Tag: featured

Excerpt from “Kernel” from the book “Proof of Flight”:

“…You can devour all the life

off this rock only to find

we ate our only way to pray.

Doctor and priest both agree

on just how sick and cursed

I am, trying to get exorcised

or medicated out of my head,

while animals jeer, and shoot me

visions of a lone boulder trekking

impossibly across Death Valley….”

Excerpt from Download Me Again

“…We shut down all applications

for a third of every day

to upload and download

the real each night,

our daily agreement taken

from a cosmic server,

with memory, continuity,

and a rigged ending to it all

to better move the story along

—a dream summoning of tomorrow…”

Excerpt from Apricots

“…Bombolino dreamed of apricots

the night before he wed. Wondered

briefly the next morning what it meant,

such visitations in our sleep, portent

of a certain kind of sweet, a clue

to look back upon his life as warned

or promised in night’s gypsy trance.

Ah, he’s fine with chance. The plastic

razor dragged up his outstretched neck…”

Excerpt from Mortar, Electrons, Breath & Whispers

“…Full cranium dump delivers my own absence of light,
inscrutable stars, lousy scratchjerk amateur’s film
that we all build in simple programming rolls
to play our piano in rhapsodies, pastorals, pumping
blues, hysterics, constricting cement, bleak time,
frustrated that our memories are made by only us
and lack the story, the arc, calculus of beauty
in movies played day and night at the multiplex.
Who of us leads a life that could sell popcorn?…”

Excerpt from Leafspeak

“…Climate once was a mountain, untethered
now so the Mojave feels free to move over
the Sierra Nevadas into the Central Valley,
great green source of half our food. Worse,
much worse, is now ordained, but unknown
to us who refused to worship undemanded,
and must pay for our easy hubris, as God
will one day make me the trembling leaf
with one glance from Her empty nests…”

Excerpt from Once You’ve Been In Love

“…A woman’s hair moves at one-tenth
its former speed, like lace curtains
billowing off a shock of window
on a most uneventful day, the way
you sometimes might see summer rain–
a wave of linens hanging from the sun…”