Poetry

What I got of worldly gumption I learned in the church of false assumption. Under the sentence of wrath and fire I studied the windows, the girls in the choir.

A small room, a small porch, a large window, a stove, a table, a chair, a cot, a few books, a few thoughts, a notebook, a pencil, an eraser…

Gary Snyder is a man of the West and of the Far East, which is farther west. Or say you go to the east, and then you’ll come first to the East, but then to the West, which is Europe the seat of Western Civilization. American historians know that Kentucky once was the West and…

Reach your cup into the air and draw it back full of water.

Them that’s got got to lose. Them that ain’t got, can’t.  

At the bar in Otto’s near 5th, both off from work, the heavy foot traffic of silhouetted commuters hastening home outside, and us, here two drinks in. The conversation has just ramped up and he wants to know why I did it, how I could have betrayed our family. The bartender is in night school,…

On the glassed-in back porch of a friend’s house on Folsom, I slept three weeks on a heap of patterned wool blankets, a large ziploc of granola and a jar of pistachios on the sill. I woke to bus traffic in the floorboards and sun on my face, drank thin coffee and scoured the listings…

When the little bulls, so-called, rained down From passing rainclouds like little bullets Unexploded, wishing only To scrub themselves away on their armored backs In postures of convulsive surrender; When we, trainees, young men and boys With imperfectly formed morals, flipped them Onto their sticky ridged bellies With wooden spoons, then nudged them On their…