How to Write a Sonnet
First: seize the world as your subject matter. Understand that its grids, its grit, its effluvial patterns can be shaped into fourteen unwavering lines. Next, imagine that you’re M. Buonarrati, acquiring a chunk of granite so pearlsheened, translucent, you glimpse beneath its stippled ice a magnificent something struggling to draw its first painwracked breaths. Then, tap with your icepick, scratch with your pencil the imperfect surface, crack and dig, scribble and mutilate until the ephemeral entity you claim as your progeny pushes out drenched and wet, slippery and hot-bloodied, ...
Read MoreMy Best Friend’s Mental Illness
sprouts, suddenly, piranha teeth. The morning’s made for sleeping. She angles her head onto mountainous white pillows; they cradle her neck, the gritty seams splicing it; her dirty black hair, fanning across fabric, creates phosophorescent rainbows of filth I long to stroke. I’m always with her on those bleached, dead mornings when she sleeps: I hover, then, over the bed, a quick sliver of light that flickers, shivers, glows, Arctic-ephemeral, shedding a warmth that steals under her chin, steadies her trembling throat. “Breathe, Sweetie,” I whisper; her eyes open and...
Read MoreCut Grass in Snow
All day long night is my storm lantern. I carry it into the farm land cutting into my harvested emotions covered by snow edging them in half in front of me see me open and bleeding. I’m seeded like a small orange pit me out and devour me spit the pulp and seed I step on the jagged edges of my feelings and sense my pain cut stretched skin with glass shavings torture under toes hurt badly with pain. Pitch the stuff with damn black top if it makes you feel relieved. Don’t laugh at me like a circus clown. I’m 61 and my dimples show smiles and crinkles. This day...
Read MoreOn the Third Ring
The late phone call brings the voice from China, from Illinois, from Intensive Care. The snow has stumbled south from Seattle. The airlines hold their passengers as collective breath while sleet marches southeast to Los Angeles as rain where county commissioners count storm drains as items for next century’s budget, and news cameras will turn tosporadic rivers in concrete beds mounting current enough to sweep away children impervious to warnings against the fascinations of waters rushing garbage from the city into the sea. The news crews wait through clips of...
Read MoreThe Sanity (1967-1997)
Remembering Nam, the vets, the regulars who did not come back. Hadn’t the flutes fragrances the seasons drawn in pencilled lines and Telemann / the fathers in smoky yards / the villages dressed like Halloween been scares enough to him / the sky-high flames arranged in drumspeak and guitars / ...
Read Morenight flowers
how strange that line of night where dreams flesh and dance to inner rhythms where all seems consequential bits and pieces of here and now fall on waiting soils to seed and bloom and flourish night flowers whose long shadows tease in quibbling irritations day lit hours Wild Transitions...
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