Some bits of my poetry for those who asked. This is from several years ago, back when I used to write and was actually pretty decent at it.

Meteor Shower

Stars are distant fires, and
an unfed fire must at some
length go out – its fury, its
comfort, is its impermanence.

In the frozen park, we watched
the stars cast their children to
earth, bright seconds every one,
extinguishing pre-impact.

Why are you here? he said,
I said I wanted to see rain, if
this thin flame could be quenched
in your storm. To know the end.

That night, it was not over
yet. We hid our fire under the
sleeping bags, crawled into each
other’s skins, arresting cold dark.

We searched, ardent palms out,
for living embers while false stars
crowned our heads and fell; we
ruled brevity under a fractured sky -

a smoldering couple. When the rain
began, we packed our warmth away,
we let the ice gloam and coat us
slowly, starting at our hearts.


***************************************

Self-Question Dance

How can I reverse this –
put dance into words, build
the story around the movements –

What right to invade the salt
of cultures, which gestated
modern speech and thinking?

Where the pounding of feet
Met naked earth, where people
Shimmy, strut, and sway,

Why try to understand this?
The human body is rhythm,
The dance our cells daily perform,

Who am I to deny the body
Means to express what cannot
Be told in any language, save one –

When peoples then met to converse -
Dance – the poem that was
Before words were.


**********************************

What the Storm Left

Dead dark, dark as Somnus’s cell,
the shorn beach at midnight; pocked

with halved houses through which
the stars winked back, unexpected guests

in expensive vacant living rooms,
glinting on mold-enfolded cabinets

and furnishings unswept by surge.
I merged with the sand against the black

water-sky; the air, fog-kissed and humid-
heavy, seeped moisture into my lungs

in an embryonic breathing. Dunes writhe
and heave, unanchored by Ammophilia,

marram-stripped, wind-rippled; like new
flesh or an undeveloped womb, creatureless

and sterile; the microcosm of a world reborn.
With back to broken buildings, I imagine

this beach at the dawn of everything,
before the sun, before permanence,

existence at pre-ontogenesis. The canvas
clean as Alpha, innocent as Eden.

***********************************

One Dozen Dried Yellow Roses

It’s strange to see
the dead kiss the dead,
married in stagnancy with
heads bent together, as though
in prayer, mourning fallen parts;
pistils, ovaries, stigmata and hips
made frigid by too much time.

********************************

Left

I spotted you inside the half-empty restaurant and behind the broad brown bar where you served beer, whiskey, and regrets – you with your caution-orange tee-shirt looking like a Men Working street sign or the beacon hats on the deer hunters you served; I remember you were laughing, full-bellied, and it looked loud - although the pane of the glass kept me from your audible amusement. I don’t know now how long I spent looking through the window’s beer-colored glaze at your brown eyes underneath the dark brown hair, darker than the stain on the wooden bar, darker than the nights I spent alone praying on your name – maybe I stood in stone for years watching you, maybe it was a splintered minute. I only know I could not hear your svelte voice through the pane, so to reach you I left my handprint, my hot breath on the window, and when you closed your eyes, I crossed the desert parking lot, I left.