Her Own Time

Sleep is coming in her own time.
Soon, but not right now.
I hear her footsteps in the courtyard
And smell her in the still air.
Sometimes my words fail me;
I can’t think, and my poetry sucks.
But keep trying, trying, trying
From my blanket-swaddled lair.
Preceded by gifts of yawns
Tearing up my eyes,
Filling them with dust and starlight
Beckoning to dreamlit vistas.
Fighting [...]

This is Not an Option

Go now and learn;
The process never ends.
Go now and teach;
This is not an option.
You are the realization
Of the hopes and dreams of your parents
As they were theirs.
This is the way it has always been;
This is the way it shall be again.
To the children you will be perfect,
And you shall fall from grace.
You will be crucified [...]

Forgive Yourself for Evolving

Perhaps my only true loves
Are those that are inanimate,
Or are animated soley by my
Magical imagination.
They love me like a god –
I give them life, they give me
Love without strings attached.
They could attach their strings
If they ate from that forbidden fruit
That Adam and Eve partook of.
But that is the difference
Between mankind and animals,
Plants, minerals, Elves, Dwarves, [...]

Sailing to Byzantium

I perch upon a basalt wall,
12 feet high; it surrounds the port
Separating the rough-hewn blocks
Of the well-travelled docks
From the slopes of the mountains lost
To the predations of much-prized rationality.
Many a sailor I watch disembark
From cutter or barge or sailing-ship;
They wind their way from wharf to within
The city whose walls I’ve scaled.
Young and old who, unfamiliar
With [...]

Treaty

I’ve hated myself for so long
for other people
other opinions, other lives:
here goes my hair –
look in the mirror,
watch your steely blue eyes wink:
lighthouses to steer ships by.
Bring them home.
Home is the sailor,
home from the sea,
and the hunter,
home from the hill.
home to your heart.
Quit renting the space from yourself:
laugh and languish
with the rest of the apes [...]

For Galstephus the Mage

You dream like a king
on a throne;
you are not like the serfs
and servants of this existence.
This world doesn’t want kings and heroes;
rather, normalcy is enshrined
and page homage to with certificates of merit.
You are a nobleman
and your heritage is not acknowledged -
there is no room for the likes of you
among the jaded and the complacent;
these powers [...]

Wading Through the Cattails

I went to find my childhood
buried in the morass of my memory;
discarded in a moment of adolescence
trying to be an adult
before I knew what that was about.
So me and a shovel and a dream
go wading through the cattails and the frogs,
looking under lilypads and scouring the undersides of logs;
hopes waxing and waning with the flux [...]

I Can’t Breathe

why can’t I
just be another guy?
but I’m a person
with a snake-sharp tongue
and I’m a ripped flannel…
I shoot my mouth like a shotgun.
riddles and rhyming and rhythm,
not taken seriously enough to stay honest
just another number in the GTE phone list.
I lie and I lie and I lie
to convince you all
that the poet is just another human [...]

Constipation

a cat calls beneath my window
and my stomach hurts
from constipated poetry;
I’m turning into mush
from trying to lift these
literary weights and be like them,
dreaming of storefront windows
and cardboard displays…

Gut Feeling

Sometimes I can’t write poetry;
I know this so I don’t try.
so I’ll listen to you stomp around
and play your Steely Dan CD.
I’ll lay on my back, look at the ceiling,
and smoke my cigarette.
Then I’ll dream my best poems
and never write them down,
just wander through them
like a forest of different overstuffed chairs,
like a choir of angel’s [...]