if you are
Obsessed with light
Then the darkness will stalk you
Apex predator night
Until you
Strike the first match
Chemical explosion
So small you might discount it
Unless…
Match in the dark
Reply
Category Archives: Poetry
More
I told you
This was a two-part answer
Ironically framed
By the disembodied voice
Selling cars in the next room
It’s like calling
A cathedral
A room with four walls
And a ceiling
Huh…
I think as I finish
Stuffing variegated laundry
Into the high efficiency machine
That is true
You my darling
Are no mere room
With four walls and a ceiling
You are a cathedral
And should be treated as such
Tear down this temple
And I will raise it again in three
Days
He said
Evoking all
The foundations in the womb
Baby pictures and toothy grins
Girls whose smiles light up the room
Do not be content to be
Measured the way a man will
Span an ordinary room
Know instead
It takes a lifetime and a fortune
To raise the extraordinary
Cathedral
Flying buttresses
Stained glass windows
Columns and impossible
Arches
All to the altar
Rising incense
Gaze of the Infinite
God
Since you asked…
Paul raises the question
(He says
You asked of me)
What does she think of me?
And while
I would prefer
To tell you
Face to lovely
Face
I will give you two concurrent answers
Simple one first-
My beautiful
Daughter my
Beautiful daughter
My beautiful daughter
Beautiful.
Daughter.
My…
Infinitely beautiful girl
Unwatchable
lately I have begun to speculate
About the geographical location of
Peter in the hours of the crucifixion
Because I am a coward too
I want to say I would be
At the foot of the cross
But my feeble heart
Suggests otherwise
Snacking perhaps
On ancient Aramaic Oreos
In some forgotten corner of
The praetorium
During the inexplicable hours of
darkness
I would slide my helpless hands
Along this cavernous darkness/
The wound in his exposed chest
Grief an animal
Grasping for crumbs
In the dark heart of the world
Pretend you go
pretend you had a lost daughter
Who in your mind will always be
A beautiful baby girl
Now pretend that in order to survive
You start to see your beautiful lost baby
In everyone
Then “everyone” starts to do things they really should not do
Go places they should not go
Smash through rules…
designed for their safety
So you, poor sot, try to warn them away…
From the crap they should not get into
But they don’t really wanna listen
Because who the heck are you anyway?
(Half-crazed stranger with some lost kid)
Yet you still
love them
You know because you lost a child.
So you go find them
In the crack houses
Strip joints
And IRS offices where they work
…and screw up royally
Because you know
That is what love does
Abstract-I get it
So let me try once more–
Years ago I rode on a bus in a country men travelled to in order to have “legal” sex with minors.
A white man got on the bus with a girl from this other country.
A girl, not a woman.
We. The people on the bus. Watched them travel together. Knowing (ball-parking, at least)…their destination.
Their terrible destination.
If she is alive somewhere I would hold her
Tell her her “job” was not her fault
Tell her I love you
(No matter what)
–I love you
Now please darling,
Come home.
Shorn
don’t need to tell me
Time travel is real
I have stood in the room with you
When you disrobed
Mixed the paint
Self-portrait, pitiless and true
You weaponized unsparing
Light for me-
hair cropped close
Seemless undergarment
So that I could know
Exactly how to strip,
Bear cross, and follow
You to the last breath.
Flowers in her hair
nostalgia is no good
When the pretty back flip you
Executed clean off the kicker
Is called a tantrum
And the suit this party
Requires
Will not cover
The girl who was twelve yesterday
Six a minute ago
Now at least 18
Still not old enough for legal margaritas
Which was always just another name for daisies
Can you see
The pretty, young girls
All in a row?
Tutus and princess tiaras/
Flowers in her hair
Six is a girl
Who eats apples for breakfast
Measures summer in hours of freedom
Needs no reflections to
Understand that
Logic does not govern either
Her fear or the sharks
Hunting the deep.
Kafka and me…at the Bikini Contest
first, he corrects the misnomer–
“Body image contest!”
Still, sly words written on the human body
Numbers, he corrects again
Pointing to the charcoal digits written
on their extremities
So close to the branding iron or…
The shadow of all his gone siblings
Fall ash across our faces
his once-alive sisters would have had
A string of dark
Numbers tattooed on young skin
Which is how he got here in the first place–
I remind him of my own
Memories from The Penal Colony
How do you
“Be just”
Without piercing
The heart of every man?
I ask. Brush his beautiful dark
Hair back
How young you look, darling
He flinches as we almost touch
Ghosts at the bikini contest
Garage sale Tutu
was it really
Hemingway who wrote
The apocryphally short
Story about baby shoes
Never worn?
Could be a tutu
In any condition
Little girl gone
We don’t know by what vehicle
Age or demise
Matters that she is gone
And with her
All we knew
Of innocence
Carrying Light 