Publications
I’m grateful to the following journals for publishing my work:
What the Earth Offers – Published in Bird’s Thumb & Autumn Sky Poetry Daily
In the Grey Glow – Published in One Sentence Poems
He – Published by Cajun Mutt Press
It Was Like Carriages – Published in Misfit Magazine
Questions
– Published in Night Owl Narrative Issue No. 1, Cajun Mutt Press
What can I say to you?
Migratory birds touch down
In littered twilit alleyways.
Our streets are home
To out of work men.
What can I give you?
The river is broken
Into shards of ice.
Children with cold faces stare at it
beneath gray skies.
Where can we go?
Mankind succumbed
to madness long ago.
Everywhere
the earth is burning.
What have they done to us?
Below bloodied horizons
our days and nights spin
endlessly in the chamber
of God’s revolver.
Maybe
– Published in Night Owl Narrative Issue No. 1, Cajun Mutt Press
Falling falling
A stream of fire in the brain
The trees all calling
Your name
Only the insects
Can dodge the earthquakes now
And the dogs are howling
At your face
Maybe it’s because
In darkness
You resemble
The moon
As Though Drawn Down In Rains From Heaven
– Published in After Hours: A Journal of Chicago Writing & Art
I know the light braided into blood and bone,
birds circling daily in the autumn of your eyes.
Body of fruit and moonbeams and endless summer-
all of it outward-blooming, pure as the silence of stones,
overflowing with a quiet grace
like the slow and ceaseless turning of the Earth.
Before there was only smoke and secrets,
vanishing acts and small betrayals.
I knew only of spells cast at night,
dark words spat at the turn of a back.
Now I forget it all with each sacred sighting
of just a fleeting gaze or smile. I forget it all
for I have known the light braided into blood and bone,
the light leaking out and over you
as though drawn down in rains from heaven.
Yellowstone
– Published in Verse-Virtual
In the mountains he found that Mind
the mystics talked of: clear as a cool pond,
untouched even by the wind. Spotless and gleaming
like metal freshly polished, it had shed, finally,
all the rust of man’s havoc, his thousand-fold illusions.
Trees bent at his word; water and stone
leapt like birds. In him there rose a soft song,
long forgotten, and while he sang, no darkness
could come near, no cold could bloom
on the blooming wind.
Dear Reader
– Published in Verse-Virtual
When you go,
take just a piece of me
with you.
A soft song
you can sing to yourself,
like praying;
A hidden voice
to rise as needed,
saying:
“Remember the trees,
the young and swaying grasses.
Remember the Earth,
the ageless, star-filled sky.”
Leaving with the Geese
– Published in Big River Poetry Review & Verse-Virtual
When a man is not loved well,
he turns his own love
toward those things that love everyone:
barns with snowy roofs,
ice covered lakes,
bold geese leaving
their homes in odd formations,
the things and happenings
that bare their hearts
to the world.
When a man is not loved well,
he leaves home to sleep
in that deep music
that hides in the earth,
and when the time is right
he leaves with the geese,
ascending like the shrill cries
of crickets, loving the life
that his world
had never shown him.
The Walker’s Prayer
– Published in Verse-Virtual
To live and see unceasingly
and in awareness to know
that I’ve missed no mountain
and ignored no waters
nor glanced without feeling
at a thing born of beauty.
To walk the earth with gentle joy
and through such walking learn
that only visions hold the heart,
the heart which must be freely given
and in its giving all longing satisfied.
To pass quickly through the halls of grief
unyielding to the road’s endless trials,
seeing instead how each scrape of knee
patch of sunburn and hour of hunger
has strengthened and informed me.
To live each day like the autumn moon,
who says, even at its lowest point:
“It is alright, friend. I will guide you
landward, like water, toward the shores
of some new life.”
I Advise Myself
– Published in Verse-Virtual
Turn, now, to the small things—
water, stone, a few footprints
in the summer sand, that look
in just one stranger’s eyes,
tall grass turning
in this evening’s final westerly.
Let the other poets speak
of the role of man,
the historicity of beauty,
the intersection
of art and industry.
It’s all worth less
than a few holy objects
and a humble room to write in.
Yes
– Published in Clutch
Yes
the river in this town
seems the river
of my life.
I walk its banks at evening
and enter again
that space
beyond time.
People stop and stare.
My eyes give off strange light.
Beneath the Ice
– Published in Clutch
In the formless river
that has turned to ice
I see forms, light, faces.
I dream of trout
that sleep
a dreamless sleep.
Somewhere beneath the ice
the seed of summer
blazes.
Remember
– Published in The Lowdown
Remember
the night
the lamplight
slowly dying
green embers
smoldering
by the wayside
of this:
our final
dream together.