Wait Loss

Tales from the Bedside

(Print Anthology / Code Blue Publishing)

April 2026

Sometimes the best waiting room
is the front seat of your car
outside the hospital
where you can’t see anyone
and they never call your name;
where you can leave when you want
and go home,
reassure your worried lover;
tell her there’s no problem
darker than her deepest fears.
 
Waiting inside, all you ever get
is a toxic exposure to
waiting room carpet,
TV static in the background,
and the not-so-silent silence
of all the other patients
not so silently waiting.
 
Sometimes, the best you can do
is to wait things out outside.
 
At least half the other patients
in the inside waiting rooms
are just waiting for bad news…
 
Why do that, when, instead,
you can roll down your windows,
crank up some tunes and
sing along until the music ends
and you’re cured?
 
All that can be gathered
from waiting room waits
(inside or out)
is what everyone already knows:
waiting is always just waiting
and sooner or later
—for better or worse—
all the waiting ends.

Two Poems 

Blown Open (Anthology)

(PDF - April 2026)

KiteString
 
The way that wind lends tension to the kite string
this is how I am without you here and now,
in the narrowest of narrow spaces.
 
The way that sand is the mission and fate of stone
so am I scattered without you. Here and now,
in the middle of the broken night, only the stars are fixed.
 
Tonight the wasted, unreflective moon’s in flux
(as am I). Here and now, without you beside me,
there is no dark so cold, so deep.
 

------[||]------
 
Escapee (Shadorma)
 
I’m not bound.
I’ve untied myself.
At long last
I have learned:
there is no such thing as rope;
(not even kitestring)

Two (Tanka) Poems 

Sunflower Tanka (Dreams)

(Print) December 2025 

Tanka (since she’s been gone)

things have really changed
now his evenings are acid
his bedtime’s bitter
no sweet lips kiss him goodnight
all of his dreams are nightmares
 
---//---
 
Tanka (phototropism)
 
small rift in thick clouds
admits a shaft of sunlight
puts an end to dreams
he’s become a sunflower
his head swivels, seeking light

Three Poems

Medical Literary Messenger
(Online) November 2024

---------[||]---------

Waiting Room (A Haibun)

In the waiting room, he finds himself among twelve phoneheads and only two booksters: one’s a Biblist and the other is clearly an ancient Beatnik reading some Ferlinghetti. If he were home, he’d be enjoying his solitude. He’d be inhaling some sandalwood incense and maybe allowing a little Susumu Yokota to lift and float him away to a more perfect world. But he’s not home. He’s in a waiting room, waiting. He knows that when the door opens and they call his name he’ll be moving into another world altogether. He can only hope that it will be a more perfect world. Or: he could just go home and be there.

The Waiting Room Blues

overhead speakers silent

time at a standstill

---------[||]---------

Early Release Likely

Saturation Level
Heart Rate
Pressure
everything on the board
has an asterisk
Same old story:
doze for an hour
wake up stunned,
pounding, breathless;
ready to explode
He might go home
(one way or another)
tomorrow
or maybe
today’s tomorrow.

---------[||]---------

Departure’s Early Arrival

After his sixth day
listening to beepers
tangled in wires
plugged into monitors and
injected and injected again
and again and again
his seventh day dawned.
He closed his eyes
and it occurred to him:
it was only Tuesday,
not his usual day of rest.

Misplaced Adoration

 50-Word Stories (Online)  July 2024

The sun sits pretty and
all of its well-tanned followers
look up and smile, say ahhhh,
and stretch themselves out
on the low-tide sands or on
Grandma’s hand-made picnic quilt
in the high-noon high-grass pasture,
basking and happy.
                               But everybody
knows this: All the really cool people
worship the moon.

From Hopewell To Halifax

 

PoetryBreakfast (Online) April 2024 

I have strolled on the seafloor
at the Bay of Fundy, wandered  
among The Hopewell Rocks, 
occasionally flattening myself 
into their low-tide crevices 
like an ancient sailor’s skeleton 
watching the tides come and go 
to strip and bury the shoreline. 

