Poetry

Most of my life I courted simplicity and tried to leash any wind-breaking plagues of rhetoric that swirled in my brain. I prayed for rational segues from word to deed, pain to relief, and madness to sanity with little success so sometimes words surged like mad lemmings to my tongue and I spoke from a…

Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt he had put on her face. And her training bra scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening, kept saying it, training bra, as if the cups of it had been calling the breasts up—he buried her in it, perhaps he had never bothered to take it off. They…

“. . . for it seemed to me that everybody ought to know about it, but I was afraid to tell, because I knew that nobody would believe me . . .” —from Black Elk Speaks It’s a strange night here in West Virginia, warm for November, one last thunderstorm before winter comes on. Rain…

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and     rearing. One can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-     renewing field of corpse-flesh. In this valley the snow falls silently all day and out our window We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in    …

Let us think of God as a lover     Who never calls, Whose pleasure in us is aroused     In unrepeatable ways, God as body we cannot     Separate from desire, Saying to us, “Your love     Is only physical.” Let us think of God as a bronze     With green skin Or a plane…

When the giant panda views another of her species through a window, in a mirror, does she feel a little less lonely? I smile when I see another couple like us, though of course they aren’t like us, except for the contrast between white skin, and black. The year I turned twelve the way we…

When the air is thin with frost I blow rings of ice smoke as I did when I was young and imagined myself grown and never answering to anyone. From smoke rings to pots that became helmets and tanks, I play-acted a world where color held no name and eyes were tears holding light. Without…

So much for the solid- gold musical taste of the age,                               upbeat, down and out, love- sick groans bawling from the suitcase-sized boom box riding the shoulder of a cholo in shades, webbed hairnet, flannel shirt buttoned to the neck in midsummer, pimp- strut rocking by on tip- toe past pairs of squat, unisex…

We meet     as always on the corner of dusk & dark & against that soubrettish tablet we step off in search of the invisible night that lurks inside of darkness like a well-kept secret or a lie. Wherever we are becomes a carnival, a fair of the heart with sidling glances at lust. We knock…