Imagine being Enola Gay waiting there that appointed day when the silver wings your young son brings drop down upon the scene with a button press, a short caress the bright, resultant light cascading atoms fusing (and the rising sun set losing). Now carbon shadows bridge the gaps where school kids once ran laps…
Arthur C. Clarke Writes ‘2001’
Arthur C. Clarke sits at his desk in the Hotel Chelsea he’s wearing a crimson paisley sarong and a pair of beaten up thongs his fingers jackhammer the keys of a portable typewriter each thrust and parry of his and Stanley’s conversations are focused into movement on paper. The story is being written. He can…
Memories of ’89
There was a moment, in those dark days when we dreamed of putting our stars there together – one gold, fifty white. On the Red planet, on the god of war so we wouldn’t have to meet him on the battlefield. We schoolboys ducking under our desks the quaking of Southern California ground not as…
We Are All Amalgamates
We are all amalgamates of taste and sound; once we heard, once we smelled something was integrated into our person chopped onions on a grill the small tinkle clunks of bamboo windchimes the breeze light the sun strong and its 1998 the grand opening of the aquarium downtown the dog had just died so we…
The Greatest Show on Earth?
Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey is closing down its circus after 146 years. They claim its a changing climate, that children no longer have the attention span to sit through a multi-hour show, not when video games and cellphones beckon. For years they have been harangued for how they treat animals in their shows,…
Joni Mitchell Cries
She cried when they walked on the moon she was inconsolable hyperkinetic. She will never be that young again never so full of life as that summer of 1969 when two men scrabbled over rocks and dust and looked back at the planet they came from, a small blue oval graffitied by white hanging in…
Tower of Babel
Such sumptuous beauty of the hidden soul made manifest in the arches and the rocks and stone blended into concrete massed into shape heart beating heavy as marble covers rough patches added grace and monumental powers push down into the earth shouldering burdens as always, man-made here the piers, hear them vibrating in groaning exaltation…
No Big Decision
Truman sat and stared out of an Oval Office window the rose garden was bare and the old President dead. Here before him was a weapon to cease all war unspeakable destruction, but unspeakable attraction. He was shown the footage a mushroom cloud rising from the desert floor briefly a new sun in the dark…
War to End War
They’re all dead and have become legend the chewing of the mice in the mud and the groaning of the brothers trapped on barbed wires as the bullets screamed into their heads who could believe it happened? Who could believe that the gas volumetrically flowed over white and tired faces their gasmasks loose as…
Herculaneum (morning)
Tufa, its all tufa underfoot and of course Mount Vesuvius stands beyond – mist obscuring the upper slopes. Cold rain, so unusual falls and fills the pool in the courtyard porphyry tiles, marble tiles amplified and magnified under the water, the amplitude of drops creating overlapping wave fronts obscuring designs of little brown clams and…
My New Chapbook – ‘Chernobyl, or the Wormwood’
Seven new poems relating to the Chernobyl disaster and the fall of the Soviet Union – available now: Chernobyl, or the Wormwood
We Return to the Sea
They returned to the sea (the sea we all crossed, some in chains) the Atlantic cold in wintertime (but they’re too far south for icebergs) off the coast under blue sky and turbulent clouds and the rays of the sun 93 million miles away, which penetrate the calmly churning ocean, scintillate in verdigris slanting through…
