some place else to be driftin’…
Posted in Verse on Sep 9th, 2008
I am not brilliant
in any two-minute way,
or in any explosive manner
you want to name.
I merely perceive my world
through my reactions to it;
the quality of my own mortifications,
the incongruous way speechlessness
takes over my senses
when beholding wonders,
the easy way words run into the meadows
to chase feelings and butterfly wings.
I write, moved, transported
elsewhere,
with found honesty,
when time and words […]
I bask warm when you speak;
my soul a drop away from the brim,
my heart that breathless instant
before it becomes
prey
running from the pack.
I inhale you to me, and I do not
want to breathe out
again,
even as I hold all thought at bay, away,
while thirst holds sway,
instantly fulfilled, immediately slaked,
by words that are no mirage,
by my sense of […]
Posted in Verse on Aug 25th, 2008
the first time
i heard your voice
again –
like summer warmth,
like the blanket
of a sultry summer night,
like your smile was never lost,
like love never took a vacation –
my soul, winter-chilled so long,
melted into spring,
into the green and the heart
of another exultation,
into a fiercer need,
a greater wanting;
to be held
again, in your arms,
to hold you once more,
a thousand nights […]
Posted in Verse on Aug 10th, 2008
To write poetry in America,
you have to be old
and spent,
or young and wastefully bent,
rich enough not to work
for another penny,
you have to be a nurse
off your weekly cycle of work,
you have
to be off your rocker;
you have to be one, or both,
or all of these things.
Wasting in want,
wanting, even in plenty.
To write a poem on love
in […]
I want to be open.
I want to be honest.
I want your arms to lean back on;
my cushion of sand on a salty morning,
the vacation I never took.
I want to spread my arms and legs
as far as they never had
and have you read my soul
just like any other book
one weekend away from work.
Discover the bastard in […]
Posted in Verse on Jun 7th, 2008
Who coined love and minted it
over the gold of friendship?
What fool first painted sunsets
and made them backdrops
for so many leavings?
Why did they have
to come up with a word that spells goodbye
so awfully well?
I like love when it’s just a weight
on your belly; a glance, a regard, longer than most,
a hunger, deeper than words,
a nameless longing […]
Posted in Verse on Mar 22nd, 2008
Keep smiling; stay away, you don’t
have to speak a single word,
don’t spoil the lovely nights I worship
when I’m not hurting.
Don’t speak to me
about things you haven’t found
the courage to leave well enough
alone;
it’s way easier
to quit smoking when you’re sick,
harder still to forgive yourself
when you have no one beside you
you trust enough to practice
forgiveness on.
Trust, it’s […]
Posted in Verse on Mar 16th, 2008
my heart counts with fingers
that don’t cooperate at the best of times,
my soul craves a different province,
and my mind is often lost
in abstractions
between.
so how, in the name of all that’s holy,
do you expect me to understand
the texture
of your silences?
i read the words you write,
the poignancies you mutilate
with every revisitation; those tastes
you remember imbibing but don’t […]
Posted in Verse on Mar 8th, 2008
i was thinking about you the other day
and as suddenly i caught myself smiling
at the thought of your name,
and maybe that’s how we build a faith,
or a trust, or a barnyard full of friends;
by simply believing the best
of those we touch along the day,
or dream along in moonlit nights…
and there the thought fell dead,
leaving future […]
Posted in Verse on Mar 3rd, 2008
the first time a man lost sight
of words to complete
or erase an entreaty marked
the birth of poetry, i’d like
to believe.
the heartbeat
after a thousand i’m sorries,
is gotta be the most profound,
don’t ya think so,
too?
the gesture lost,
the one you make
behind a retreating back; now,
that is poetry, words leaving
in a huff,
words you run after
while your soul
cultivates the driest
tears.
and […]
Posted in Verse on Feb 22nd, 2008
Love is finding someone to hold,
never to own; the missing part of you
you never had, the one you wished you’d found
just after you discover
you were not meant to be alone, the part
you’d never have recognized if you’d chosen
another way but the one you now follow.
