DARKNESS

I miss the dark.
Nights pitchblack as pitch in the seams of the planks of boats on a starlit sea,
When you walk in a garden
With hands out in front in case you walk into a tree.
Moonless nights
Where stars let you grope over rocks at the beach with blind eye -
And then the moon rises
Like the sunlit reflecting rock that it is. Then you can see. Can see why.
Why I miss the dark.

Published online: Snakeskin (UK), November 2015

RAIN / ELIZA

I love the loud rain on the tropic roof

Telling me I’m warm and dry.

But the house doesn’t last forever –

We have to work to repair it always, always.

I love the quiet breathing of my Liza

Telling me she loves me even in sleep.

But –

Published online: Snakeskin (UK), November 2015

PORTRAITS

Easy enough, the people in the park,
A subway addict, or some screaming child:
Knock off five lines from some chance-heard remark,
A tic observed, or mood or clothes gone wild.

A longer piece for loves, coworkers, friends,
People you’ve bonded with, played some life game;
Can’t be so flip – unless the portrait bends,
Fictionalizing thoughts in formal frame.

And closer to you than your own bed mate
Is, tougher yet, perspective and full view
Of parents, more than threaded through your fate,
They’re warp and weft, the loom, the weavers too.

So, last of all, the golden trophy shelf:
That great and grand grotesquery, yourself.

Published online: The Poetry Porch, October 2015

IMPLANTS AND BIOTECH

These are the scarecrow years
When frost tears glisten
On molded and painted cheeks, beside ears
That no longer listen
Being more deaf than dead
And hearing only
Through implants and inputs into the head
Bonily, stonily.

Fears come while certainties lapse:
Fears of the dark,
Of abandonment, monsters, uncertainty. Now (perhaps)
Some Schrödinger’s shark
Divides cosmonaut, cryonaut, chrononaut
From those who can’t trust
The unknown, are ill-taught, or die without thought.

Thrive on change, or be dust.

Published online: The Rotary Dial, Canada, September 2015