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Category: Poetry

Poems, thoughts about poetry and links to places that have published my poems

Psst. Hey, Buddy, Want a Free Chapbook?

January 6, 2010 • • 1 Comment

I made a simple chapbook of some of the micro-poems I’ve been posting on my other blog, Identi.ca and Twitter as a holiday gift for family and friends.

The poems are frequently about birds and were written on (or shortly after) the weekly walks I take on the neighborhood trails, the daily walks I take at lunchtime, or just the goings on in my backyard.

I saved a few copies to give away to blog readers since I appreciate y’all stopping by. If you want one, I’ve got five three to give away here. Just use the contact form to send me a mailing address, and it will be on its way.

Pomegranate Surface Features

December 3, 2009 • • 25 Comments

If I could study these spheres long enough
to see canals as Schiaparelli saw,
or invent for them tragic civilizations
like those dying while Lowell watched,

these pomegranates might reveal
the wildest tricks of the light.

I’d stake my rep on pomegranate people
living out tiny desperate lives,
their doomed world sure to be destroyed
for the jeweled seeds inside.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s Image Prompt (#103), a picture of two pomegranates. Inspired as much, I think by my recent reading of Mars: The Lure of the Red Planet by William Sheehan and Stephen James O’Meara, a fascinating history of our understanding of Mars.

Where there were pomegranates, I saw planets. I suppose we’re all a bit like Schiaparelli and Lowell in that we often see what we want to see.

For those who may not know, Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) was the Italian astronomer who first reported seeing “canali” on Mars. It was a trick of the light and the human eye as well as, possibly, his colorblindness, but the name “canali,” which in Italian means “channel” was mistranslated to “canal” in English. American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) took canal to mean artifical channel and reasoned that Mars was populated by a dying civilization building canals across the surface to irrigate the deserts with what little water remained on their doomed planet.

Read what others saw in those two pomegranates here.

Update: Don’t miss Angie Werren’s “planet pomegranate” at woman, ask the question. She too saw Mars in those fruits and wrote an amazing poem.

Apocalypse

October 30, 2009 • • 3 Comments

The day the desert was destroyed, water
sucked from distant rivers sprayed through the sky,
and cars bore pilgrims, dreamers to Mecca,
sedated by slot-machine lullabies.

The stars all tumbled to earth, outshone by
neon casinos and fountains of light
while roulette chances to change everything
spun against the darkest of desert nights.

Now, unheeded prayers to dollars drift down
from the mouths of those ghostlike survivors,
mumbling dreams into urns full of quarters
as taillights depart in night’s brightest hours.

Boys with flyers for prostitutes jostle
the stars, shouted down from celestial heights.
Barely burning, they stagger slow down the Strip
cursing this blaze, this apocalypse of light.

—

I tried to come up with something for Read Write Poem’s latest image prompt (#98) which involved writing a poem based on an image of swirling lights at a fair. I fixated on the lights and kept thinking about this poem I wrote back in April (I think). So this one is sort-of off prompt, but I offer it anyway.

I wrote it for a (not-quite-there-yet) chapbook of road poems called Highway Sky. I’m still tinkering with some of the poems, but two have been published at Bolts of Silk and Ouroboros Review #3.

Some of the lines are lifted from the manuscript of my novel A Short Time to Be There. In the novel, the characters are driving into Las Vegas after a week on the road and find themselves alternately overwhelmed, excited and disgusted by the city.

Read what others did with the prompt at this week’s Get Your Poem On at Read Write Poem.

Scene from a Bar that Closed Ten Years Ago

October 1, 2009 • • 24 Comments

I swear to God it happened in slow motion
the way you walked in that night, like a movie,
like Jimmy Dean, like a record scratch jukebox
breakdown—
or maybe it was just me
someone, anyway, no one could believe.

Dark walls and faded posters of traveling bands
from years gone by seemed somehow fresh alive,
the smoke of years dissolving as you smiled
and dropped quarters on the table—
even Jesus stopped to stare
a shining pile of silver for anyone who dared.

At the foosball table, your hands clutched the levers,
red and blue pinwheels spinning to your command,
counterclockwise against the nature of my heart,
you were kicking ass—
I sipped my beer, losing time
you took every name but mine.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s Prompt # 94. It’s an image prompt. A detail shot of the red and blue players on a foosball table called “My Angel and My Devil” by Thomas Hawk. Check out other people’s responses to the prompt here.

The Crow’s Lesson

September 17, 2009 • • 16 Comments

A multitude of hungry words, scribbled on a scrap of paper, begs for just the merest pittance of the greater meaning bestowed by syntax. I stare and hear their cries, but next to hip, husk just looks like flask, for crying out loud. Besides, it’s clearly an empty one at that. The cat suggests that swilling single-malt could be the remedy of meaning that might make these words conform and stand in ordered lines.  Then he knocks a bottle off the bar, which is irksome, but not critical. I mean, what good is a cat’s advice on writing anyway? Sure, they’re decent spellers—everyone knows that—but for paragraphs, they don’t have much to offer. He looks at me with something like pity in his green eyes and asks if I’d like to help him lick up a puddle of Oban 14. I shake my head—not now, I’m working. I clean the broken glass and wrestle those words, but like scofflaw dreams on fitful nights where sleep, forgetting its starring role in the late show of my mind, lurks beyond the limelight in the shadows by the curtains, the words just lie there, scattered on paper, plum forgotten and ignored much like the clover extending across the lawn, dotted as it is with the wrappers of some confectioner’s dreams, reduced now to just the faintest sparkle, piquing only the interest of the passing crows who pluck them off the ground,  take them back to their nests and read the lists of ingredients to their children warning them away from words they don’t understand and can’t pronounce.

—

This is the result of staring at the word list from Read Write Prompt #92: Word Gems. I think I used them all. Go here to see what others made of the same list.

Gasoline, Meet Match

August 19, 2009 • • 29 Comments

The bustling elocution of
the eight-track saints

rattles nerves like diodes
hitched to an electric chair

Rancid impulses coagulate
around anger, another rant
blares from the radio

Car racing homeward
lizards skulking among
dead armadillos on the shoulder

One last chance for a course change
flinging into the driveway

desperate to say, I understand,
forgetting reason frothed to static

going instead for the gun

—

This is for the latest wordle prompt at Read Write Poem (#88). I like these word list prompts because I generally approach the writing with no preconceived notions of what the poem is going to be about. I just let the list of words play and try to see where they land. This one kind of surprised me.