Friday, February 21, 2014

My first ever Haiku




Sudden thunderstorm
scurrying shoppers plastic,
'cept a wet baguette








Sunday, February 16, 2014

Filial Piety




A syphilitic fighter pilot at once decorated the fuselage with his fingerprints, drained of both fluids and fuel where it would never rain. Sylvan landscapes of soft tiles painted in a foxhole under the fo’cs’le—it will never fly again. Slippery slopped down on all this sand—your Corsair lay like a silver fossil, remnant of an age of legless giantssmooth as a missile and phallic as a beached whale. Listen: the slipstream will no longer flip you, neither flaccid nor dripping; this is the end of your flying. The fling is flung, and all your flotsam already littering the veranda, is done. All good things... Or are they?



Then the fleas, Norwegian wood—this bird hastens to lift off. Smiles line up in the silo, sensory memories of skies once sewn upon your flight jacket. World War II, Korea, and home—you old philanderer, fixed, you old fossil, flummoxed by all love, my father. You always knew, you always flew away.





1/9/2014

Florence











Saturday, February 15, 2014

Apology


Asked to write something about myself as a writer by the Creative People in Florence group I came up with this apology of sorts. It explains my history as a writer and why I chose to self publish.
(It also includes some visual/textual collaborations with photographer Debra A Zeller.)



http://creativepeopleinflorence.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/creative-bloggers/




Thursday, February 13, 2014

Casta Diva (chant)



Baby Dionysus
Basket
A kanthoros for wine drinking
Beak
Beak
Beak

A fecund fuck
            Keeps coming back

Tobacco
A kanthoros for wine drinking
A satyr, erect
Correct
Train wreck

A fecund fuck
Forever coming back


1/3/2014
Mantova







Tuesday, February 4, 2014

TWO TOADS



(Ode: a poem in praise of something.
Toad: a poem in blame of something.)





The Loser Without a Face  (for Joseph Campbell)


Others were in charge
of heaven, others claimed
the day, the night, the fruits
of all those endless shifts
of slavery.

You rose at dawn, went
down to work, and worked
and worked and worked
and, once in a while,
you got a day off

to wash your children’s diapers
to satisfy your spouse
to clean the toilets, the kitchen
and every other room in the bank’s house.

You were hardly a hero.
You lived for too many years.
You died and were almost immediately
obliterated by time.

True story.







Atlas Humbled (for Ayn Rand)


The selfish never
get what they want
‘cause no one likes
a brat.

            And mostly ‘cause
we only want what
we can’t have
anyway—

                       Love,
respect—a way
to pass the time
without worrying, too much,

how bad it’s gonna hurt.




2/4/2014
Florence