“Your use of metaphor jumps off the cliff of excess into the sea of confusion.” – Tamped Down: The Pipe Smoker’s Poetry Quarterly.

“Too much rough stuff for us, although stanza five showed potential as a framework for a video game.”  -- Warm Porridge  Review

“Derivative.” – Jazz Is A Poem, Poetry is…

When teaching the poetry of geography, begin in Ireland and concentrate on Yeats, the rolling countryside at Sligo and a line or two from “The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Waters” (they had hands like claws, and their knees/ Were twisted like the old thorn-trees.)

 Move south to Italy, where the exiled Dante Alighieri pined…

Since poetry is                                    sparks against darkness, conceived

in general                                              in private, so easily snuffed by any

such a subjective                               random draft, made yet not made.  Seek

art, I’ve found                                    …

The day after falling in love,

I became unmoored from everything familiar,

(this chair, that piece of curtain, all suddenly turned brilliant)

And I floated off, as light as photons.

You stayed behind to guard the perimeters of

our marriage, to summarize the situation…

...ripples of the Somme, he wrote, and I imagine the young soldier laying down his book, grass-stalk in mouth, to watch the hospital barge drift by in the reddening varnished sunlight. Perhaps that afternoon he was on leave, a few still hours respite from the cacophony of Flanders.

There is something fierce…

In a thick, brown, hooded coat, she stepped out into the cold night. Her rubber-heeled boots made no sound as she walked quickly towards the deserted intersection. She was in a hurry and didn’t want to wait for the traffic signal to change. Without breaking her stride, she glanced blindly in both directions and started to cross the street. The young man behind the wheel was sailing down the empty lanes when he took his…

            I don’t know where it came from or how it came, but it was there suddenly in my lonely life visiting me constantly.

            It was a rock holding me down making my steps heavier and heavier, prohibiting my progress, my meaningless flight into the unknown.

            I found myself…

He felt very perplexed because his mind was really blocked as if cement hated to dwell in between the bricks and chose to dwell in his mind and obstructed his thoughts and ideas. He felt very weary and burdened like a little ant that bears a big grain of wheat because he hadn’t written any word since a week.

So deeply perplexed, he sat on the sofa trying to take a deep breath. His eyes were travelling through each part of the living room, capturing the tiniest details, but in vain. He…

for Adrienne Rich who passed away on March 27, 2012

Adrienne                           I love reading your poem “Diving into the Wreck.”

And as you know there is a place between the ground and the sky

where roses in full bloom just ascend the sky emanating the aroma of eternity—

it is the ether where great people just bathe combating the oblivion

and the dreadful death.          Adrienne your departure is not diving into the…

1. 

Orson was scanning an abstract in the January issue of the Journal of Applied Physics (Subthreshold characteristics of ballistic electron emission spectra) when his phone rang.

This was jarring since it was first-cup-of-coffee time on a Sunday morning ( too early for telemarketers), and anyway, Orson’s phone never rang.

He penciled a…

Another day another "poem." This was was written for a group. The topic was "Time."

--Watch--



Watch my watch,

Time ticking by with each tick,

Minute after minute, hour after hour,

Well-spent or wasted; it doesn't matter.

Time flows on anyway; Siddhartha's endless river.



Watch my nephew grow,

The newborn morphs into a plucky toddler,

Smiles and dimples on a cherubic face,

Hands stained red from finger painting,

Wait…

Should you ever get back to California, remember it for me for I cannot.

I only have dreams, patchwork gardens of dusty emotion over run with sun and so much growth.

We planted our feet firmly; we never died.…

Once I looked in the mirror to see who I was,

creating a picture of myself that I could carry with me.

Later I looked in the mirror to see where I was going,

the only road map I had was what I had heard of life from others,

I checked it frequently.

And then one day it seemed that I had arrived. At me.

This was how I was.

These days, I look back, hear my spirit calling,

leading once again ~

who…

teena-beana types love letters to god on her mom's machine, tiny pink fingernails getting stuck between the keys which makes her wince, but she gets better with every letter.

teena-ballerina doesn't type poetry yet because she isn't sad and doesn't know her best work will flood empty journals at midnight, by candlelight, drunk on tears.

krissy-teen's got no mind for ambiguity, clarity, or authenticity but that's all right. her aunt kept copies of everything…

was once a little blintz,

Blintzy

Wincey

Mintsy

Chintzy,

Cheesy in-sy

Little Blintz!

Who was Edward Lear and what is a…

"Omygod, Nance, check this out. I'm on the train mindin' my own business when this guy sits down, and of course first thing I'm thinkin' is look, I don't care how cute you are, why you sitting next to me, but then he starts talkin' about my magazine and wants to ask me stuff for some college thing. So I says sure, and he starts askin' about what I read and all, and one of the questions was about poetry, and I was like, I don't read that stuff because it's in French and that's just…

Take it off

the fear that pins you to doing/not doing

stand naked in the light of your own…