Insignificance Late in life I struggle against my insignificance When I should enjoy the freedom from performance before an audience. Applause is happiness but if they withhold applause, embarrassment. When Da Liu put me to work crunching hexagrams and spreadsheet numerology Instead of ghost writing his books about T’ai Chi for longevity I was humiliated but freed. No need to […]
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I take a 12 month chip, a copy of The Iceman Cometh, drape myself in Union blue, cultivate a salesman’s grinning grip. A Valley trip lies ahead, road miles registered in a company car. Spring becoming summer, there’s a ghost in the garden, a feral cat, sensuous in the drying grass. I light a Tiparillo, block walk the […]
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In 1920 he came on a boat from Ireland and found his way through Ellis Island. He found a room in a boarding house catering to his kind and went looking for a job but found instead signs in windows saying “No Irish Need Apply.” A cemetery asked him to dig graves and lower the dead. In America today […]
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Once they spot me All my bakoki disappear Like dew in the morning sun Pledging to see their halves Or take children on rounds Leaving me desperate. I too shall marry because I disgraced not my uncle To curse me die a bachelor Neither did lust lure me fuck a donkey and have my testicles smashed. I can’t stand […]
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I. As suspicious of the morning as I am thankful for the night, I no longer follow bird flight, the sinking of the violated sun. Mouthing a dialect of short checks and charity wards, I stare at a wasting life, unhappy, aging, unhealthy. Sympathies have been trained out of me. The elegance in a sniper’s logic is what remains. […]
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WATER DROP In icy cold of empty space, It hitched a ride on comet’s face, Accelerating toward a star Of recent birth, from distance far. As sun of color yellow grew In field of vision, met with two Enormous spheres of frigid gas That slightly altered comet’s path. Whereas before would swing around The virgin star, […]
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It was an ancient city. All the young people left as soon as they could but the old remained in their mortgaged huts surrounded by evergreens that offered a haven for cardinals and jays, robins and finches. No matter the season birds flew from tree limbs to feed on seed and suet put out by too many widows […]
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HOTAND COLD Perhaps 100million years To rise from naught, then disappear Above the Hot Spot in the Earth That to Hawaiian Chain gave birth. The oldest now perhaps just stumps, Once mountains proud, now merely bumps Long passed from magma cauldron where They first broke through the surface there. The youngest rise majestically For miles above […]
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DEATH BY PHYSICS If present, past and future All concurrently exist, Can what has passed before us Ever truly have been missed? If space and time are equal, Can we trade between the two? Relive the joys and pleasures Or remake events we rue? If we could press “Fast Forward” To discover what awaits, Would we […]
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A click and its likeness can’t change, curled the way rain yellows though you hold on almost make out the grin that could be yours –it’s been years, minutes and even with your arms apart you have forgotten the smell the fleece-lined gloves filled with dry leaves half paper, half iron half pinned to this snapshot still bleeding […]
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