09 Thursday Feb 2023
Posted in poetry
haunted
the day you killed yourself
you appeared as flies
and rats giving birth
in my garden you never tended
even after all those years apart
you swarmed me with your noise
you built a nest like a wasp
in all the places near my heart
poisoning every room
defiling every memory
even in death
you will not leave me alone
07 Tuesday Feb 2023
monolith
no one remembers
when you became the immovable object
the day you became stone
enclosed in your superiority
refusing any ingress
you stood against the storm
how long has it been
since anyone touched you
have you defied entropy
and in doing so
lost the power to change
nothing scratches you
your perfect reflective glass
mirrors all that assaults you
when i press my hand to your surface
i wonder what is left inside
15 Saturday Oct 2022
Posted in poetry
ash
i hope you found your beach
you left me waiting
stirring my cauldron of memories
that will never come true
somewhere in the night
you dance on distant shores
around nonexistent bonfires
sand between your toes
sparks against your skin
moonlight in your breath
and all of it will come true
25 Sunday Sep 2022
Posted in poetry
Tags
In 2033, Meteor Mags records 88 Light Years, the second solo album featuring her vocal and piano talents. This lyric for one of her original tunes is about a legendary chess player who defeated damn near everyone in the States and Europe before quitting the game entirely at age twenty-two. At age forty-seven, he was found dead in his bathtub as the result of a stroke.
The Paul Morphy Blues
I fought fools and princes,
taught them how to kneel.
Vict’ry gave me nothing,
nothing I could feel.
I fought states and countries,
taught them how to cry.
My heart is a riverbed
drought has all run dry.
Conquered all horizons,
I solved all the math.
Quit while you’re a legend.
Someone draw my bath.
Will you come and visit?
Will you say my name?
Hist’ry’s what you make it.
Now it’s all the same.
Call me pride and sorrow.
Say I was insane.
I can’t see a damn thing,
blinded in this game.
When there’s no tomorrow,
future’s in the past,
I won’t care for legends.
Someone draw my bath.
07 Wednesday Sep 2022
Posted in poetry
We might be inconsequential,
but every fragment of us
contains the whole.
Every atom of our lives
holds a universe.
You and I
have always matched:
our eyes the same color,
our origins identical.
We came from nothing.
We stole everything,
and we refuse to leave.
This poem now appears in the book
Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales.
28 Sunday Aug 2022
Posted in art studio
Tags
Today, I got the sad news that my artist and poet friend Ktahdn passed away last week. If you don’t know how to say his name, don’t feel bad; hardly anyone ever got it right. Most of us just called him by his preferred nickname: “KT”. He was a softspoken, gentle guy who never had a harsh word to say about anyone, and he was always exploring different avenues for his creativity.
I met KT at an audiovisual presentation where he read original poems and short, reflective pieces about his favorite art form: building abstract sand sculptures on the beach. He displayed gorgeous photos of these ephemeral works and interspersed his readings with soothing yet evocative piano pieces by artists such as Philip Aaberg. The presentation was a hit with the storytelling group we were both part of, and he returned several times with follow-up presentations and lengthier pieces about all the work that went into his sand sculptures. For the past couple of years, he had delved into writing fantasy stories and taking part in various multimedia collaborations.
KT and I weren’t super close, but I enjoyed our conversations about art, sand, stones, and poetry. He recommended a few great books to me, including The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History by Jan Zalasiewicz. I’ve mentioned it before, and it’s a fascinating read.
It starts with observations about an apparently simple, ordinary stone on a beach, then quickly expands into a history of the universe that made such a stone possible: from the formation of the first stars where hydrogen was fused into heavier elements disbursed when those stars exploded, to the collision of the Mars-sized planet that struck Earth billions of years ago and resulted in the formation of our Moon. The book continues with a history of Earth where geologic dramas created different kinds of rocks, and how those rocks were distributed across the planet through continental drift, erosion, and other natural forces.
That’s how I will remember KT. He was a man who could look at something ordinary and see the extraordinary. He appreciated how even the smallest things most of us take for granted are the result of complex, elaborate histories, and he knew those histories would continue long into the future after those things had gone from our lives. Like his sand sculptures that stood as beautiful monuments until the tides rolled in and washed them away, everything exists in cycles of creation and destruction, which are really just two sides of the same coin: transformation.
