now in print: Never See the Night

Tags

books, extrasolar planet, octopus, poems, self publishing, short story, space exploration, space octopus, telepathy, writing

An interplanetary biologist locks himself in a fortified research lab with an alien octopus, stranding his teammates outside in the path of a ferocious hurricane on a water-covered world. The animal already killed one of them, and the scientist-commandos must get inside to confront it, or die in the storm.

But the octopus has plans of its own, because it just discovered a new species, too: humans.

This short story is accompanied by five recent poems from the Poetry of the Planets project.

Now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. On Barnes & Noble in paperback and Nook Book. On Apple iBooks.

gravity

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earth, gravity, Moon, planets, poems, poetry, writing

gravity

the moon burns for the ocean
when no one else can see the sun

he cares nothing for what her tides erode
with violent patience

nor the animals lost
in her limitless depth

he only wants her
closer

they hold each other
across unchartable distance

never touching
but never pulled apart

kalaratri

Tags

kaalratri, kalaratri, poems, poetry

kalaratri

time’s endless night
destroys all those she makes
her acolytes

we build honeycombs in carrion
not even ravens will scavenge
we sleep in cities where birds refuse to roost

back alleys where the concrete wind
blows one implacable song
then collapses

in refuse we find refuge
what was cast off we repurpose
to make it new

my sweet everything
this continent belongs to you
by virtue of your villainy

you own it because it cannot escape you
nor restrain you
your power here is absolute

the essence of impermanence and solitude
embracing all and drawing them
to your breast

suckle your disciple
so i might outlive gods
and kings and treachery

outlive words and paper and the
bonfires where they will be burned
and then
forgotten

jupiter

Tags

gustav holst, Jupiter, planets, poems, poetry

jupiter

you make me laugh until we tumble
into this drift like asteroids
coaxed by gravity

to surround this jovial hydrogen bastard
who disturbs the belt
with his frivolous storms

laughter heals and lifts us past the pain
your tears on my shoulder and fictions
we dream together

love me for an hour then leave
traces of your orbit and clues you give
astronomers

to the sadness of the inner planets
where life only made them realize
they’re small

i will never let them touch you
with telescopes and equations
i will erase their blackboards and crush their lenses

until all they know is mystery like a fool
i would keep you to myself
though your brightness burns for everyone

annihilation comes easily
rejuvenation takes more effort
or none at all

one word
one touch
will inspire

Hear this poem read by Judy Cullen. Then go discover her work!

mercury

Tags

gustav holst, Mercury, planets, poems, poetry

mercury

when you no longer hate the sun for shining
or curse it for bringing life
to our cold blue speck

when you run out of things to say
i will hold your heart in my hand
so you may count the petals of every flower

every hand that held another holds us
ache for me when i am gone
then realize i never leave you

write our manifesto and burn it
our buried chest of golden coins
will grow to a garden of stars

love it for me as if it is our child
my place is with you

we paint the stars together
when no one else is breathing
the moon hides below the horizon

our neighbors rise from beds
like corpses from their graves
unable to recall the songs

the mockingbird performed at 4 a.m.
the wind whistled down the asphalt
haunted only by coyotes

my modern mercury’s caduceus
is a radio tower pulsing
between realms like dreams

the serpents of his staff
become iron girders riveted to the sky
broadcasting love and fury

to the sons and daughters of lightning
spanning the globe under incandescent shelter
from midnight’s prehistoric treachery

clarity
communication
the courier’s gift
signals the dawn

mars

Tags

gustav holst, Mars, planets, poems, poetry, war

mars

you and i have unfinished business

you taught me destruction
a skill for leaving trails
of unmarked graves and broken spears

your path leads nowhere but down

stone is your only element
you bask in the sun for millennia
and only learn what it means to burn

you serve neither love nor justice
but conquest as its own reward
its prize a thread of wounds and ash

what words could you offer for redemption

how dare you speak them
over the eulogy of rain
and falling earth

neptune

Tags

gustav holst, Neptune, planets, poems, poetry

neptune

you wait when light abandons you
to a frozen ammonia tempest
forgiveness lives here no more

what becomes the sea without the sun
what tide is borne without the moon
to bear it

silent you drifted for centuries
while after you dreams dared not venture
and no one sang at all

holst named you the mystic
but what knowledge awaits
your desolation

the astronomer forsakes the city
for the unlit barrens
to see farther

past the realm of noise and mirth
and the din of blinding light
distraction

busy with nothing
he discovers
what lies
beyond

Note: Holst originally composed The Planets for two pianos, except for Neptune, which was an organ solo. Peter Sykes’ nine-minute organ transcription of Neptune captures a depth of tonality and emotion that surely would have pleased the composer.

