Lately poetry has been thick of the swamp rather than salt of the sea what’s become of me? a knot of fever unwound as plot
a shade a pressure from my mouth
words I would rot
but each holds memory throat or not each recalls the titan the battle fought
Each a trace of encoded scar or
A star found by the road
As I was walking
As I was walking home

Past haunts

The slipping sand
The fading light
The howling moon
101st Street

Appeals lost
Or grammar’s bad
My life is lived on a fault
Split ground
did I choose this fate?

Of the three to date
Doesn’t matter but
my clothes are heavier
Lined with grief
Smile’s just as quick
A wick catching on every fire

Out

With the slightest
Slightest
Sigh

Hope, dear friends,

is the weight of all the sorrow you hold
It is the carrying of soul not your own
misstepping in the dance of joy
For you will dance

the great heft and fall of every
Mistyping footstep to rouse your loved one from that locked depth

Poetry dressed in summer laundry
Poetry raging through the shutters
That devil poet and his pen

The bass adds his line
To an alto kind of day
A choir forms in the lower ranks
Shredded I feel invited to corners of time where water will not steal the ink from my pedigree
Just send the bits of paper pulsing like lost jellyfish in so much bits of self
Echo for me the lost years in this hall

Blending through the shoulders hunches and absorbed
Faces searched and abandoned
Shuffle my hat deeper into my head lower with shrug frozen to my neck
I walk away

Everyday I climb a tree and howl for you

Greeted by the Dawn pale and mute