Saturday, January 26, 2013


the shriek of breaking day 
after Percy Byshe Shelley's 
The Call of the Open

when whiff and color part
days are wan and tired
when morning dew affronts
a far north wild and wired
the fortitude of frost
a pink sun's glow collides
spare whispers flutter pillows
dark areolas meet
a rising pinch of heaven
in one essential sun
The Call of the Open

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Which yet joined not scent to hue,     
Crown the pale year weak and new;
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue noon is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun.


Friday, January 18, 2013

two new poems; january commute & designation youth





january commute     (trying not to care)

trying not to care
that I flew across that platform
like a thimble in a windstorm

scrambled up the stairs like a fairy grinding dirt
stared out the second level window over trees
and tracks and marsh

at lakes reminding me
of watery roots for mermaids
and their petaled kin

imagined bluffs as launching pads
for airless summer love
in beds of ivy pebbles sand

the surf inseminating landfill
while the frogs and rushes slept
while the rot of summer leaks

trying not to care
that all this winter beauty fills me up
emboldens my already far flung limbs and gestures

as I hover between man and madrigal
florid horse & fancy pony
bull and china doe

the smiles and stares
as satchels - book bags
a lunch pail fit for queens

dangle from extremities
baubles on some blazing pine
the queer relentless pleasure pain and seeking out

of  comfort in a body
as it flings itself through poses
as natural as frost

trying not to care



























photo by pete gafney (taken many any years ago! needless to say)

designation youth

when he was young again
in middle age
before that final infancy
he turned to older men
babied them in cubist cradles
refracting joy and wisdom into trust
moved them swiftly out of teen inspired jeans

(draped like fallen petals upon their lacy frames)

into trousers - cuffs and pleats - stopping long enough
considering cravats - but saying no
Prufrock had it right - no mannered frill across
those firmaments of graying lust
just simple line and shadow
gracing shallow pools of once taut crops
falling into florid rows of flimsy flesh

fashion not as folly but the well hung framing
of all those years that pass as light
having known in his first blush of truth
much older men who grazed along
the edges of his snowy thighs
on feathered follicles when summer sun
transformed them into gold

so now he ambles back in middle age
to same sex sites of longing
for the brevity of lust with older men
becoming hope and love and care
parenting lovers in ways in which
his own familial unit failed to dare

so there he goes - bob bob bobbing on the edges of their thighs
he has become too old for their desire to hold
but has somehow found a way to set that snare
to beat that drum - to fumble in and out and back
again to where his first last stab began…