Poetry
My personal poems and works by favorite authors.
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Dark Dream
I recently had one of the most vivid dreams of my life. I was standing on a boardwalk in what may have been a city Like New York. Out in the bay a cascading series of nuclear explosions occurred. To say it was startling is an understatement. Here is a poem about it: In the…
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Again?
The alarm went off again a brand new morning welcomed by NPR. On the news, another shooting somewhere nearby perhaps a baby is dead, or a lunchroom full of bright-faced teenagers; does the carnage belong to an elementary school or a military base? Is it a black man shot without cause in the face? Will…
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the Salk Vaccine
Suspended ruefully in its own shine an object of vast proportion, it heaves forth light in all spectrums gamma, ultraviolet, radio spinning off photons to travel 4 or 5 or 6 million million miles across infinity settling on satellites and gas giants on our own blue-green world. Its hydrogen fusing in a core unseen the…
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1989 (Birthday)
This poem was written for my step-son Josh for his 25th birthday: Hirohito, Emperor Showa goes and dies, some Eastern gods fail no matter where the sun rise sizes up the island chains, and cold January rains. To see in time a new reign too from the USA, with a Vice President shallowing in the…
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A Poetry Reading…
These are my poems, “Higher, Orville, Higher!” and “I Hadn’t Cried in 20 Years” recorded by new as the duet they were intended to be:
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“I Hadn’t Cried in Twenty Years”
Walking through the science museum in Kensington, you stop once more in front of the stack of wrought iron and intricately machined cogs and gears of Mr. Babbage’s computing engine and wonder what he would think of this modern world of vacuum tubes and television. Often, as you’d wander down the marble halls, you’d look…
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“Higher, Orville, Higher!”
The aluminum cooled engine sputtered to life and amid the twangs of warping wings and pings of sweating muslin the airplane took off into the sky. Below, the cow pasture with it’s animal reek and tufts of overgrown grass longing for the same said cows, shrank into a bland smudge from 350 feet above. In…
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Armistice Day
The sky is a wonderful blue and the air is just the right touch of cool for November. Southern California days in the lateness of the year are a pleasure – which makes this parade exhilarating instead of tiring. Armistice Day, 1924! We came back from France changed, my old self, dead. I hardly remember…
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I Remember Venice…
I remember Venice and the stucco homes along the canals. I remember coastlines of soft sand and people arrayed along them as far as could be seen; a warm summer day was a beach day. The weather could be comfortable even in August, and when I was a child water, drinking water, flowed freely over…
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Brian Wilson
I remember California sand soft, moist, under my bare feet. That tugging pull of the ocean, Pacific green and cold on my ankles, eroding the foundations on which I stood. Out there, under bright sun and royal blue skies, is the mythology of the surfer and the beach bum and the casual swimmer. I collected…
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The 20th Century Never Ended
A petty crime committed in the street echoed loudly in this oppressive heat. Here outside the big city, boys in their teens are targeted without pity for the crime of being out and brown, the empowered police of this town are tasked to dispense justice true and swift, without suspense. Mercy…
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Justice
Let’s not talk about retribution or what justice means, it is an ill-defined word. Let’s not talk about victims and the horror of what they experienced. Because, what in place of revenge can fill the empty, or be a measure of hope when nothing is repairable and all broken finality? So we punish with cages and the…
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IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
Its hot and muggy in this brick oven the gray painted walls tacky from the heat around the various small tables sit sweating men in Southern cotton and Northern wool. They haggle and argue and face off about the injustices that roil all English blood and come to the point, that independence from the Crown…
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Charles-Henri Sanson
(Place de la Révolution, 1793) 3000 people under him float on a sea of blood and sin; of them that went, all are left ahead. In his two fists grappling greasy hair and plunging neck lines crimson, this man Sanson executes the law of the land. In his red uniform designed to hide the…
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Dichotomy Under Stars
In a giant room full of loud machines men and women sit or stand over their labors, working together to build what was once impossible. It’s a dream in plastic and carbon fiber, a wish built on a strong titanium framework. They strive with tools and minds to break home ties with this Earth, just…
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Sexual Creatures
We are all sexual creatures, we dress up in our dowdy exterior paints, some flat primer and our simple stitched cloth and dance around the reality. We anchor ourselves to deep ocean currents, a green sea of belief and understood truth. Sometimes it’s received truth sent to us from barmen and priests, often times they’re…
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Make a Woman Make
Make a woman understand in the land of what and why how she played the game with dignity, her head held high. They called her a mathematical fairy a beauty and a wife, her friends were male and genius who all enhanced her life. Despite the scandal of being thought of as an equal with…
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Monteczuma
I have bathed again, the water rich In frothy copalxocotl, I am made clean. As I dress, I am informed that there are representatives from a king across the sea approaching our city. From my palace I can see the glints of sunlight coming off of their metal clothing-standing among them are huge beasts which…
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Cortez
Walking down from out of the small hills, we saw on the lake, floating like a ship in a fevered dream, Tenochtitlan. Its palaces and temples and strange structures unnamed, its majesty rivaling anything in Europe. Everything in ordered rows, painted in bright colors, marketplaces full of people and fruits and vegetables and wares, everywhere…
The Numinous Cosmos 