Poetry
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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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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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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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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…
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Ink and Flame
I It was a pleasure to read. The black letters scattered across yellowing pages like ants on a lemon cake, each receding line swallowed whole with a cursory chew. The rain echoing on the plate glass and rat-a-tatting on the thin metal roof was a joyous cacophony to peach fuzzed ears in the early evening.…
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Consider the lilies of the field…
I have read the Bible in many different versions; some strange translations that leave out the sex and the violence. Versions that illuminate Jesus’ words in bright red ink. I have a beautifully illustrated copy where the black lines that make up the agony of patriarch’s faces, the lines that showcase indifference and paternal powers,…
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Watched
Watches don’t tell the time, they manifest it. The various little voices that tick out speculative moments: the second, the minute, the hour, all accordion noise to waltz through the seasons of our lives. Where the passing of time is measured by the heat of the summer sun, its mercurial reflection on winter…
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Red Light
I was thinking on something Carl Sagan said about the last perfect day on Earth. One day, in the far future, the sun will one day change from the happy main sequence star we know, to a bloated red giant—many times its original size, engulfing the entire inner solar system. We are standing on…
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Star Power
There is a certain moment when our world turns its darkened face to our local star and its light shines upon it, and the small photovores consume its tasty effusion with what can only be joy. The nuclear reactions deep in the heated heart of it explode with beneficence, ensuring that the planetary retinue about…
The Numinous Cosmos 