This page will be updated as I dig up poetry I have written over the years. I will insert newer material at the top and do my best to add what I find in chronological order. I anticipate finding mostly undated notebook entries and will have to make my best guess.
Signal from Sirenum Scopuli (2024)
Sea of letters
River of promises
Squandered like a tsunami
Crashing on sand alone
Or on the rock face
Whose ageless gaze
Will neither wear nor crack
Long as it stands
And I stare back
Grit in the eye
Frothing at the mouth
Pounding and shrieking in the ears,
The headland crumbles at last
No dust rises and no sound echoes
But I circle higher
Loosed from the clutch
A widening gyre
I swoop and climb
Houses become pebbles
And I spy the ruby
In the great expanse
But from this height I cannot dive
For the tsunami has turned upwards
Incoherent and raging
A blanket refusal
Gusting spittle
Carrying vision but not voice
And I am the Archer
No more, nor the magpie
But a swimmer in air
Diving the swirling mists
In search of a glittering stone
Morning papers (2022)
Looking at pictures of friends doesn’t quite cut it.
But what is a minute? In a minute I can waste ink or waste wishes. The wishes dry to butterflies and are gone; the ink, to a guideline in a maze. You can run it over and over, and why wouldn’t you? It is beneath your feet at this very moment.
There is always place for the next step forward, creeping, groping even. The shoe fits the footprint because it is your shoe and you are making the footprint NOW.
We want and don’t want to net the butterfly and pin it still forever. But it is the flight that is the thing of beauty. The wings are a wonder to behold, but the beholding is not the holding, and the holding is nothing without the release.
Well OK, not nothing. It is death. Which is nothing, I suppose.
Do not fear the path, for you are already upon it. The way forward is the only way to hope, because hope requires an unknown.
I Am the Red Shift (2020)
I am the red shift
Heat death at the horizon
To the limit, but not Beyond!
And not Quite
Burning lower longer
Forever, even, and ever
Radiating in no direction
We will walk in
Bright meadows
Only in memory
But move as shades
In darkerness
Complexions like a lobster shell
Before the blush is applied
This is how you slow down time
Selected Poems (c.1998)
1
Hermes will let you know
If you can light the way
Under the undertow
So galvanize your mind
Your thinking hat remains
Half buried in the sand
And rusting in the rain.
The metamorphosis at hand,
You’ll shed your weary skin
The new one on the land
Awaits your stepping in.
2
A tattered flag or beach umbrella
Staked like a spear toward the sky
You step up from behind it in your
Shimmering mirage pyjama
Roll out your bedouin carpet
And throw your armoire open
Let Eastern light illuminate
Your breakfast on the common
3
As if in somnambulant satire
Silicon Ron searched high and low
Toes rubbed numb from ankle dragging
Eyesores wearily encrusted
Nobody can see me now
Visible is not my racket
Easily collidable
In a polyhedron jacket
Complex crystal not dissolving
Sublimating into crowds
4
At rest or slow I give off a shower of neurons,
An engine idling and disengaged.
I will gather the turtles of Greece
The bells of India, a forest gem
Or marine phosphor in a robin’s egg.
I will fill my basket.
A million billion trillion stars
Have fallen from the concave velvet curtains
of my eyelids’ inner theatre.
I have wasted them. You will sweep them up
Peeper glitter litter sweeper.
5
Black Rabbit unblinking
A starry eye amidst the velvet fur of night
Twitching like sticks in the wind
Shivers and is gone
In a silent scamper
Unobliterates the sun and leaves you basking
Palely flickering watery eyes
In moments your skin cells bubble into action
Photosynthetic alarm clocks pealing with warmth
Bristling with new wonder at the day
