Category: poems

He sat on my stoop, slightly drunk as usual, with his head against my door.

He swayed a bit as I helped him inside and asked me for a drink.

I gave him water, fed him a meal, and listened like I always did.

He told me the stories he could not escape,

The stories that drove him to walk the night,

The stories that put him there with his gun.

The war, some covert machination for unknown gain,

Where he killed for reasons he was never told,

Continued to claim him as a casualty.

He did not kill himself that night,

Though he fired one shot in his liquored haze.

Perhaps he knew it did not matter,

Because he had not returned alive at all.

No war is just, for any cause, if this is what results.

I hold the brass casing in my hand and mourn.

It was almost dark, and I was alone.

The moon waited to rise, sunken in the swampy waters just beyond.

It would be bigger than the sun, orange-red,

But send no fiery heat to blister the tarmac.

I wanted to stop on the edge of the gravel road,

To watch this happen, but had no time.

My skin throbbed as I walked, and I wondered

What would happen if I raised my head in supplication.

Would the night heal what the day had wounded?

I wanted to stop but had no time.

I still remember the crunch and slide of the gravel underneath my feet,

The whirr and click of crickets, and the weight of the damp dusk

As it fell, far too heavy and far too fast, upon my hurrying back.

Eight years old, alone.

I wanted to stop but had no time.

cold dropped my wandering mind

immediately into the heat of body’s center,

wind slammed my absent attention

into the here and now of walking,

clouds forecast my changed trajectory into a quieter day.

I cannot call you as before,

to register this dramatic landscape.

frozen tears are no different than ice;

sorrow chills the heart in mid-beat.

another death, and snow is falling.

another day, and you are gone beyond.

It was more the fact of me than my work,

I think, that caught their attention.

They came expecting art, not to find the artist.

I appeared at first an acceptable guide, until I started talking:

Explaining the premise of the show,

The collaborations between intelligence human and non,

And offering a few baffling metaphysical concepts.

I asked startling questions, though it appeared

That to these young people any questions were so,

As I sensed they came from a school

That encouraged smiling silence, not vocal curiosity.

The young women looked interested; the young men appalled,

Both understandably so.

For the first, I could be a glimpse of an alternative future;

The latter might find me a definite threat,

As I proudly stalked unafraid through the halls.

I move close enough to share her breath,

Gently stroke her face, and listen.

Her sleep restless, she stirs in pain,

Her breathing labored, ragged,

A harsher sound than before.

Now it’s joined by a thin rhythmic whistle,

That I dread yet keenly hope to hear:

Though it be the herald of death’s eventual arrive,

As long as it remains, thus does she.

What can I find in the night,

When it holds darkness soft like your velvet skin,

Stars that shine like your laughing eyes,

And rain that falls like your sorrowful tears?

But when I look to the moon, I cannot find love,

I cannot find it there, nor anywhere I seek.

So I must return to you, beloved, to look to your heart.

Only when I am there beside you

Do I find love; do I find happiness; do I find peace.

Even in the night.