Precipitation/Stigmata

Hailstones stripe my back, welding welts as I bike one Holy Saturday.

Too-Tight Ties and Other Unfortunate Realities

Twelve forks, six rolls, four coffee cups, two candles. Dozens of smiles, forced.

The Poet as a Gladiator as a Reluctant Red-Tailed Hawk

Claw to top of poets' carcass heap. Wipe off blood. Get anthologized.

Poetry Junkyard

Just past the city limits of my mind, there is a junkyard or Gehenna of all the the poems I didn't write before they skipped town. They're way better than the stuff I usually produce. You'll just have to take my word for it, I guess.

The poems in the Gehenna graveyard or junkyard cover a vast array of colossal topics, each more soul-piercing than the last. As I recall, they are alternately profound, hilarious, pithy, and devastatingly sexy. Passionate spirituality, mountain-moving love, the whispers of God and angels are all almost certainly discussed, although I cannot verify it. The poems all make love and progeny. The colony must be self-sustaining by now, if my calculations are correct.

I tried to drive there earlier, but the roads all end suddenly, in ramps, catapulting the unsuspecting traveler off the edge of the known world. I screeched to a stop just short of the abyss.

Tuesday

That lamp looks like an egg. Cars whiz by. I will never see her again.

Nehemiah

Painting at Habitat. Community service: great for resumés.

As I Try to Breathe

Water will shape to fill the hole excavated in my warring side.

Treason

Covert op. Hiding my notebook, I write poems among engineers.

Sylvia Plath

Before the oven incident,
her best friend was a bee;
a leftover from Otto Plath's
harsh apiology.