the sleeper

all that is real is what I imagined, lost in a world of dreams where my soul is full of love and love is my passion drifting and floating on an endless sea of vision stirring and softly breathing in a night of endless prisons all that I feel is only imagined here in my…

For(e)Fathers

Eye blinking at suddenly light The misery of an early sage No shame to be earnestly contrite. How can we claim all that’s right? Gather sheets from history’s page Eye blinking in sudden light Built on shoulders bent by blight The riptide of pent up rage No shame to be earnestly contrite. Earlier still, death…

closer than they appear

I watch you watch life through the rear view mirror not knowing what you’ve seen until it has passed and only then a backward reflection I watch you watch us fading into the distance looking passed our future never knowing I was left behind, lost in your blind spot I watch you leave and know…

Dust on My Head

You collect your pretty, pretty things on the shelf  for everyone to see. Caveat emptor!   Had I known then, what I know now, the person I would be.

The Second Calling

The Second Calling I Do you know why I want to believe in ghosts? The night you died, the phone broke through our wailing. I answered a screen filled with zeros to echoes of silence. II As they wheeled you away, I kissed your forehead, the cold radiating through me like winter glass my frostbit…

Five elegies (Elegy 1: the mother)

gone.   (looking at palm) the hand feels empty. madman. flashing: gray, black, white. a little girl in bathing suit, squirting water from the hose at the camera. gone.   why not some other mother’s baby?             she wonders: will the body ache for the loss of love like the ache after birth for the loss of…

Courtyard of my Dreams

I stood before you my soul naked. And you embraced all my faults and sorrows loving, accepting. There have been times in my life when I thought I would love no one not even myself. But then I found you standing in the Courtyard of my Dreams full of wild flowers in bloom, your shirt…

Blaming David

your smooth flesh is marble, etched hard muscles like no man [save supermodels] evanescent beauty is forever yours vita brevis arta longa the mold of you casts a shadow across me still how did you find the time to perfect mind and body and still work 40 hours each week? my beauty is rain in…

If food is culture…

I do not want to eat some watered down bastardized version of Moo Goo Gia Pan. I want to eat real Chinese food. I do not want to eat complacent middle American tacos and burritos. I want authentic Mexican food. I have had enough hamburgers, artificial flavors, artificial colors, reconstituted chicken product and processed cheese…

(sitting on an urban park bench)

she resembled a grandma doll with dried apple for head, staring eerily from its perch on a shelf. wild on her head, her hair had turned white and was stained yellow, like gauze left on a wound too long. her clothes, old, musty like air blowing from an abandoned building.             her orthopedic shoes tap…