And I’ve seen their murky furrows 
vanish and reappear and 
vanish and reappear again 
so many times  
I’ve come to believe that 
nothing ever vanishes, 
that all things vanished  
always reappear and  
always reappear again, 
always the same 
but different. 

But today, instead  
(but somehow again)  
I’m hundreds of miles away 
and it’s bumper to bumper
in downtown Halifax, 
and I’m waiting behind the bus 
on University Avenue, 
waiting for the light to change, 
for the pedestrians to crosswalk,  
for the bus to move 
in and out of traffic 
like the Bay of Fundy tides 
always coming and going, 
creating a tidal flow of humanity 
appearing and reappearing 
but always the same 
the same.  

(senryu)

 

LEAF (Vol.2)
Journal of The Daily Haiku
(Online) December 2023

 

troubled times indeed

no soaring sing-along tunes

—forgotten lyrics—

Modern Warfare

COLLATERAL - Online (w/ audio) November 2023 

Someone else filed the reports 
and someone else read them,
passed them on to someone else
who organized the surveillance
that generated the phone call
that aided another someone 
to determine the coordinates,
launch and guide the drone, set it
to hover high above the village,
laser the tiny target’s rooftop
so that the silently incoming missile 
couldn’t possibly miss.

All he did was pull the trigger.

l'objet sombre

 Brave & Reckless (Print Anthology Support) October 2023

turn it over tenderly
turn it over tenderly
shhhh   shhh   shh
look at this a minute
see look how it’s dark
see how it’s dark here
how it curves how it’s
hard to see look at it
look at it lookit this,
man, I’m tellin ya true:
sure as shit it’s hardly
even here this minute

Accompaniment

 A Story In 100 Words (Online) July 2023

Almost every morning
it’s the same old ambient toss-up:
Susumu Yokota or Lazybatusu.

Some days, neither flips his switch;
some days: nothing but nothing. Silence.
(He neither needs nor wants either one.)

Some days—especially days he’s up early—
he just sits and types, humming his own theme:
he calls it Lazysusubatsumu Yakotoma.

He hums and writes and writes again
until everything comes out right,
or his fingers start to bleed.

Even then, though,
intent on his mission
he encourages the hemorrhage.

He’s stumbled onto something good;
he’s just got to keep at it
until it sings on its own.

The Calling

Tiny Seed Literary Journal (Online / Print anthology) July 2023

Blood-red hibiscus grew

further back from the riverbank
sun-dappled
where I dared not often go;
soft green breezes
in a periwinkle sky
now shimmered tiny bloomlets
now held them an instant in balance
calling

Foxglove and hyacinth mingled there
deeper in the forest, wild
heavy with scent and delicately swayed.

Songbirds by the waterfall
peering down at the pool
found its surface still:
unbroken but for two rootless blossoms
tossed gently to the current
from the hands of almost lovers below.

Camaraderie Uninterrupted

 A Story In 100 Words (Online)  May 2023

I had a friend who rescued a dog. He told me it could speak. Russian. He knew that I was bilingual, so he asked me to do some translation.

I sat patiently, listening.  Nothing.  I’d almost given up waiting. Then I heard it.  It was Russian, alright, with a Labradoodle accent.

Sadly though, it was total nonsense: “Spotted carats snipe phlegm kisses.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell my friend about his furrier friend’s crazed utterance. Instead, I said I couldn’t translate for him because I thought it might be Hungarian.

Someone else would have to burst his bubble.

Visitations (Anthology)

 

Red Wolf Editions - PDF March 2023

Visitations

An Author Collection / Anthology of eighteen poems, all previously published by Red Wolf Journal over the past decade or so.

