So, in these poems I've tried more wordplay than usual and have labored to keep a lighter touch consistent throughout. I dedicated this collection to my sister, Christine, wanting to write a book for her that addresses love, fidelity, faith and amorality in an increasing secular age, the need for family ties and a sense of belonging, all of it anchored in what Seamus Heaney once described as poetry's need for a "sense of moving on, crossing something...into the dark...towards a destination and a transition."
You can find the book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/1377792
Table
Of Contents
Second
Nature
Love Is A Ballad,
A Quartet
Responsorial
Speech
Insert Big Mind
Here
One Breath Enough
Ashore
Analogous To
Amnesia
This Life As
Mural
Time Feasts On
Each Lonely Believer
Metro Retro
Itchy
Terrain Tour
Risk Mined
What To Do For
Children
Sybarite
Shut Up Or Own It
Seek Ye Neither
Culprits Nor Blame
Every Hazard
Every Step
Third
Eye
Wind Hawk Theatre
Dream
On A Saturday
Morning In The Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Six Reflections
From A New York System Diner In The Rain At 3:30 A.M.
An Asseveration
Rehab
Tree Strength
Pain Is Not A
French Word For Bread
Never Too Old To
Play Simon Says
When The
Neighborhood Stoop Was All
This Be
Surrealism
Northwestern Air
Three Reflections
On Bullying
In Near Sleep
In A Highway 7-11
West Of Ashtabula
For Mags
In Support Of
Just Causes
Importunate
Options
Regarding Words
That Never Needed To Be Spoken
What I Won’t Bury
In A Time Capsule
Ritual Virginia
What I Imagine As
Colors
A Palliative
Dynamic
At Truman
Reservoir
Etching My
Initials Into A Fencepost
Optics Versus
Delusions
Fifth
Wheel
Occasionally
Complete Strangers Sending Flowers
If I Could Weep
Beyond Rims Of Earth Dream
Girls, Girls,
Girls
Again Nightmares
Of Falling
Two Left Feet Or
A Determined Woman Finds Her Way
Little Sister Is
Now A Mom
I Find No Faults
In The One I Love
Some Never Get
Too Old For Each Other
Regrets In
Grueling Times Need Rain
Obit Sent By A
Friend
Annihilation,
Reinvention
Roddy In
Speaker’s Corner, 1980
Chill Silver Of
London, 2004
Two For Dad From
Adolescent Years
Connect Please
I’ll Wait
This is a sample from the collection.
Love Is A Ballad, A Quartet
Eternals beheld his
vast forests
Age on ages he lay,
clos’d, unknown.
William
Blake
1.
Cut and paste here your fang
scars as I spin tales
about forgiveness defining
sanctimonious responsibilities.
You have me sawed-off, out of it
chewing soul because I can’t find magic
during each planned rendezvous
with a naked midnight.
Addled in the rinse of moonlight
I turn now to silver melting over grass
a town common, memories of legs
in your smile, each heroically elegiac.
2.
You coaxed me forward
into the undertow, our past.
Take them now these hard, coiling voices
set them free as angelic waves
so I’ll know again downward spirals
each fathom that once held us together.
I cannot stand myself any longer
recalling acts of violence I submitted to
and in response how I inflicted pain
to broker repentance.
Here on this beach remains of us wash up
shaped like a series of elasticized hooks
tied to ropes eroding in the shadows
a storm having thrashed our bones.
Witness me negotiating infinity’s edge
and please trust I won’t ever forget.
3.
While showing peach trees how to tremble in
the rain
I follow urges to shape shawls of jackal light
left neglected.
Patrolling truant impulses, I season my nights
with blood petals.
If only I’d been more – I can’t imagine living
now
without this hunger for you, for a common
language.
What I accept is that beauty remains a sublime
intelligence.
4.
Pawning the chipped hands of God Fortune
quoting ourselves as portrayed in a Netflix
doc
about American ignorance we sing,
“If it’s not one springtime, it’s your
mother.”
Inscrutable restorations. Perishable resolve.
Caviling degrees of incivility.
We watch tomorrow arrive
in the guise of dystopian genius.
Tension among ghosts, a lower-case epiphany
along avenues where garmentos fabricate
responses to our hand-blown glass threads.
A holding on? If so, how to respond?
Our fingers become a loom stitching
interstices into elegance.
We’re oafish in response.
The runs, the turns, the compensations.
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