Truth Be Told

One Sentence Poems (Online) November 2019

If the Secret Police come knocking
late at night, armed with terror bombs,
their visors reflecting moonlight
into the dim interior of my room,
I will freely surrender, eagerly confess
that just before they arrived
I sent out a song
on the clandestine airwaves;
that the coded lyrics, deciphered
on distant, receptive shores,
will lay all beings bare of arms,
bereft of all supposed defenses.

Two Small Threes by Five

HALIBUT (Online) November 2019

he can’t help himself

—the moon is fully windowed—

syllables, calling

This is how it is for him.  It’s pathetic, and even he knows it’s pathetic.  He wakes up; it’s only just after three so he makes himself go back to sleep, but he’s fully awake by 4:20 and he’s got it stuck in his head: something about two small poems, three lines each, maybe formal haiku, maybe some weird Americanized Kerouacian version, he doesn’t really know, only knows he can’t help thinking Two Small Threes By Five over and over again until finally he gets up to write them.

He thinks about where to start with the writing, and he thinks there’s a harvest moon shining in the window, but at first he doesn’t know this for a fact.  He stops thinking about the writing long enough to Google the phrase harvest moon, which, being a good contemporary poet, he has vowed never to use in his writing, but it’s just so very much there, flooding through the window, shining on his desktop, shining on his keyboard, washing across his office floor, sure enough: a harvest moon, shining on.

After the first three hard-won lines, he hits the auto-set for Shankar and the Sandhya Raga fills the room like moonlight.  He’s out of incense.  He’s afraid he’s out of ideas.  He walks to the kitchen, turns on a light, changes his mind and turns it off again. He makes the coffee by moonlight, steel strings still ringing in the next room, where he has left his head, thinking in threes and contemplating the Raga Of The Harvest Moon while the moon, still, still shines on the keyboard.

This is how it is for him in the morning, every morning, early, and even sometimes all morning long: long before even the first cup of coffee, the first thought repeating, repeated in the moonlight, repeated at the keyboard, repeated at the keyboard in the moonlight. This is how he is.

absolute perfect moon

coffee moon keyboard moon raga moon

haiku moon, release me