SORRY I'VE BEEN SO BUSY!

I have missed you all very much. I got so busy I didn't have time to blog or write poetry. It was really terrible. As pennance I post a new poem which experienced a rather emotional birth this afternoon. I can't wait to see everybodies blogs. I can't wait to get caught up on all of your doings!

oui

starving on the apricot cross
I believe in the mysteries
starving in your gaze
fondly returned
I also believe in the obvious
you play like a kitten in my lap
yet you are trying to kill me
you need no absolution
it is your act of grace
that like a serial killer
you stalk salvation

come to me trembling with
the rage that is love
bend back the limbs
that gave you no freedom
there is only one moment left
between the future and the past
and it is ours

scholarship

quietly in the morning
the silence is ownable
your eyes watching me
your laughter
the way your attention
stalked my hours
were not
still there is not a moment
I would change

so I sit
pretending life
marches like a tea cup
that there never really was
any color to sunlight
and that one day
is just as the next
at the office

working late

darkness is a story I tell to myself
it keeps me from being lonely
desires burn in this darkness
as if it were some volcanic world
desires erupt in the dark
glowing creation
something new
at the expense of the old
what was there
is forever changed
what was
is no more
what will be
will destroy all that I know
in the end
in darkness
only I remain
the story I have told
has put me by myself
the last warrior
making peace
with nature’s anarchy

looking for the larger view

please help me write this down
there is a disaster that claims all life
I see it in pony tails
and friendly get-togethers
I need to celebrate the life that was
before we sang yesterday
and sniffed a little
I need to know it as if
I didn’t live here
in the disaster
discovered as a child
the brutal love I recall
that became a habit
and sticks like glue
in the span between
God’s earrings
and forever

Impermanence

This is the worry, you see,
that in the end
the air will disappear;
there will be nothing
and nothing will not sing any song.
Butterflies will tremble
in some new air
somewhere
wings healing from
smallness will never
swim through the passion
that our lungs felt
(with that air
knocked rock hard
and hammered into
wordless headstones).

Do say I loved you –
that we knew eternity
before we wore out
and sank into
that rugged, wooden night.

Tell someone we
were a something
that mattered.

fluid mood mystery

Liquid music
moonlight
floating on the
surface of a
puddle
makes us
calm
a tonic
we drink
or
memories
rippling in and out
of workweek
days in
vacation moments
that settle in
the sun quietly sinking
down the ocean a trillion lives deep

paradox

the song that sang
of the little else
beside what we felt
will not endure
because there
is no place for it
in the bedlam cosmos
of our passion
no matter how
long ago
it made today
and tomorrow real

Outside the disco

Harmed by the view
like a moth,
she stays in the
chilled light of evening.
While winter stretched its arms,
she withdrew all offers –
steaming, sucking teardrops
in gulps
from the ice air
of a winter’s night.

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY!

Woman

There is the darkness
and the light -
you are gracious.

There is time –
in your presence
it has flesh, length.

Sound becomes melody,
poetry.
Poetry becomes
intoxicated words
that are our escape,
our hope -

the mythology of our hearts
is the whisper of your name.

driven all the way

looking for the right words
need is hard
like a big nail
hit so hard
it is countersunk
in a living tree

its like an illness
the only illness
the final illness
the one that cures me

I’m dying of something worse


This poem was originally published in Autumn Leaves

Black Ice

The flared match has an old face in it. The pair of hands moves and the glow does a young face. Then only two tiny sunsets are sucking wind in shadow’s cosmos. In the night the black ice rules, the dome of dark is endless and the dawn is after eternity. Drink the black water; ride the black wagon; laugh loud and full to drink the darkness. Do not look. You cannot see. Do not wait, the night is endless. Do not wish, this is the time of dreams and later is only the now you can’t avoid. It has already arrived against your wish. No matter where we go it is dark, no matter how many lights we turn on. We are naked and it is dark.

Katy did it to me again!

A list of my 20 favorite movies (in no particular order):

1. Groundhog Day
2. Star Wars – The Empire Strikes Back
3. The Third Man
4. The Shining
5. A Touch of Evil
6. Psycho (the original)
7. Vertigo
8. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
9. Men in Black
10. Back to the Future 1
11. Matrix
12. Amadeus
13. Blade Runner (Director’s Cut)
14. The Rear Window
15. Throw Momma from the Train
16. Good Will Hunting
17. Dead Poets Society
18. Rainman
19. Finding Forrester
20. Once Upon a Time in the West
21. Raiders of the Lost Ark
22. Romancing the Stone
23. The Piano Movers
24. The Silence of the Lambs
25. The Bank Dick
26. The Maltese Falcon
27. You Can't Cheat an Honest Man
28. Casablanca
29. Mad Max - Beyond Thunderdome
30. Road Warrior

And that is not all, I probably need to do my favorite 50 to really cover my all time favs.