The tides have taken KT away. But I will remember that even the smallest grain of sand returning to the ocean will become a part of something else, something with an intricate future that dwarfs even the history that brought it onto the beach in the first place.
I don’t think KT would want us to mourn his passing any more than he ever shed a tear for one of his sculptures. Instead, he would want us to return to the beach and, once again, create something beautiful. Whether it lasts for an hour or a lifetime doesn’t really matter. What matters is the experience.
August 30 Update: After meeting with mutual friends last night to remember KT, it hit me that my first art adventure with him wasn’t in the storytelling group but many years earlier in a weekly gathering to musically explore the old trade routes known as the Silk Road. Following the path of the Silk Road from Europe to China, KT played music from the regions and talked a bit about the various cultures. I picked up several albums he sampled for us, though I would have liked to get them all.
While going through my music library, I also found an hour-long recording I made of one of his reading sessions. Click here to have a listen.
15 Monday Aug 2022
Posted in poetry
Volcano
The old volcano
slowly releases her heat.
Ponds ripple gently.
Birds flock to her warmth
and nest for generations
until she erupts.
Startled birds flee to
nest on quieter islands,
remnants of raging,
sheltering their young
from the unexpected storms
brought in on the waves.
The young ones will grow
and raise their own to migrate,
exploring the seas.
This poem was written in collaboration with SisterMoon, who also composed the original poem that appears as the epigraph to The Singing Spell in Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus. Although our 5-7-5 verse format is an oversimplification of traditional Japanese haiku, we did use the classical method of taking turns creating verses to form a longer poem.
Joining this collaboration as illustrator is the Midjourney AI, whose otherwordly imaginations you will now see adorning many of my original poems in the poetry archives.
10 Wednesday Aug 2022
Gondolier
Underground in the basement,
three young men plug in.
No roadies carried their amps.
They are lean and strong.
No one else wrote their music.
It came from inside,
from a place you never see
below the surface.
Friends arrive, descending stairs.
Conversations. Drinks.
Reunions and shared laughter.
The band greets them all.
Then in unison: a chord.
Not just any chord.
It’s a harmony of light,
shining in the dark.
This poem is a variation on Japanese poetic forms that often use groupings of five and seven syllables. It is named after my favorite local band in Ann Arbor in the mid-1990s. Bassist Geoff Streadwick was previously a member of the locally legendary Morsel, created 40 oz. Sound studio to record local talent, and sadly passed away many years ago while still a young, creatively brilliant man.
You can still find Gondolier’s music online thanks to their drummer, Jayson, on his Soundcloud page. Although those recordings remain amongst my favorite things, they pale in comparison to the jaw-dropping majesty of experiencing Gondolier in concert in a friend’s basement or Ann Arbor’s Blind Pig or the bar formerly known as Ypsilanti’s Cross Street Station.
For many years, I had a Gondolier t-shirt silkscreen-printed with the first single’s cover art by the company founded by Morsel’s bassist Brian Hussey. I wore it through seven kinds of hell until the damn thing nearly fell off my body. I still miss it.
Gondolier was three young men from Michigan who made music that inspired me and continues to inspire me to this day. I had the pleasure of interviewing them once, for a music review in a local publication. But nothing has ever compared to being right against the stage when they belted out the greatest sounds I’d ever heard.
This poem now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales.
09 Tuesday Aug 2022
OCEAN
We are small things
unlike the stars that birthed us
or the Moon who pulls the ocean
without ever touching her,
an infinite depth of azure and obsidian
swallowing dreams
dissolving them for centuries
before setting them on the shore
polished as smooth and featureless
as a mystery without end.
This poem now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent.
03 Tuesday Aug 2021
Posted in poetry
They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and perhaps that statement is never more true than in the animal kingdom. In June, I posted a pre-publication draft of a story that involved a woman and a wasp attack. A couple nights ago, my sister called and told me an equally harrowing tale about how she had recently been attacked by a swarm of bees that came out of the ground! I knew some bees lived in the ground, but not massive hives of them.
In the same story, the narrator explained some of the more gruesome aspects of octopus reproduction—aspects I was unaware of when I first started writing octo stories back in 2015 or so. It turns out that in many cases, while the octos are getting their groove on, the female decides to strangle the male to death and eat him. That’s also her last meal, because she stops eating once she lays her eggs, and she dies around the time they hatch.
Anyway, that should explain this poem whose title and lines are all eight syllables.
