Breathless

Your One Phone Call  (Online) July 2015

There is neither edge nor precipice;
nor slide, nor knowable fall.
There is only bottom.
Lack makes itself known
abruptly, not losing or loss.
There is only nothing, suddenly.

There is neither flight nor flying
nor slipping away into airlessness;
there is no drag or drain, no
low warning, no looming alarm.
There is only bottom and nothing.

Revisiting Venus

Objects in the Rear View Mirror (Print Anthology) July 2015
Kind Of A Hurricane Press

               He leaves the hospital for the last time, unable to forget her face.

Half the country was locked in an arctic vortex that night, wind chill readings in the dozens of degrees below-zero, but he’d driven home—an hour’s drive over The Heights—with the window fully open, his hands frozen on the wheel, his eyes blinded, the radio blaring some almost incomprehensible ‘60s tune about love and a forever he can only just barely recall.

When he reached the top of The Heights he remembered how he’d once stopped at the pull-off on a mid-summer night, sat quietly for an hour staring up at Venus, and written a poem about a homesick Canadian dying to get home, flying across the median, sailing over the ditch, and crashing in flames into the granite embankment. After all the years of reading and reciting the poem, it had ceased to be a fiction. He never crossed The Heights without recalling it.

Now, years and years and half a year later, flying home, frozen, he forces himself to decelerate when the headstone grey granite, harder than mere rock, looms, beckoning.

Icarus, These Days

Anthology: Greek Fire (print) July 2015)
Lost Tower Publications

Morning: Icarus pursues a correlation
between a red hawk, gliding,
silent on a far dark horizon
and the first slash of sunrise,
dull fire before the day’s flames.
But everything intervenes:
meetings that haven’t
happened, that won’t happen
until after it's light, until after
it’s almost dark again;
the coffee that spills,
the words that don’t;
the pills and calls
and all the deadly needy
people, ready to be served,
waiting to be saved.

He’s an unwilling subject:
a wing he cannot grasp, an
image of small flame spread out
across a wide and empty air,
lifts him from sleep but leaves him,
breathless and parched, unable
to speak; drops him, speechless,
down among the boulders
of another desperate day.

Appraisal

Your One Phone Call (Online) July 2015


When you find me, here,
try to imagine me whole:

52 year-old meat, hairy,
leaning on my last leg,

grizzly, unbearable;
a spectacled sight. Behold

before you the aftermath
of a half-century of breath;

half a million hours, wasted,
spent like small change

on small changes. These days,
if you seek me here, here

you will find me, such as I am:
crutched and unbalanced, blinking,

a teetering relic, nakedly unearthed,
recently given to fits, recently,

when exposed to sunlight, stunned.