Short Poems

a dime
that falls off
a dresser
and rides the trough
of your spine
into your pants
and sleeps
in the hammock
of your underwear
until it falls
(when you first
notice it, diving
down your leg)
into
your shoe.

Looking for Good Poems in Poetry Magazines

Sometimes the only poems you can find are cobwebs,
the ones with dead bugs
hanging, but no spider left to bind them, drink them up.
They come off in your hair with a sticky rip.

There’s a phone ringing in a toybox. It’s buried.
We don’t have caller ID.
Imagine,
being a toy in that box–no usable hands.

Once, as a boy, I was so bored I left the only room
where anyone
was talking, and hummed a song that sounded
like boredom. I’ll never forget that.

Night Ghazal

Your cotton-seed ambition keeps you awake in the dark.
The clay-sod failures keep you awake in the dark.

The burning house down the block makes the trees shine
while the smoke-genie watches the neighbors huddled awake in the dark.

Roaches love street lamp light and bats stream from trees when you clap–
two things to behold when wandering awake in the dark.

Three sets of eyes: the coyote’s, the dead deer’s and mine.
One flees, one flinches, one lies still, seeming wide awake in the dark.

My daughter interrupts her bedtime story, “there’s something I need
to tell you, Daddy,” and falls asleep. I finish the story, barely awake in the dark.

A Common Wish

If not for the need of sleep
I’d be living twice the life
I now drowse through.

At night, I’d drink my wine,
my tea, my strongest beers,
or just water while I write.

I’d read my shelves empty
on a table layered with dead
pens and one live one flying.

I’d teach myself to dance, to fight,
to paint, to draw, and remember.
I’d read to my daughter till she woke up.

Then all day, with eyes still
light as diamond-shine, I’d make up
for all the lost dreaming.

Parallel Love Poem

The air smelled like your hair one evening,
the wind carried your perfume to me.

My brain whirred the possible smells around,
My mind searched for it’s origin.

It’s silly to stand on your porch with your heavy bags,
A fool smells the air with his shoulders bending down.

I stood still until my brain quit flapping,
I didn’t move until I could say your name in peace.

I smelled your hair until I thought I might feel it,
I breathed the air until you almost appeared.

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Stress

You pocket so many problems and then
you’re standing in the grocery store by the tea
and you feel the minerals start precipitating
out of your bones. Your body makes a little beach.
You’re speckled with dead jellyfish. Your brain,
your captain in his boat of bone is sinking
in water so salty his skin goes white.

That’s the new you for a while now. Don’t forget
to eat or the clothes won’t fit anymore.

A little fresh-water stream feeds this sea.
One day the whole thing will taste clean and sweet.

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September 11th Art

Once in a while you get
wounded,
punched,
right in the mouth,
your cheek torn
ragged on your teeth.
But you don’t spit
all the blood out.
You swallow a bit,
not because you think
you get it back,
but because once in a while
you need to get
a taste of yourself,
and there you are,
already open
and running
like a fountain of youth.

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Why I Don't Have a T.V.

Religion and Science are at war in the yard.
Philosophy and Poetry quarrel on the porch.
It’s getting hard to sleep in this neighborhood
with all of the fighting. The coffee and the tea
are arming themselves with mass anti-oxidants
and preparing for battle before the water even boils.

The other day Philosophy and Science allied
against Religion and Poetry in a skirmish over free-will.
They all want me to take sides; each one fights
a little harder when I walk past, tries to look archetypal.
But right now I need the sleep, sleep and caffeine.
I walk past them every morning sipping whatever’s in my cup.

Learning to Tango

If you don’t dance well
it’s easy to let your mind
slide down out of your head
and go warm in your arms
and belly where she’s
pressed up against you.

Just keep dancing!

You can’t carry her around
inside of you like a baby.
Once you learn this dance
you’ll both disintegrate, anyway.
And then you can do
whatever you want.


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Wands

Find it here

An Ode to False Love: Calling the AT&T Help Line

After fierce phone-battles with endless representatives
strung out in lines of networked webs where somewhere
in the cloud of thread there’s a moth caught and ready to be bound...
I came to Clair. I will call her Clair for her clarity,
because she told me “yes” and “no” in precisely
the right way, and that “no” I didn’t need to pay.
I said my phone battery would soon die, and then it did.
Our love did not end in a reluctant truce of warring hearts.
We were cut at the green root by the mechanical blade of fate.
She is now the rose hung bud-down with the black petals,
but I tell you they were once Phoenix-feather red
and the thorns could draw painless blood from your hand.

This is not a poem

I'm offline again for a few days.