The Octopus Murder Ballad
Understand that with my three hearts,
I will love you three times as much:
passion signed in triplicate,
so you will always be with me.
You have all I long desired:
perception, beauty, daring, strength.
You outshine others like a star,
a blazing sun to stay with me.
You give me life and then you won’t
stop struggling. I thought you loved me.
I thought you wanted me. Husband.
Lover. You promised to help me.
Become this. Become us. We will
fill the ocean with our children.
You will die and I will eat you,
and we will never be apart.
This poem now appears in Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus.
21 Wednesday Jul 2021
Posted in poetry
After twenty years in Phoenix, I thought I had seen it all. The monsoon season that peaks around August in Phoenix had done some terrible things to me. Once, I got caught on my bike in pitch-black night in a combination dust storm and rainstorm that was like a sheet of mud pouring right out of the sky.
Another time, I was trapped on my scooter in the middle of flooded streets, and cars and busses were trying to get past me in the dark, splashing massive waves against me, and I was pretty sure I was going to die before I got back to my lightless, powerless apartment to see if my cat was okay.
I guess at some point you just accept death as an option and keep going.
Tucson’s monsoons this year started earlier than I recall those in Phoenix rolling in, but they are no less violent. Last week, I got caught walking home from the store by a dust storm that turned the entire sky brown. Two days later, I got caught walking in one of the most insane rainstorms I have seen in twenty years. The big drops of sprinkles started in, and it wasn’t even minutes until I thought I was going to be knocked off my feet by the wind and drowned in the deluge at the side of the road. Cars and busses were pulling over because drivers couldn’t even see. By the time I made it home, I was drenched from head to foot.
So, Tucson monsoons surrounded by mountains and lightning, here is a poem for you. Now please stop trying to kill me.
The Flood
Grey mountains perforated the
underbelly of a great cloud
that admitted no horizon,
until nothing held back the rain.
City streets drowned, and vehicles
lost their way, taking with them
drivers, children, and families,
until no one held back the rain.
The entire valley filled with
rolling, churning torrents darkened
by earth and history of earth,
until no rim held back the rain.
No mortal knows what lies beyond,
where only floodwaters venture.
The deluge keeps her secrets well,
and she never forgets the rain.
This poem now appears in Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus.
10 Thursday Sep 2020
Posted in poetry
Tags
These seven seven-line poems go with the short story The Singing Spell. The subjects relate to the story, and the first letters of each line spell out the poem’s title. It’s not a form I usually work in, but I thought it would be fun to try something different. These poems now appear in Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus.
PATCHES
Pressed close to the ground,
a solitary huntress hungers
to taste what scurries and forages unaware.
Calico colors—brown, black, and white—
hide her in the sun-dappled forest floor.
Everything comes down to
survival.
BILLION
Before history,
I knew you
like a light or a
lyric or the
iridescence of a hummingbird.
Only now,
nothing separates us.
NEBULAE
Nurseries of infant stars,
expectant giants and
black holes hungering for birth,
ushered into a theater of
light and violent gravity where
all who ever lived await
eternity’s epilogue.
MINERAL
Maybe next time,
I come back a stone.
Nowhere to go or
escape, just
rock.
Alabaster.
Limestone.
SERPENT
Sometimes you need to shed
everything to find the
right skin.
Pent-up explosions
emerge as something new.
No one ever mourned
the cell she escaped.
FORTUNE
Fate remains silent,
only speaking in unsolved mysteries.
Road signs vanish, and
travelers lose their way
until that unexpected
night, when
everything at last makes sense.
HIGHWAY
How we got here
is less important than why.
Go as far as your
heart can take you, and
when you reach the
arid edge of time,
you will find me.
09 Saturday Mar 2019
Tags
It looks like several people enjoyed the previous post featuring a poem about a bird from Pablo Neruda’s book, Art of Birds. I mentioned that all but the first and last poems in the collection are about one specific species of bird, but the second-to-last poem takes a liberty with that idea. In it, having painted dozens of magically expressive verbal portraits of birds, Neruda considers himself as a bird.
MeBird (Pablo insulidae nigra)
I am the Pablo Bird,
bird of a single feather,
a flier in the clear shadow
and obscure clarity,
my wings are unseen,
my ears resound
when I walk among the trees
or beneath the tombstones
like an unlucky umbrella
or a naked sword,
stretched like a bow
or round like a grape,
I fly on and on not knowing,
wounded in the dark night,
who is waiting for me,
who does not want my song,
who desires my death,
who will not know I’m arriving,
who will not come to subdue me,
to bleed me, to twist me,
or to kiss my clothes,
torn by the shrieking wind.