Love is a face, a smile, a soul
in the distance; a […]
Posted in Verse on Feb 22nd, 2008
Thoughts shaping
torrents in my mind,
to the music
of implacable confusion.
Finding release
in the soothing caress
of wind, and silence on my skin.
Movement
arrested by movement,
as it were; the future held
in abeyance
by the momentary joy,
of being, of sitting
still.
Living
for the sometime
wind.
Posted in Verse on Nov 17th, 2006
I ventured into my seething self;
once again, dirt into dirt,
to see, soul to self,
how emptiness welcomed its twin.
I find no scent of pity,
having sought none,
but sought I did, still, to gentle
my caresses of what
remained, torn and mangled
by wanton waste
yet wanting more of the same,
knowing life
was nothing if not for the struggle
to rise above the
muck.
It wasn’t […]
Posted in Verse on Dec 13th, 2005
RonReads:
I have two hands
the right and the wrong
and lips not knowing the difference
between your joys and mine
it has always been easier
to nurture, then mourn pain,
but I do not know now
where your hurts end and where mine
begin
I taste my laughter while hearing yours
I cry tears that seem only mine
by transference
and both immediate as life
distant as […]
RonReads:
The minute
consumed him in its eternity…
a fluid instant rapt
in the struggle of images,
and for words to mount them;
a cascade of tastes, of scents…
the thread least tenuous an embrace
easily chosen,
snug on his procrastinate soul.
In silence berthed,
as soundlessly nursed;
the grey of a dawn disgorging
impressions and colors,
towards inevitable noon.
A perturbation fleeing; pushed,
pulled, vomited, swallowed,
at last […]
Posted in Verse on Nov 10th, 2005
RonReads:
there’s two of us waiting for a dawn
that might never come,
waiting for answers that don’t ask back
to show us the way to ourselves
some walks take longer than others,
of course, some questions ask more than the rest,
and there’s a few of us; one, or two, yes,
who must cry and laugh
not knowing which one we really […]
Posted in Verse on Nov 9th, 2005
RonReads:
In breathless reverie, bemused;
washed, drowned, engulfed
in a state past interpretation,
I dreamwalked –
my sleep through yours,
my fancy clothing the nudity
of your desolation;
weighing loss with loss
peopled with tears fallen like rain,
struggling, windswept, wrung
tight as memories looted of their wealth
by cruel hindsight,
and the stark promise
of empty days to come.
Breathless still, I twist, I turn,
wrestled and wrestling,
surreal dream […]
Posted in Verse on Oct 31st, 2005
for ben johnson macapayag
Your fingers do not
rebound,
with the press
of my unshed t e a r s …
your eyes
hold no words
I can halfway understand,
though my mind’s eye can paint,
for good or ill,
your remembered
uncertain smile
around the sometime grimace
on your face,
everytime I try to whisper
yesterday’s one-liners
into your unfeeling.
The clock ticks the seconds
away over your head,
a metronome winding […]
Posted in Verse on Oct 21st, 2005
for manzelle
BobReads:
The bite of rain
on my face
fails to take me past
the cold
where your spirit nurses
the warm that’s left of your days.
It hurts me to lose what you have gained,
makes that sorry part of me
wish I was
in your place, gouging life
from all that remains.
The lash of wind
on my cheeks
takes the resolve away
to stay until
life […]
Posted in Verse on May 24th, 2005
BobReads:
Behind closed lids, I fed on your smile;
nipping, worrying your lips, until they were
reduced to subservience, until they achieved
that particular upcurve which never fails
to shiver the timbers of my resolve. You
always know, and knowing you do gives
my knees the heebie-jeebies; you always know,
when the teasing must end, where your lips,
swollen from the humidity […]
Aren’t we all puzzles
to ourselves?
