Stone Pillar

Stones are thrown into piles on the
ground.
They are ten times my
normal weight.

The sun heats up my life
like a furnace.
Under the night stars,
under a gray charcoal sky,

you are heaven—and I,
I am hell.
Speak to me, stones:

you are hard as a boiled egg,
and round as the moon.

An African Outhouse After a Hurricane, Dec. 1983

There was the smell, constant,
that spun with the lightning and rain:
a mixture of dandelions and worms.

The outhouse
was like a great flood. Four walls, one little
room,
a toilet that leaked, water spewing everywhere.
It sat on the edge of a terrain,
looking down into a small animal graveyard in
Southern Africa until a hurricane blew it away.

All that remained was a roll
of wet paper towel
and a newspaper from 1979.

Even the old man who used it was gone.
The last time they saw him he was
humming a tune as he strolled down
the path towards the outhouse,
a magazine tucked under one arm.
He didn't seem to mind the rain
at all.

-Published in Whistling Shade Magazine

It Has Not Been Autumn For Seven Years

Macaroni is boiling in a pot on the stove.
The pot is burnt--it smells
like burnt toast.
The macaroni tastes like rubber.
A tire is rubber.
It tastes like a tire.
A tire is black like the sea,
or maybe like space, endless as my heart.
Or maybe like the burnt stuff at the bottom
of a pot of boiling macaroni.
The astronaut is falling. Falling.
Can you see him, spinning through air,
falling like a leaf in autumn?
It has not been autumn for seven years,
and still you are falling,
dangling on a thin string of hope.

-Published in Aught Magazine

college life

Listening to urban

jazz music in old time coffee shop,

girls in cardigan jumpsuits scurry across

the courtyard with

an armload of books.

eyelids

sagging heavily from too much

partying, a football jock crashes on the couch, sleeps

until monday.

his essay is due at 2pm. he has not started

writing it yet. he corners a nerd in the library,

demanding help.

violence is unnatural, the nerd tells him in a high-pitched

voice, but i will help you just the same.

the rain falls, glistenin.g

from the heavens,

and a

flower opens

into spring.

Life and Death (an interlude)

You played this game of
do or lose, and lost the game of living to a
pale man called Death-but the rooms

found out and the white face of the
clock found out and stopped time just for you.

A year moved forward (went back) and you are still
a young man trying to find out the meaning of Life,
which is as dim as classical music is to your deaf ears.
Sometimes Death is as close as vivid is to
the red eye, and you just want to cry,

but Death leaves you laying there,
bleeding on the doorstep (strawberry red jam
shoots out of your ears).
Then you live once more-you are
resurrected, let’s say-but the living is
only half-living, and the Death is only half-death.

This game of Life and Death-of "do" or lose-
is a party to get your young
mind to sleep in bed with Eternity:

Eternity as dark as birth,
as dark as a majestic mountain peak against a purple
night sky,
as dark as her own black Father cursing in his
shallow grave.


---------------------


I wrote the poem like last year but I still think it's cool!

The Star and the Heron

The woman lived a thousand miles away
from her family. She wrote letters to them often,
and posted the replies
on the back of her bedroom mirror.

Out on the balcony she sees a flash of white-it is a
heron out on the water, searching for
signs of life. In the vast purple sky a
white star bursts into flames.

Taking her chances, the woman makes
a wish against the dark night.
Then there is nothing, only the
sound of the heron calling to its wife
and children on the far side of the island,
telling them he will not be home for supper.

How a Horseman Loses His Words

Forget the fly, my love, forget that he is
the bringer of death. I dream of
what I cannot have and how you
dear unequal part which my
flower gladdens and darkens
these words. Lose yourself, my
heart is soothed by the taste of green
tea and devotion; the river does
not stop going onward into the mist.
It is the cold, the etherlies, the slim
morning which I hold in the palm
of my hand.

The horizon is a young woman
who grips the battle of the sky;
whom we lead on into Eternity;
the skilled horseman moves
into the valley and breathes without
his words. That is what a writer
must do: he must be the horseman,
he must learn how to lose his words.

-Published in Burning Leaf Magazine

untitled

The tree stands tall as a skyscraper.
It leans over a house where Mother and daughter
are learning to sew. Daughter knows

that learning to knit is not important as spending
time with
her friends. The mother, she sees an opportunity

for her daughter to acquire a new skill.
There is no sound, only

the rustling of tree branches as a new sapling
rises from the earth, and the snitch snitch of
hands to cloth.

-Published In Underground Window

muse

If you are in fact a blank piece of paper
where are the words? Where is the flower
that snuffs out the bread, where is the
bold metaphor that calls to me
in the dark of the night, wanting to be written,
waiting to be heard? I have
not eaten the bread yet nor have I sniffed
the life out of the flower,
the beginning of a new poem, the beginning of
something that has not yet been written.

new poem published

http://www.writingjuice.com/issues/volume02/issue01/poetry.htm

All For Love

It is such a nice evening that I comment on your appearance,
how your eyes appear deep like the ocean,
and you give me that old eye-roll, as if you could not
believe that I would comment on the ocean when
I know it is forty miles away.

A sprinkler is goes off in the yard next door,
and children are shouting in the still-hot evening as
they play tag or
Follow-the-Leader.

A sea gull screams,
far away from its home.
My t-shirt seems to be second skin, stuck to my back
like melted plastic, and I take a small sip of coca-cola.

Recycle the bottle when you are done, you
say patiently, as if you are a goddess
trying to explain to a mere
mortal how the universe works.
All in the name of love, I answer.

I chuckle to myself, and
trace my fingers over
the three arrows shaped in a triangle on the back of
the bottle that has a secret meaning
I alone am meant to
discover.

-Published in Offcourse Magazine

Struck by a Sparrow

Struck by sparrows flung in a dark
cage, the snow has been gone

for seven long summers. There is cake sitting
out on the stove

but it's none of my concern:

the birthday party was last
week.

Then the postman, someone

who was much like my father, told me I
could
no longer come home anymore:

he didn't like the way my hat
rested
on my head.

That was the last I heard of old

Belfast, the old man
who once gave me my
bread.

-published in Toasted Cheese Journal

The Yellow Haze

Sit down in the yellow haze.
The eye of a flower, the flower
which is complicated
and rotten like
the apple is rotten.

The pear is also rotten, waiting
patiently for someone
to bite into it. It is daytime. The stars
have come out, blissfully
unaware of the apple which is rotten
and contains a red worm.

The red worm ate the flower,
and sat in the yellow haze, then
spat out the yellow seed
in the haze.