Poetry

  • Mementomori.com

    Lugging a corpse with you everywhere you went. Strapped to your back. Slumped in a wheelchair. Dragged on a sled or pulled in a red wagon. The corpse keeping you focused on your mortality. Reminding you that ultimately you’re just a corpse.   At first it was a fringe thing. Hipsters only. Then celebrities got…

  • Note

    He said he would hang himself so as not to make a mess.   But he was still there the next day. And the next. And the next.   He wrote the note for the cops on a page he tore from my favorite book   of poems. That’s all I saw of it— in…

  • Fine Despite

    Three days after my chemo infusion, the hospital Chapel’s framed inspirational words wishing us well in moving forward, I send myself flying   with frozen lips and bad ski equipment, arms and legs dragging against the winter’s cold molecules— no longer regretting the frilly white gift   saved from the affair in Vaduz that I…

  • Pleasure Pit

    “So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers…

  • Meditation at Ice-Out

    Write a poem about the sounds the ice makes end of winter, my father says.   I could say grinds like slow gears. I could say moans and grieves, cracks like a gun in the night but holds, and I would not be wrong.   There’s a remedy for winter called the tilting of the…

  • Dear Amy

    We hiked back to those desert rocks just after Christmas. We saw the whale head rising from the sea, and the parrot’s odd unstaring eye. We saw a thousand plump barrel cactuses, and a single antelope squirrel, and a half-dozen lizards running ahead of us on the path. We saw one yellow flower and saw…