And as we delve,
as nature dictates,
into other souls,
as we stare into shards
of broken mirrors…
should not we,
in tracing beds of scars;
should not we, as we
choose stillness, seek
movement still?
The screams of the used,
these linger high, and higher
still than little joys,
but in the standing still,
if lie we find
seems easier than
the tearful truth,
might we choose […]
to laugh
and find you
there,
to scream joy
and not leave
the sky
empty
to wake
between dream
and sleep, to gentle
your name with my lips,
to whisper fears
back
to oblivion
to feel
my heart thudding
the essence
of you
inhaling
me,
soul and self,
back to
life
to laugh
and find
you
everywhere; to
scream
and not
leave
the warm you’ve
spun
out of my
cold
to laugh
and not leave
the
sky
i dreamt i was
a syllable
inside a word,
and the word was joy
and joy
was
you.
the word was flight,
flight was song,
song was you.
and
i did not want to sleep,
or sleep so long,
that i would not wake,
or wake up too soon,
and flee the ground
too early, too late,
to watch the sky you wake
bleed ribbons
of laughter
over days that have never been,
across promised days […]
Posted in Verse on Mar 31st, 2005
She sat with me
under the inauspicious sky
as crows sidled close
for crumbs of bread thrown
from my narcissistic hand;
remolded demons we,
from childhood clay,
into the twilight
of a hopeful day.
Ah, this was meant to be,
reincarnation
and the big-bang theory:
souls, long arid, dousing
for water in tearducts long
dry, islands of knowing seeking
to slake heart-hunger
in imagination’s sands,
history lending tomorrow
the benefit of the drought.
We […]
you wrote,
and i laughed
tears onto hands that
had never learned
to cup heartache
properly.
gifts there are which
free you;
but yes, there is
a giving that
enslaves.
i fear i cannot tell
you
the truth
of my ignorance.
i have lived
too much
to call myself wise;
learned
too little to trust
myself in your presence
so
to tell you truly that
my warmth means
your safety.
the last pillow-fight
i joined willingly
was a carnal disaster
of premature proportions […]
Posted in Verse on Mar 27th, 2005
We are leaves in the full bloom
of summer, destined
for autumn glory;
surreal in discourse, we dance
to wind and half-remembered patterns
of spring-time and dreams,
and first kisses.
We have learned to speak truth
with the grey,
seen the lie in black,
discerned deceit in the white.
We know life as it unfolds for us,
for others, and we know ourselves
unwhole,
except in the company of […]
Ships caught in the undertow
of waves clashing between storms
trapped in flights no seagulls
were made to fly…
It seems to me that is
what we are;
a series of images trapped
in the dancing, tired murmurs
of debilitated thoughts trapped
immobile in the finality of mortality,
fanned in agonized abstraction
over what we would do,
and what we could not
Victims of infinite desires
we don’t even […]
Posted in Verse on Mar 8th, 2005
as i am
i am an infestation
of darkness
an appetite with arms
wide open
devoured and devouring
through life and my times
scourged by truth and lies
both mine and theirs
sweeping through
principle or metaphysic
past stranger and friend
until beauty finds me
light as petals on my mouth
until i find
myself dining on misery
over words
quaffing through silence
bent on discovery or loss
past all reluctance
thus i
become rainfall
coalescing into […]
Posted in Verse on Mar 7th, 2005
the heart
a scale a stage
like nothing else
the government of a country
steeped
in lies and subterfuge
the lodestone for misery
and the miserable
home of the deceitful the
defeated
the heart
a scale unbalanced
courtroom like no other
departure and destination
of torment and the tormented
where expectations vie
with inclination
and the oppressed
outnumber
the oppressors
where judgments have
become the village of needs
unclothed
the province of despair
the heart
prisoner and prison
a scale sitting […]
Posted in Verse on Mar 3rd, 2005
Tonight.
He spoke that,
the light above the altar
pining on his bald head.
Urging glory to the uninitiated,
through the wild hedge-grows of life;
loving past hate, trusting beyond betrayal,
hoping
even after the biggest
loss.