Titles Included:

Visitations 
Looking Glass
I Heard Voices 
Rust, Pepper 
Relative Distance 
Altered Itinerary 
The Quest 
Love Conquers All 
Overheard 
Ginsberg’s Omelet 
Metamorphosis 
Whistler’s Annunciation 
Chase 
Sundress 
How Billy Writes A Play 
Well 
Qi 
As It Should Be 

(a winter haiku)

 Plum Tree Tavern - Winter Haiku Collection (Online) February 2023

January crows

stare down from barest branches

black and white morning

Payback

 

A Story In 100 Words (Online) February 2023

On their Golden Anniversary, he started calling her by different names and nicknames on a random basis – Stewie and Stewbabe, Audrey, Boobala, Doc, Squig, and so on – knowing he’d never forget her real name, but figuring that when he finally reached the peak of Mt. Alzheimer he’d be able to cover it up a little longer, give her less to worry about.

One morning, she asked him, “Did you sleep well, ummm…” hesitating as if trying to recall his name.

“Yes I did,” he replied, frowning at her smile.

After that, he knew he’d never play the alias game again.

Relative Distance

Red Wolf Journal (Online) January 2023

RWJ Winter/Spring Anthology (Online) March 2023

Red Wolf Editions (Online Author’s Collection; Visitations) – March 2023

I suppose I’ll be up late again tonight,
with the white high full moon
in the cold, almost-springtime sky
banging on the windowsill
screaming to be let in,
and you so far away.

I suppose that in two months’ time
the grass will have greened
and I will lie again in your arms,
having forgotten completely
the shadows of these midnight clouds
racing across the deadleaf lawn. 

Tonight, though,
it’s late and I’m awake,
thinking of you
staring up at the same silent moon
                   a quarter million miles away.

 

As It Should Be

Red Wolf Journal (online) January 2023

RWJ Winter/Spring Anthology (Online) March 2023

Red Wolf Editions: Visitations (Online Author’s Collection) – March 2023

This morning’s forecast

requires no translation.

There is nothing unintelligible

about the sunshine, nothing

open to interpretation, nothing

equivocal.  No. 

                          This morning

the lawn—if brown can be a lawn,

if a lawn is a mat of last year’s leaves—

this morning, then, at long last

is finally and totally frost-free,

no snow left anywhere, just a

slowly warming too-long cold

and the promise of a soon Spring.

 

 

 

  

Rust, Pepper

Red Wolf Journal (Online) January 2023

RWJ Winter/Spring Anthology (Online) March 2023

Red Wolf Editions: Visitations (Online Author’s Collection) March 2023

Red Wolf Journal   (Online Leaflet)  March 2024

It’s hard, living here, not to
want to be a tender poet, not to
wax poetic and rhapsodic when I
step out onto the deck at dawn
as the last tendrils of fog fade,
the first birdsong of the day
rising, a delicate prelude; hard
not to give in, not to write
about wispy cloud and fragile
early leaf unfurling in early Spring. 

But I’m not like that. No.
Morning’s birdsong is for nerds.
Not for me the silver sunrise; rust is
where I really live. Give me instead
the mid-afternoon call of ravenous
crows, swooping down on carrion. 

I can tell you this much:
faced with a panful of fresh-caught
trout, I’ll choose the coarse-ground
pepper every time, leave the lilt of
saffron for some other kind of poet.

I Heard Voices

 Red Wolf Journal (Online) January 2023

RWJ Winter/Spring Anthology (Online) March 2023

Red Wolf Editions: Visitations (Online Author’s Collection) March 2023

I heard voices
on the long highway home from Sutton
and I missed you when the sun went down.

I heard voices in the dashboard, singing.
I turned up the volume and I missed you.
I thought about Graffiti Overpass
thirty years ago in Stafford Springs:
“Love conquers all,” it said; “The strong will endure.”

I heard voices on the rise near Coventry
and I missed you when the sun went down.
As the darkness rose around me
I thought about you, that night in Forest Park,
the darkest rose in the garden,
and the long highway home, alone.

Recessional

 50-Word Stories (Online)  December 2022

“No, no, no,” he said, his voice fading. “I see what you mean. I get it. I get it,” but his delivery had become a mere mumble as he entered the unlit room at the far end of the hall, softly closing the door behind him, making everything even darker.