That’s why I come and go,
fly and don’t fly but sing:
I am the furious bird
of the calm storm.
09 Saturday Mar 2019
Posted in poetry
Last year, I got an illustrated hardcover edition of Pablo Neruda’s book, Art of Birds, translated by Jack Schmitt with drawings by Jack Unruh. It was a bit of an accident, since I thought I was ordering a bilingual edition, and I wish this volume included the original Spanish. But even without the originals, this is a very cool addition to my Neruda collection. Every poem (with the exception of the first and last) is about one specific species of bird, and many of them are right up there with Neruda’s best and more well-known poems.
The following poem is about the austral blackbird, which I had never heard of before, so here is a link to read a little more about this bird, see a picture, and listen to 30 seconds of its unique song.
Austral Blackbird (curaeus curaeus)
Whoever looks at me face-to-face
I shall kill with two knives,
with two furious lightning bolts:
with two icy black eyes.
I was not born for captivity.
I have a wild army,
a militant militia,
a battalion of black bullets:
no seeded field can withstand.
I fly, devour, screech, and move on,
rise and fall with a thousand wings:
nothing can stop my determination,
the black order of my feathers.
My soul is a burned log,
my plumage pure coal:
my soul and suit are black:
that’s why I dance in the white sky.
I am the Black Floridor.
27 Tuesday Nov 2018
seedlings
ideas and emotions are seeds
longing to sprout
unfurling green to capture the sun
they might live for centuries
or be wrapped in fire
presented as gifts to the blackening sky
they might become medicine or poison
they might drink their fill or die of thirst
they might flourish in obscurity
or wither under the attention of millions
they might fill a forest like soldiers
marching in chaotic ranks to the coast
or stand isolated on the cliff edge
where no one sleeps in their branches
seeds neither know nor care for any of this
gravity tugs their roots
the sun summons leaves
the stalk joins earth to heaven
the seedling wants to grow
yet desires nothing
seeking light
without ever looking
its substance and soul
are one and the same
14 Wednesday Nov 2018
Posted in poetry
eclipse
when the sun disappears
we dance in its umbra
embracing lightless silence
where mockingbirds dare not fly
darkness belongs to bodies
we plant kisses like seeds
and if one star
carves its absence like a scar
then you and i are healing
in the wound
28 Sunday Oct 2018
Posted in poetry
Tags
bees, poems, poetry, pollen, wild roses
pollen
words we create together
for each other
lavender-scented and improvised
bloom like wild roses in a field
untidy and free
scattered in summer sunlight
delicate as lace
our blossoms want to stay
unplucked from our stems
we cover this field
in a scent we share
embracing bees
who drink from us
we hold them close within our petals
for moments we never recapture
but always remember
giving grains of pollen like gifts
paper-thin wings
carry our presents
to distant lovers we never meet
flowers who want to taste and touch us
to grow as we have grown
and fill this place
with creations of their own
26 Friday Oct 2018
Posted in poetry
art generated by Midjourney
simple
you make life sound so simple
as if we could feast on angels’ corpses
dragging tomorrow over us
like a blanket
as if we could inhale
the first breath of stars
and claim their color as our own
to you this all makes sense
the way a song splashes on stones
bathed in light
rocks never see
how water holds a person aloft
when she dreams of drowning
and forgetting
you come here all the time
to this windowless shelter full of holes
this expanse that ceases
at your fingertips
you call it home
and it answers you
in silence and thunder
25 Thursday Oct 2018
Posted in poetry
While organizing my writing files today, I found my collection of blackout poems from a few years ago. Some were eventually combined or otherwise transformed into poems I published in Anything Sounds Like a Symphony. If you’re looking for off-beat inspiration for your own poetry adventures, give this method a shot. I didn’t invent it. It came to me through a friend of Austin Kleon, who made a name for himself doing this to pages of newspapers and launched a successful series of books including Newspaper Blackout and the New York Times Bestseller Steal Like an Artist.
I didn’t use newspapers, but a stack of National Geographic and old Playboy magazines, and odds and ends like an issue of Seattle’s Stranger.