One
step
after
the
other.
That is how
you get up, you
know, he said that,
too; you have to go down
past the limit you thought you
would go, even past the point of
giving up, and push, […]
Posted in Verse on Mar 1st, 2005
this moth perched
on an indifferent twig
stilled into essential silence
by the immediacy of a raucous forest
this moth flutters still
onto little seekings, even driven
away from the sanctuary of the darkness it calls
home,
roused ragged into day by the sound
and haste of butterfly wings raging
in capricious vanity flying
from dominance to dominance.
one moth lost, taking flight
from light made inhospitable
by daytime […]
There are words
to shatter complacency
there is a particular silence
to mute even the clamor
of heartbeats
there are songs
to soothe the savage heart
and lullabies of wind
to break the monotony of rain
I waited for you
like soldiers to the marching song
I waited for your speech
like keyboard to fingers
kindling to the brand
a slave to the command
an accident waiting to happen
There is […]
Along, around,
across; I would make
a journey
or two, down your
spine, to the backs
of your feet, celebrating
wordlessness
I swear
my mouth is warm
enough
for a pilgrimage,
in vintage moonlight,
or sweltering noon
Suddenly
I find my joys shuttered
behind the dance
of a firefly
snatched into a paper cup;
a stranger I feed on
through the palm of the hand
I hold over the brim
lest it spill out
and leave me to my
desolation
Posted in Verse on Sep 23rd, 2004
You asked me once
what I had
since I was never
there for you
anyway, but then you
were gone
again
before I had breath
for words; back to your
preoccupation, or forward
to your next agenda.
And so the right
time
for answers passed
into future remonstrance,
victim to what remained
unspoken.
I need
not even ask you
where you are, what
you do. I would find
you
even then, in every
fall of a leaf, in
every slither of the
wind.
Posted in Verse on Aug 28th, 2004
He shows
me
love,
this inarticulation
snuggled in my
arms; teaching like love
should never be
taught, in ways
that are forgiven
before they
unfold.
I wake
to the throes
of morning aching
to find
your familiar
quietitude
in the middle of all
clutter. There is
no one,
nothing else,
I would rather live for
than the grace of
your particular
motionlessness.
With you I can
drift past
savage noontime, cooled
by the joy you pack
into a lunch-box warmed
by the smile you
paint on my
parched,
schizophrenic
lips,
at every
leaving.
By you I sleep,
I wake,
in warmth spooned out
with quiet loving;
every restive kaleidoscope
of […]
I’m supposed to
know
where my right hand is
but my
heart doesn’t
seem to know
what language
reality needs to
be
spoken
through
Where are you
by the way
why am I
not where you are
hiding
I’m supposed to
see where
i want to go
but there’s nowhere
out there
where your
smile
occupies
the space that I
am
Where am I
if I’m not
where you are
free
i left my
heart
behind
unplanned
in the palm of one
uncaring
day
i’d forgotten
i’d vowed i’d
never
cry
again
now in the
throes
of this
unsleeping
night
i
chase one
tear
back
until another
takes its
place
i could write again in a hundred years
practice etching what some future misery
will defeatedly decide redundant
though there is more of me now than before
the center of the universe has shifted
somewhere left and behind my dreams
that doesn’t mean i have given up
trying to mount my essence into eternity
my cravings only last as the last breath
i will […]
Posted in Verse on Sep 30th, 2003
fallen sideways in
yawning silence
will you let me love
you
without reducing your
significant soul to
kahlil’s haskell?