This is an interesting exercise! I tag Gulnaz, Sue Hardy Dawson, Gautami S. Tripathy, Ozy, Schadenfraulines, and Cecilia

Sad half sonnet

could’ve been your major
a question asked by scholars

could have been
the day you missed class

could have been
your Mona Lisa smile

loved not is half a couplet

My Bio for Plus Ultra

He was born in California, grew up in West Los Angeles, and moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1964. He attended the University of Arizona where he was a student poet. After the university he entered the food industry, first working as a retail meat cutter and later as a chef. He moved to Almaty, Kazakhstan in 1992 to work as an executive chef for a hotel. He started teaching English in 2003. He opened his blog Yuckelbel’s Canon in 2004. He has published his poetry in numerous magazines, bi-annuals, quarterly’s and journals. He has acted in theater, movies, commercials, on television, and sung in musicals. Currently he is a full time Lecturer in the Language Center of the Kazakhstan Institute of Economics, Management and Strategic Research.

Dance

It was a mess
I didn’t make
sounds on the stair –
dog barking

it was a day
beyond lies
but less, far less
than truth

name me an ugly
dance, naked with
the heart-shot
falling bear

I am the anguish
that answers the door

Blacksmith

The night is huge and powerful,
a dark muscle, massive and bulging,
changing as a hammer hits
hot steel the color of sunset
and sizzling stars shoot
into the blackness of forge smoke.
There is no reason to face this,
she says, and a ship sinks below the surface
of convolutions and ripples.
He takes the bottle with the ship in it
and pours out an ocean around him
drowning till the clouds part
and in the full moon light
the faces of the bobbing, bloated crew
shine with grins.

The diamond of the day had a flaw
and through that crack came the brutal black –
the bulging blacksmith pounding, pounding,
telling all you wanted secret,
heralding in the ample night.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!!!

The poem Mime is for all of you. I love you very much!

Mime

I have caressed this
rapturous book of silence
with which to tell you my mind.
Laced throughout are
obscene gestures,
genuinely obsequious,
ultimately polite,
which have prevented us
from touching,
from tracing eternity
along starlit paths of skin
strategically slippery,
here a pearl of spit,
there diamonds of eye light.

Immortality

What is this stuff called time?
Do rare birds fly near our windows
With a beak full of it,
snatched from the sky,
to stand in our yards
in the afternoon sun
and partake of it,
even in winter when
there is precious else
to chew on?

Who is it
that so has her belly
full of it that she
has long ago
forgotten how to die?

Or worse yet
who has had so much of it
they have grown so bored
that, in mid air,
they fold their wings,
expire,
and plummet to the Earth
a small sarcophagus
of disinterested flesh
given up wondering?

Has a little bird,
head the size of the body,
said I can’t bare to start
so long a journey,
folding those yet
vestigial wings?

Do we breed
every billion years
and regret it
forever?

Only a question of time

For Luis Benitez


Do you realize who I am?
That is not possible.
I am less me today
than I was yesterday,
I am unraveling like
a badly thought out story.
I am now that piece of
sadistic humor -
the joke time
has told my birth.

Friday night came and went.
Nobody noticed poets;
they sang, they danced,
they romanced ten pinters;
nobody will see
yesterday without
some burden of regret –
fewer still
will understand
what was missed.

If I am different today
is that better or worse?
Is this more of who I am
or less?
Why does pain
and the chance for
happiness have
an inverse relationship?

What can my aging mom -
captain of the ghost ship
full of friends and relatives
only she remembers -
hope for with
tomorrow’s dawn?

Hope

Fat half of the moon -
crows fly with Spring at daybreak,
caws fold day's bedclothes

Papers

Drink the darkness
but don’t stir,
the glass of night
is a long, black silk sheet.

Tired eyes
dart to shadows
but fear the abyss found there.

Sheets of white
remain bright
but the edge of the room
is frosted with moon.

Still teaching after class.
The itch is scratched
with a red pen.

Wrong circle

In our next moment of wearing clothes,
we will be unstoppable in our nakedness.
Every answer will be a lie
and will mean everything to us
like the darts in your dress,
the soft rub of your jeans.
I cannot tell you the truth
and that no longer hurts.
True was a lie that we shared
before your small hand shattered
my big one with a squeeze.
I look to the light in your eyes
for this world has grown dark.
You are apple and I am orange.
I cringe at beauty because
the glint of a hair has entranced me.
I revolve around your lips
like a forlorn moon.
I pray for gravity and descent.
Destroy my orbit.

poetry 2

a week without spilling out the words
is the burning cross
with my insides boiling

busy week
distracted week
only rhyming preffixes

syllabus students
working the vending machine
in drop/add anarchy

nights echoing
day’s folly
foulness at rest

a dance
without any music