You can do it with anything! In a writing course I took last January from Joanne Fedler, we did a similar exercise with our own material. We started with free-writing based on our recent dreams, just filling the pages with anything that came to mind, and then we highlighted only the most captivating words or short phrases. We used those as prompts for additional writing, like new starting points, but my highlighted pages resembled a blackout poem. Anyway, here’s the lot of them, from the archives.
17 Monday Sep 2018
history
some objects crave stories
like the restaurant receipt you find
in a used book of poems
or the face carved in palm tree bark
on your walk home
from the bus stop
the lavender tops of a mountain ridge
silhouetted against the soft peach of sunset
demand a history
the truth of their geology moving in slow centuries
collides every night with astronomy
to tell a different tale
embrace the miniscule
the details
in their honest inconsequence
they are undiscovered fragments of giants
waiting for you to weld them with words
unique narrations tying threads together
symbols find meaning
only when married
to other symbols
all mine
lead back
to you
27 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in poetry
dawn
at dawn the trees awake
with your name on their lips
unfurling your syllables on every leaf
tributaries of sap
running clearly to the edges
like resonant waves from a bell
a microcellular song
carried to thirsting branches
to reach above the horizon
and reunite this earth with heaven
like the trees you create the air i breathe
and shelter for the birds
flying from my heart
in every direction
seeking home
nestled in your boughs
where last night
stars danced and descended
to converse with shadows
and show them
what gave birth
to light
05 Sunday Aug 2018
Posted in poetry
writers
you drank away
everything i ever owned
it burned a hole inside you
until nothing was left
but unpaid bills
stains on the furniture
pages full of imaginary heroes
you son of a bitch
i threw them out
you writers are all the same
in love with any life but this one
even when you slept beside me
you dreamed of someone else
28 Saturday Jul 2018
Posted in poetry
resident
before silence erased everything
you could go to bed
with jet engines ringing in your ears
the roaring railway serenade
cacophony of car crash lullabies
then emptiness
now you lie awake in solitude
unable to imagine what came before
not a drop remains
no sine wave nor vibration
only sickening tranquility
no one arrives to set you on fire
and toss the gas can
on your smoldering corpse
no one even remembers
where you live
18 Wednesday Apr 2018
Posted in poetry
shelter
that night we hid from rain
under cover of a metal carport
lightning crackled overhead
and the warning drizzle became an onslaught
i only felt safe with you
it didn’t matter how long we hid
so long as we stayed together
your sense of adventure inspired me
your intractable desire to hunt
encouraged me
your constant presence at my side
comforted me
to hell with the storm
for thinking it trapped us
together
we were never cornered
that parking lot belonged to us
we hunted across its asphalt expanse
exterminating the small things
locusts moths and lengths of string
property lines and contracts we did not recognize
agreements of strangers we did not recognize
we owned our hunting ground
for as long as we survived
hours passed beneath our metal canopy
before the clouds relented
we acknowledged their awesome power
no different from ours
forces of nature
embodiments of will
we gloried in the surrounding chaos
knowing we were its equals
i have never forgotten your eyes
your nearness at night
how you touched your face to mine
saying everything without language
but i have often wished
to live as you lived
to demand this earth obey me
and answer to my whim
to remain indomitable
when hope evaporated
to rule everything
when nothing
belonged
to me
—for Ellie Kitty, who loved to take me on walks at 3 a.m., whatever the weather.
10 Saturday Mar 2018
Tags
weightless
let us remain weightless
high above earth’s orbit
intangible spirits
untroubled by time
and its disasters
do you see how they scurry below us
frightened by storms that find them
terrified by a future they cannot predict
but arrives in solid armor
crushing everything in its path
is that what you wish for us
to be physical and real
to empty every drinking glass eventually
to wither away and become nothing
untraceable specks in a landscape
no one remembers
not even our children
consider
my counteroffer
let us remain weightless
and only touch them in their dreams
where we do and say what we please
let our only gravity be emotions
they remember for moments in the morning
then disregard
let us live more lives than one
an endless stream of biographies
we shape and redefine
only temporarily imprisoned
in a parade of faces
and memories
that never happened
let us meet them
in gardens untended
in buildings unconstructed
never becoming as real
as those we encounter
let us remain weightless
only touching life at its edges
like tourists who long to see a country
without immersing
in its wars or politics
when you and i become dreams
we will swim vast oceans
with no more commitment
than dipping our toes in the surf
without ever leaving
this place beyond it all
where we are forever unknowable
always seen
and never
ever
touched
Mars Will Send No More 