be still, my heart: quiet now as the creek is running over rocks roughshod, eroding that cacophony of a world gone mad with choices soiled – and mine, that beating old bag of muscle stuck in its cavity and aching arteries flowing like the creek, cries out for my own sins, for ours, for the […]
Category: Poems
From poetry to short prose, a list of current creative projects

The Boonton Line
I took the Mount Olive train to Gethsemane and slept through the Conductor’s call for tickets until, somewhere near Dover, or maybe it was Denville, keeping the vigil came back to me, so I woke up — It’s as if the rail car were a little grotto I saw with a friend from year’s ago, […]

The Prophet and the Lyre
sometimes I can’t speak to you (but the poet can) when words fall on deaf ears, I am mute despite my screaming, that all these years what you hear you only heard in song, so you wonder why I keep on talking, and the truth is, it’s just for me, because we love to hear […]

Naked Tree
and the leaves now have undressed the trees on this island of islands, bare and brazen, but not afraid of the winter’s whisper, of the threat of her howl, while the whole damn world cowers, the trees now are rooted in sand so deep they found soil beneath soil, beneath the leaves of their past, […]

Kingswood
there where the hemlock’s needles spiral up, up, the conifer in a copse of spruce, I saw the pink orchid, the lady-slippers swaying like lanterns to my feet along the stone-staircase, too, there where a fence once was, between friends, lay shale and blue sandstone shattered about, covered in cold, clean, wet-sediment promises I peered […]

Jennings Point
coarse, cold, the sand about the wintered beach was mixed with snow, and I could not tell the difference, save the crunch of those crystal pebbles below my leather soles, and near, five old rocks like giants guard the Peconic’s dance of unnamed hues in the mystic moat: coarse, cold, but weathered in the way […]

Mockingbird and Valley
at the corner of Mockingbird and Valley, I saw the dogwood there coated in ice, feigning warmth of the coming of the Kingdom and hoped the coming of Spring would suffice as the children in pink and blue bonnets were busy building a sandcastle of snow, I listened to what is really within me and […]
The Vulgar Call them Christians
theirs is the American god whom fear of struck fear of those not fearing quite the same, and cloaked in pretty politik they’ll shame those they can shame in Christianease, they’ll please with pleas and so empowered, claim that right is right and wrong is given to some other name, a simpler world, in black-and-white, […]

New Year
the years they slough off the flesh dead or alive, from the inside or out leaving in their wake some hollow gap, like snakeskin and memories of what once wasn’t, this life of shedding, but we are wont to find the skin and not the snake, not anew, instead to hold the old like some […]
Nataraja
You dance upon the earth, twirling lace colors like fire- fighting the air for attention with feet marching into the ground and each soft stomp your command to make new every goddamned minute with eyes closed to a sea beyond what’s made by the wave of each arm that to dance is to snake among […]