Category: Poetry

I am satisfied with my life at 64. I feel like I have already suceeded. And that I don’t have to worry about not having lived my life to its fullest. Now I am waiting, waiting as gathering.

that is he was like the wind, and his breathes were counted in days. Tonight, he dreams and in evenings long shadows he remains. Where have you gone when the wind stands still? What is there that fades away? Come to me in the evening. Dance as a shadow in the night.

There were three colors last Sunday. I noticed three colors last Sunday. One was green and worn by the minister. The other was brown and was the wooden floors and walls. And on Sunday the color of the sky was blue. I saw many friends throughout the week. And the sky was blue all week…

There was a turquoise rabbit. Soft. There was a diamond and a claw. There was a child down by the ocean walking along the side of the road. There was a diamond and an ocean and the ocean leaned over and said I have heard the name Barabas… who is he. And the child sat…

Reasons to listen. Cartesian Graph. The music moves me to laugh. She stands. Today we mark remarks of past. Mark your cards child, someday we will sing praises to Kings.

This is the Elephant Graveyard. Elegant bronze lamps presiding over tortured green lawns. Teakwood and brass and here there is nothing only the fractured conversations of alcoholics. The catalog showroom where self determination is preempted by birth. Over beyond the toys are us palace. The camera’s faceless. These are the stumble cookies. And these are…

Shelter is a whisper. House is a dream.Morgan’s younger sister counts the starson Wednesday evenings.Mother watches the cars on TV,the auction and the old power cars.Alice has grown up into an Angelof blue jeans and Jack Daniels t shirt.And the world is waiting… for old men at crosswalks,and retired Power Rangers. And Presidents.We have become,…

On the East side they dress for suicide.Razor edged faces with molting hair.T shirts safety pinned to the back of jean jackets.Unkown artists with felt tip markers.Khaki wool overcoats on monochrome silhouettes,like the remnants of some future holocaust.They make their final statements. The West side screams for anarchy with their tongue in cheek.These are the…

Fields and lovely. This is where you find the founding fathers. Nestled among the cold gray stones. Down the street by the Wendy’s and McDonald’s. Here there are tombstones where men are men. Some headstones rising like cathedrals over rows of mirror houses where car fenders and seventeen year old eyes watch hands that move…

A cake. A Saturday afternoon cake.Windows in the evening with the sunshine.There is a thought that goes back three years.I touch the window with my palm.Why do I sleep. Why do I breathe.Because the ocean moves my chest. “What did you and Sarah do this weekend?” “We went to the store with the Martins to…

forced rhymes and chain link fences. Statues for what we believe in. Manicured lawns and leathered faces, callous flowers in winter’s dead hands. Parking garages with night faces and preachers giving reasons for living. Graveyards beside elementary schools in small towns, like baseball diamonds with Easter Island Faces. Fireflies with the souls of innocent children.…

An expression of a sin,until the evening is over.then we can talk around it in the street, walkingdown the street. I was a child, just a child. Look over there down 5th Street in this miracle of God’s hand.Ra gives himself birth among these Tombs of Pharaohs.Basked in the lights of the moon. A swirl…

Two reasons to live. Pain and emptiness. Depression swallows seconds like an event horizon. Or is that the Corvette? Swordfish and, God, I remember. And thank you, God. For a blue, Z06. The emptiness of a highway like a thin sixties tie winding its way past, just past on its way to the ocean and…

The canvas reminds me of soft colors. Brown and green and blue on brown canvas. Twisting around each other. And the twisting turns the canvas smiles, clouds with streaks of black and grays like breaths. Branches reaching up from the ground twisting around each other and the twisting turns the canvas smiles. And the canvas…

We turn twist and fall to be remembered or created? He says with a question, ” Do you remember learning French?” “No.” “Do you remember learning any of the other languages?” “No. There seems to be Italian, Hebrew, and others.” And in the turn of a hand is the presence of God. The turning of…

A guitar and a piano sat alone. There was a singer’s voice down the hallway and a man sitting at a desk in an office. The Church was serving a Wednesday night meal. Two kids had wondered in a little late for the sixties. 1974 and they had a car they had been given in…

There are three reasons to wake up in the morning. One is a shadow with words written in the past. The other is a sign on a wall by a pub in a foreign language. And the third is to see where you are. And if you follow the stairs along the wall you will…

A chair with its leg broken. A typewriter and a Marchant Calculator. An old man turning seventy. A pond at seven in the morning. A whisper to a neighbor. And a tan labrador. These are the days of whispers where everything is broken and only a child knows his own name. I was once the…

We lived in Picayune, Mississippi, on the Saturn first stage for Apollo One. My father explained to me that the Mississippi Tourist Office was a surveillance front for the state government and that local citizens were encouraged at the time, 1966, to stop by the Sheriff’s Office to get Northern license plates if they were…