest sea you must cross
while you are still alive
 
who can tell what rends the veil?
but it is the moon that pulls you apart
and takes you down to the wooden wharves
made of roots pulled from the dark earth
free for only this moment
when you taste the salty sea
 
what’s torn never mends
and you would stay in one place then
if you wanted to be a hollow diamond
so you write definitions of freedom
on each white page
then wander
a little longer --
the rules may follow you
before you bend
 
the fallen branches
form a raft
in the diaspora of sense
as the merciful ocean
carries you away from shore
the bell on the buoy rocks and rings
behind you
and you begin the voyage out of your hands
 

The Hut of Otherwise

the table of splinters
sits in a fallen shed;
 
it is a rectangle of ash and dust
and human labor left
in the middle
of the hut with no walls
 
the roof burned off
and now it’s time
to recover stars
 
the cottage wants cleaning
sweep around it! get rid of it all!
leaves and fur and rust
the particles of first cause
the sweeping never ends
 
the broom catches galaxies
yet misses what is small
 
bring a cot, two cots,
and arrange them against
the hut’s missing walls
sleep the sleep of the wicked,
there’s space enough for all
 
no need for walls anyway,
things are too busy becoming otherwise
 
and the absent roof?
that’s an ancient fiction,
nothing but made-up stories
 
a wooden table sat there,
arrayed with archaic tools,
all temporary
all already gone
before you can hold them
 
your memory is a hut burned
before you build it --
it’s to its ash you will return

Star Songs

A woman is singing down in the valley --
you cannot hear her as the night covers
you with deep violet silence.  You’ve picked the mountain top
to sleep.  To distance yourself from such songs.
 
But the stars, whose lights do touch you,
tell you her story, warn you –
you misunderstand, you think she is the predator.
You freeze and pull in your nubby claws
to sit in sand at this saddle
between north and south
 
and you pretend
you can hear her --
you think this lie will hide you;
an ostrich’s head in the sand of evolution.
All your performance buries you.
 
You deny the stars’ comfort tendered.
You let them spin away.
You are relieved when you think you have no guidance.
 
East or west, paths climb
in both directions.  The sawtooth ridges on both
sides scrape the sky for impartiality.
You’re on the edge of something,
you can almost smell it.
 
But you won’t climb; it’s yellow-golden
morning and you must choose.
Yesterday, in the valley, thick with both
aversion and obsession
your body stopped in its tracks
to stand like a shield. Only dusk freed you
and now it’s day again.
 
You must simplify your life.
But don’t expect to sing.
Song isn’t something you earn.
 
The lilies in this valley,
are planted by spinning stars too.
You think you have been abandoned,
though you are held in an embrace

by what you cannot hear.

So you walk south, hoping
the woman follows. Hoping
someday you will hear her.
Hoping she catches and consumes you.
 
The stars have a green power
to answer these false hopes –
their melodies purge
the madness and its monetized residue. 
Do you know why you’ve lost
the ability
to fly? You must change your life.

 (Published in the May/June, 2023 issue of Cathexis Northwest Press)

The God of Gaps

 

At the base

of tall redwoods

I stop thinking 

about thinking.

I wait in the space

between tall words.

It’s October and the late 

afternoon light

rests on its side

yet wavers from the wind.

The wind’s too much

for words I have remembered or found.

The only song now

is up in the crown.

There’s room

between the song I want to hear

and what keeps singing up there.

 

There’s a distance

between the right word

and me. 

Sunlight diagonals

fall through tall pillars of spongy bark, 

from canopy to duff,

to mark the link of shadow and light.

The trees invent the light.

They invite us to parse it.

We learn from what is sparse.

There is a Japanese word

for light like this

in the forest.

I can’t remember it.

I can’t remember enough.

Proper nouns, then nouns… in that order

words slow.

There is darkness between what I knew

and know.

The light in the forest

fills in its name,

komorebi.

Does this not sound like song?

Did it ever not sound like you

or me?

Nature needs to abhor a vacuum.

Without questions, words come

to the dark room between us.

The autumn wind

in this redwood forest can rain down

widowmakers in the gaps

or fill silence

with  a rush of singing

or stain a page

with exactly the right word

as long as this light lasts

and joins us.

(my first fiction accepted for publication, to be published July, 2023, by Half and One , and short-listed for the Khasi Hills Creative Prize, Jan. 2025)

A Closed Set

Two men in French blue overalls knock on the door and mumble something important.  Something will happen.  We cannot hear them though. I am drinking coffee and I try to open the door, one hand balancing the coffee, the other struggling to close the door enough to release the chain lock.  But they’ve walked away now. I say, Excuse me! But it’s to their backs.

The next day we wake to find an large earthmover parked in the drive. A mound of dirt blocks our door from opening.

We don’t panic, but it’s odd to be trapped inside. I climb out the window and walk to the warehouse next door. I see a whirl of activity. I walk in the roll up door and talk to the workers, some anxiously moving, some sitting distractedly in canvas camp chairs.  Some in overalls, men and women both, some wear business casual.  In my significant voice I ask: What is this? Is it a film?  (There is a camera on tracks. A large man with a baseball cap that says “Manchester City” sits on the seat behind the Dolly.) When will it end? What about dirt in our driveway? (These are reasonable questions! I tell them when I am ignored.)
 
I think the shrugs of indifference are from shlubs who look like workers who build spreadsheets, carry iron boxes of tools, handle a web of cords and wires, and answer phones that do not ring. (Continued....)