there is no one else
i would rather crawl
on my knees for
bloody on rocks fierce
with our mutual
reticence
come i will not blaze
my own bitter trail down
your cheeks
i am not that frivolously
selfish
but surely crave the
resonance
your dreams etch in
my own disembodimence
too far apart yet closer
still our fears […]
another sunbeam
spitting through venetian
blinds
hitting my already
parched lips stretched
in a rictus of another
morning
does not seem to help
at all
i do not see what good
one more saturday can do
to soften the edges
of a soul knifed shut
but for the susurration of
dreams sighing
down
stray shadows escaping
like notes wrested from
a cradle-song remembered
too late
i have no bedfellows
who can share my […]
Posted in Verse on Aug 25th, 2003
bleaker than emptiness
gapes open that spring
where mystic fire had seemed
so undying
like heart-pumping dreams
the night before
subsiding
without a whimper at
the light of day
the soul cries out
one more time
like a heart coughing
up one last defiant breath
of air
how many wrongs
does it take to make one
right
how many vermillion
sunsets going home
does it take to greet
one sunrise
cleanly without
despair
Posted in Verse on Aug 14th, 2003
Between minutes distinct as day
and night, each shadow every
stranger I have touched; known,
but for the quality of their giving.
Memory at rest.
But a memory whose recall was
an arm blind to the limit of its
reaching, an eye which did not,
could not, accept a horizon.
And so.
Like every story in the telling,
every stranger’s face was
the green shape of […]
Posted in Verse on Jun 20th, 2003
you are here
sultry as every summer
night dipping buttery
fingers into my moon-kissed
soul riddled with memory
dappling heavily yet
lightly over liquid limbs
languid with poetry
wordless as impending rain.
Posted in Verse on Apr 25th, 2003
this is how driftwood feels,
given sentience: buoyant,
perhaps with despair, for waves
swell and foam where they may,
themselves moved by powers
and tides not of their choosing;
perhaps with that strange joy
that sometimes, even if minutely,
blooms
from resignation, for even if sea
and sky can look so endless, still
they give you your dance, from
one swell to the next, from storm
to the […]
Posted in Verse on Apr 23rd, 2003
like an afterthought
to the somnolence of this indigo
twilight
i sit cowed and cobwebbed in
silence, against the backdrop
of a tasteless day gone past,
enmeshed in the stark nudity
of a loneliness coursing down,
like an absent tear,
down the cheek of my
lassitude.
Posted in Verse on Apr 16th, 2003
I stand naked in moonlight, me and my nation
of memories. Braving the cool indifference
of distant city lights, as gently mocking as nostalgia.
I am not so much guilty as innocent, of all good
intentions I’ve discarded, in searching for a wealth,
far beyond the shores of my birth. Leaving loves
and a thousand ties; seeking golden trumpets
to destroy a […]
Posted in Verse on Apr 13th, 2003
Your smile is the unseen sun in the blueness of sky;
the dance of the dreams I hug until waking, the
gentle lullaby of my sleep when it is not
peopled with dragons. It is the sparkle
of the day on the crest of a beaching wave,
the jealous sheen on a leaf glinting off
a dewdrop falling to thirsty […]
Posted in Verse on Apr 11th, 2003
who knows
what the next
instant
might bring
Posted in Verse on Apr 9th, 2003
i would rather not think
of roses blooming
on mist-free mornings
FIRST SONG…
Yes, I do mind how the door slams
everytime you go out; that, too, is a cruel
mockery of my self-imposed silence…
(silence is the perfect word; for to think
it otherwise, would loose all recriminations
best left unspoken)
Posted in Verse on Apr 5th, 2003
No other souls mourn with me,
where I sit vying with my demons;
I have no passion left to share stories,
tears for tears, serving them up
When I was young
I had no words
for rain
I only knew to let it
f r a m e
the Nudes agonizing
on my face
Now that I am old
I have too many words
for tears
i have learned, like a sailor on a ship
going through a reef passage, to sound
the depth and nuance of your every hello,
for i have no other way to know you
Posted in Verse on Mar 16th, 2003
Often i wonder why I turn myself
into parched words inside a bottle, wait
for someone not thirsty enough to cork
me in and cast me out to sea. Often I
ask the wind why my life is so short on
time, but so long on desperation, that
I must yet flit from one heedless ear to
another, until I learn to […]