The orchestral version:

frontier

Tags

animal inside you, frontier, Moon, planets, poems, poetry

Frontier

Luna, our beloved crescent,
you swell until you are full enough
to hang heavy against the horizon
like the breast of a pregnant woman.

You will be the first we settle,
our laboratory to test survival
on other stones that fill the sky and
telescopes. How could we resist touching you?

Will you shudder with pleasure
beneath our fingertips, or recoil
at the machines and metallic intrusions,
the rivets and girders of our civilization?

You have been our goddess
since before the dawn of history.
Now we will bring you atmosphere
and mark you with our scent.

We have always been inseparable.
Now we will be close.

 

 

saturn

Tags

animal inside you, gustav holst, planets, poems, poetry, Saturn

Saturn

At your core, gravity crushes hydrogen
into liquid metal, where it becomes
an electric conductor.

Holst, the symphonic astrologer,
orchestrated your old age as
contemplative, serene.

A sadness boldly pondered
resolving into acceptance

a vast lake of hydrogen
where tumult settles into ripples,
then the polished perfection of pearls.

Your moons attend you.
A family of sixty-two descendants
and admirers. They cannot leave your side.

Have you still the strength to
swing your scythe and reap for them
a harvest? Prepare a feast for solstice.

Io, Saturnalia! Celebrate the sun
we thought was dying but was only
far away. Revelry summons rebirth.

Close the courts. No justice
may be served today, nor any war declared.
We have eaten enough of our children already.

Let them grow old as we did.
Give them time to reach this aphelion
and wear these rings themselves.

 

 

venus

Tags

animal inside you, gustav holst, planets, poems, poetry, Venus

Venus

Second daughter of the sun,
Holst imagined peace in your embrace.

Without a moon of your own
you thirsted for the man
to caress your cloudy tresses
with cellos and rapture.

But without his fantasy
he could never survive your
pressure, such peerless heat
dripping sulfurous sweat.

Volcanoes erupt and
recarve your surface again
and again until they render you
unrecognizable.

Yet Gustav dreamed of you,
and in the lies one’s mind
spins while sleeping

he saw you not as you are
but as he wished you to be:
tender, resplendent, radiant.

 

return

Tags

anything sounds like a symphony, bougainvillea, poems, poetry

Return

On a morning ruled by chainsaws
they cut off all your branches
right down to the ground

then carted you off to burn.
But you would not be dispatched
so easily.

Underground you waited, untouchable
by sun, and moon, and me—
but not the rain. You drank

and planned a bloodless revolution
filled with sap and life
all covered in thorns.

You never lost your dream about finches
singing in your flowers and cleaning
caterpillars off your leaves.

You never doubted, and you never
held it against me when I did.
You only proved me wrong.

 

animal inside you

Tags

animal inside you, books, poems, poetry, self publishing, writing

Animal Inside You: Poems of Chaos and Euphoria collects 31 free-verse poems in a Kindle edition for $2.99 (free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers). Available in paperback April 2017. Now available for Nook Book and iBooks.

aurora

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animal inside you, aurora, dawn, earth, poems, poetry, sun

Aurora

Do you have the courage to be loved by the sun?
What daughter of Earth can bear his solar flare?

Better perhaps to write your verses in dark
deep forests where hushed voices of deer
have only the moon to contend with.

Better perhaps to fold your sails and choose
for your harbor a cove where his scalding corona
remains a whispered legend.

But you, daughter of soil and wind
of leaves and blades of grass, you
who have known fear but once and never again,

your defiance carries you up the peaks
and into the light.

You cast aside your gown of slumber
to weave the dawn into your tresses.

You gather flocks of songbirds
to nest in your palms and encircle you.

Robed in such finery, you welcome him.

watercolor

Tags

animal inside you, dreams, painting, poems, poetry, watercolor

Watercolor

Painted butterfly bushes
and permanent flowers
whose colors never fade.

Here, a panther can dream
or a child, even children
whose bodies time has aged.

Some verdant forests are
denied the waking and only
grow in starlight, real

or imagined. When you look
with your heart and not your eyes
you see a different truth.

 

—for CK

annual

Tags

animal inside you, Annual, new year, poems, poetry

Annual

Tonight you will take time to remember
why you could not tell her everything:

why galaxies weep and clovers sing
why each raindrop forgets its name
before it strikes the ground.

Tonight Venus the evening star
will shine brightly enough to inspire myth
but not illuminate a forest.

You will notice a shade of green in the sunset
unlike anything which came before.

You will remember how to dance
but forget how to walk.

No consolation awaits you in the
brick broken alleys between here
and home.

Nothing heals a hopeless heart like the dawn
and mockingbird song strewn across playgrounds
and parking lots in random perfection.

But that must wait until tomorrow.
Your name means nothing to you now
but you will choose one that does.

Think of the animals whose lives you stole
and the ones you cared for. Then ask yourself
how they are any different.

