Category: Poetry
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Hitchhiking in the 70’s
Impossible impasse: your guitar case kicks at knee level, one thumb in the air. Both eyes marooned on the taillights ahead. The callous cold. The gloves too thin. Red numb thumbs exposed to a curse the woods shouts out to everyone who walks near here this time of year. There must be ice in a…
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Birds of a Feather
Count backwards from 99. What’s the first thing you remember waking up? Back from permanent loan, a temporary tattoo on your forearm, you pour whiskey over ice, two fingers deep— the temperature on the front of the local bank the first sign that something was amiss in the month of October. Jobs are coming or…
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Shooting Star
Like a shooting star across the sands of time your breath in the snow trails like crystallized ice in a galaxy lost in the world of far, far away beyond the silence that is all roses. Brief moments glisten in moist patches of memory, fragments, shards, jagged remnants of places and events. How knowing is…
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Technetium Element 43
Hexagonal crystal structure silver fox of the table unstable Wavering in amongst the cooling red giants showing off stellar nucleosynthesis traces of Tc dredged up revealed to us in the spectrum shimmering First element produced synthetically (found rarely inside the earth) Squeezed in between molybdenum and ruthenium lowest-number of all radioactive isotopes separated from its…
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Year of the Rat
… sittin’ on the dock of the bayWatchin’ the tide roll away . . . (Otis Redding & Steve Cropper) We’re sitting on splinters, watching and whistling as the world falls apart. As if all we have to do is bide our time until the next tide rolls in to cleanse our consciences. As…
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Oasis
My mother smoked Camels, the animal, not the cigarettes. Men would slit the throat and hang it from a palm tree until it had been drained of blood, had its stomach swept of entrails and organs. She would gather wood, mostly cedar, and brood a small fire from which to cook. She was the kindest…
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I name my vain entitlement Jonah
You sweet precious prophet, you drama-driven poet, you prophet for profit: if not cash then congratulation, admiration, ease, indulgence, delight all taste so sweet. O you sweet sluggish reluctant “prophet” (you like that word), enlightened one, so chosen, so wise, with what serenity you step aboard the ship that…
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Dreaming of Beth
She descends from a crevasse in the grey mountain piercing infinity gaping holes in the space time continuum at the event horizon those eyes simply stop curving time bending strings of theory like a gentle harp penetrating chords of light expanding beyond the silence of neutrinos
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O’Hara
Love, be sick as I am sick.Hold the door for a stranger.Tell it to the chicken hawkone thousand miles away. Hesitate and let the wind pinchthat blanket of sawdust we lefton our patio. Who even rememberswhat we were trying to build? Lift me, as you lift the sky,and I will still choose to lay my…
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Agrestic Ditty
painted in red on a pasture gate ‘Welcome, townie, to this ground, Though the grass be hay and the hill rockbound, let the cowbells clang and the spring lambs play whenever, wherever, however they may.’
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Barometer Leaking Brass
I have come to expect rain, torrential downfalls, the great big shrugs of old men who empty buckets into the streets. I have come to the point in a promise where eyes meet, and there is an injustice of silence between us: The part of the curtain that blocks the sky from this angle on…
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The Desert of Dependence
I hike in to the Coachella foothills south in the desert of Palm Springs into a past with no memory. The desert has no memory. It is only wind, sand, sun and rock. The trail dives steeply into cragged boulders of granite, sandstone, quartz and eons of sand. How I have known these depths like…