Think of the exceptions to every rule
then realize they are the norm.
Consider why we began breaking laws
in the first place.

Recall Pluto has not completed
a single solar orbit since we discovered it
then stripped it of its planetary status.

Our new year does not belong to the outer planets.
They have their own sense of scale and scope.

If you ever wonder if something as small
as a bee or an ant can feel love
then you don’t understand yourself at all.

Remember this tonight when you stumble home
at 3 a.m. clutching the walls and
groping the empty city.

Remember this when you
break your resolutions tomorrow but hold on
to promises you never intend to abandon.

Tattoo your body with stars
and understand it means
we could never leave each other.

Where could we possibly go that we could not
be together? What canvas in all of history
could have been painted, if not by us?

Our hands held the brushes
as they hold each other now.
We could not let go without
taking all of geology with us
like continents.

tribute

Tags

animal inside you, poems, poetry, raven, tribute

Tribute

Her majesty the raven
dressed in afternoon sunlight
gilding her feathers with liquid fire.

Owning nothing,
she takes what she needs.

Her empire begins above your head.
Air currents sustain her, lift her
giving grace and meaning to her wings.

This she accepts as her rightful tribute
her payment for centuries of survival
and her genius in conquering gravity.

Spying her mate, she sails the sky
carrying her prize in a beak as black
as the flag of no nation.

Solar gold, stolen silver
and her lover’s heart:

What will not last forever
today belongs to her.

pentacles

Tags

animal inside you, garden of stars, pentacles, poems, poetry, seven of pentacles, tarot

Pentacles

His garden of stars
he nurtured with his own blood
and toil. Seasons

come and go. No more
wandering the streets, begging.
The harvest grows near.

The foliage shines
luminescent and gravid.
Today we are born.

Resting on his spade
he considers the journey
from the past to here.

He was once the fool
and perhaps will be again.
No matter. That time

is over and done.
Only the future concerns
him now, its tempest

and its aimless storm,
the gift it gives and the toll
it demands from him.

He plucks the first fruit,
brings it to his lips to taste
the stellar forces

he tended so long.
Their sweetness will sustain him
through the months ahead,

nourish him through the
gathering darkness and the
unkindness of winter.

His pentacles hold
all of summer’s promises
and her sunlit dreams,

the wealth we cannot
build nor mine, but only grow
from seeds we planted.

solstice

Tags

animal inside you, australia, poems, poetry, solstice

Solstice

My antipodean sister, today is your longest day
but here, our shortest. I grow jealous of your sunlight
though you are the moon who shines in daytime.

I need days that last forever, open and unending
while you crave black-walled rooms and curtains
to deny the outside world and murder it.

These are trivialities. Your heart beats like mine.
It knows the rhythm of the seasons we cannot escape.
They enslave us and they liberate us
and we cannot tell the difference.

Beneath your radiant southern cross
you sing and paint with light to create new worlds.
You, my partner in musical treason,
my inversion who lives one day into the future,

we are not so different: two halves of a sine wave.
My troughs are your peaks
though I cannot touch nor hold your hand.

Our amplitudes are one heartbeat:
the same symphony, the inhalation and exhalation.
Water crashes into sand as far as the eye can see.

You made a home for that part of me too wild to settle down.
I could not repay you with all the gold stolen
from a thousand papist galleons.
But this is no transaction.

The family we are born into
is not the family we meet later,
the one who resonates with us and
cares more for who we are than what we were.

orchestra

Tags

animal inside you, orchestra, poems, poetry

Orchestra

Some songs fade like old photographs.
Others change our lives
and stay with us always.

An orchestra could not do you justice
unless the score was revolution.
I listen to you so loud it hurts.

Long after our sun grows red
to devour her planetary children,
our elements will find a new star, together.

carving

Tags

animal inside you, carving, grand canyon, poems, poetry

Carving

When she loves you she will prove it
with glacial patience and eternities of storms
carving sacred geologies into your planetary skin

filling it with peaks and gorges
majestically dismembered terrains
where jaguars roam in shadows

where seekers quest for visions that often find them
but other times escape to nests
like birds on the edge of a thundercloud.

Mark this place with petroglyphs
so you will never forget
here you drank the dew and starved

for one more drop
one more sign she cared
when every crevice of the world dripped evidence.

Paint the animals you hunted in her caves
then realize they are you and never hunt again.
You don’t need to search. You are not lost.

You are here in the palm of her hand
the gully between her breasts
and the soft forgotten folds of prehistory.

If you look up into the rain and drink it
you already know everything you need.
Caress the canyon and dance

in its unrelenting atmosphere
like all the other trees whose limbs embrace
and interpenetrate her like capillaries.

Dreams are mirrors. Fools refuse their gaze.
You can see it all from here
and she can see inside you too.