Official Sounding Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT:
thom ingram
PoetGuru.com
206-350-5436
poetguru@mac.com

PoetGuru.com Launches

Columbia, Maryland, August 19, 2007 - Today thom ingram announced the launch of the permanent home of the PoetGuru Podcast and his other poetry and training related pursuits, PoetGuru.com.

Over the last three years the podcast has moved around, being hosted on free sites such as Blogger and WordPress. The new site will host the podcast, information for the annual writer’s conference Convergence, information for thom’s free training sessions and more.

“I have been waiting nearly ten years to host this site, ever since I signed up for my first free poetguru email address. Sites like Livejournal and Blogger are awesome for people to get out there on the internet, but there is something very special about having your own space. Hopefully, I can do the best work of my life now, having a permanent online home.”

Archives of the previous sites will remain up and are a great resource for over 600 poems written by thom and his poetic friends.

For additional information contact thom or visit www.poetguru.com.

ABOUT THE POETGURU PODCAST: thom ingram is a poet, podcaster and trainer living in Columbia, Maryland. His poetry has appeared on his own sites, The Cloudy Day Art Podcast, The Everyday Muse, Indiefeed Performance Poetry and has been published in local and national journals including Elysian Fields Quarterly and upcoming in 29, The Magazine. The PoetGuru Podcast has existed since August of 2004 in many incarnations and is a member of the Association of Poetry Podcasting at PoetryPodcasting.org

- END -

Dear Poetry

How does one start a letter about endings? You and I have been through lifetimes together, through hope and tragedy, through madness and boredom. As people come and go in my life, as I have changed cities and climates and jobs and obsessions, you have remained constant. And you always shall. But, as you have seen in the past, there are times when I need to go away, when I need to forget you, so I can come home again. This is one of those times.

I am empty. I am all played out. So, I am courting another. Finally, for once in my life trying to rely on prose as a way to express my affections and confusions, giving sentences a shot at my madness. Please do not take this personally. It’s not you, it’s me. I have found another dying art to serve for a moment, for a month, for a week.

But all these are false promises, you know that right? I could be gone forever. I may not come back. So, go Poetry. Find some young thing who will appreciate your oddities. You have tons of people around who love you. Go, and pretend you never met me. Cuddle up in the scansion of those who truly love you.

I am off. The page calls, the noun and the verb, the predicate drama of the paragraph in all its glory. I wish you well. I know you are bound for endless great things. And, I know I will see you again, in pages and magazines, on the corners of street carnivals, dressed up at high collared parties. It seems you are everywhere these days. Have fun and know you have meant more than the world to me.

with Love,
T.P.G.
—
email: MyUnopenedLetter@gmail.com
phone: 206-888-6946

Click Here for the Audio

A New Podcast

On May 6th, PoetGuru Podcasts launched a new community based project called Unopened Letters at http://unopenedletters.wordpress.com.

The podcast is a departure for thom ingram, as it is letter writing based, rather than poetry based. The podcast, inspired by Post Secret.blogspot.com and a short lived project from 2000-2001 called Open Letters.net, seeks to have people send in letters that will be cast in both text and audio.

“This is another art form that we are losing, that I would like to give some breath to. Also, sending and getting a letter is so wonderfully personal”

The description on the webpage states, “It’s a near lost high language wrote into well crafted sentences, poured over for hours by both writer and reader.”

All are welcome to participate as writers, audience and voice over artists. Please contact thom ingram at MyUnopenedLetter@gmail.com or 206.888.6946 to participate.
–
Audio of the First Letter

Episode 14a: Haiku by Masters

Today’s poems are by Basho, Kobayashi and Gary Snyder

email: p3podcast@mac.com

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Episode 13c: 5 Haiku

5 Haiku:

stem to stem and cell
to cell able only to
replicate itself

scorching like the sun
the day I’ve lived to love you
rotund and yellow

her long coming cries
like a stem against the wind
a soft bent body

fast asleep as weeds
wilted in the dawning dark
cold before the sun

left unwittingly
on the altar of my life
carving out my eyes
–
email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 13b: Poetfade, Podfade and the Dangers of the Trade

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phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 13a: Nothing Twice

Today’s poem is “Nothing Twice” by Wislawa Szymborska

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phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 12c: Prologue

With a prick, it begins.

A needle struck in the neocortex
or misfiring neuron, which sees
at first the disk of the sun,
the lunar surface,
water roiling down hills,
the shape of a well-worn pebble
slid easily off on its own.

And so bangs one thought against another.
Wood to stump, stone on stone,
all day in the sweet pearl of the sun
setting about to make things loop and roll.

It begins with a prick.

A spark in the neocortex
or misstruck neuron, firing, what
could be called a birth defect
that sets us off, on this path.

Fire was a gift.
A strike picked from the embers
of a spent forest. Not a leap
to keep that branch alive,
pass it down through generations,
heirloom, song, olympic birthright.
It was right to keep the cave warm,
nothing needed be reshaped.

But to so bang one against another.
To shape the sun, stone to stone,
all day catching quick sparks
on the hairs of heavy arms.

In the end, the prick wins.

While others drug family about
on long hides, grunting and sweating,
the one with the rough round thoughts
rolled easily over the flat plain,
and at night, in the face of the saved fire
had gas left to paint the trek in ink,
in mud easily on the walls.
–
email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 12b: Poetry and the Creative Methods

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phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 12a: Beauty for Beauty’s Sake

Today’s Poem is In a Jon Boat During a Florida Dawn by David Bottoms

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phone: 70 425 Poems

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life intrudes

My apologies. Life has arrested the week and made podcasing too diffucult. I will return on Monday, April 2nd.

email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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11c: Like Art

Midtown, Late March

Nestled amongst the spires and scurrying
like ants
for another hour, at this hurried
pace, they who can’t

stop or rest, who in their haste for success, courier
around deli sandwiches pent
up in paper bags with their worries

until someone, like art, who meant
this morning to select a shirt where nary
a fold didn’t wend itself this way and that,
passes, and like dumb bass to a lure

they hook around to sneak a gander,
stop dead in their tracks (single or married,
like serfs or kings, unevolved or gents),

something inside them hurries up
to stop and gawk, be it from the walk, the fold, the tent
shaped furrow flowing back and forth, the rare
site of red cloth, as to a bull. The ants

can find nary
a reason to wake in this city. Still can’t.
But perhaps for her.
–
email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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11b: The Voice of the Poet or the Poetic Voice

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phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 11a: This Be the Verse

Today’s poem is “This Be The Verse” by Philip Larkin

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phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 10c: “The Walking Tomb”

by thom ingram

Awoke one morning,
one morning from sleep,
my bloody eyes stoned
and reaching for the light

For the light that hid
in shards from the thin
and stuck lids of my eyes,
of my bloody stoned eyes.

I was buried, buried you see
beneath a pile of stones
piled atop of me, each
with its gritty face facing me.

On each stone, on the face
of each stone, the name
of a person or place, a year
or a date or a quote.

And each quote, each name
weighed down, its face
facing me, shards of light
fighting to find me.

In the blurry mirror
and down the foggy road,
all day at work
these smothering stones

The ghosts of things
I wished and lost,
the people I’d wronged
and lies I told.

All day I tried to see
the world in front of me,
but each time a voice whispered
or spoke, a stone would glow.

And each time the dark girl
with the quirk in her lip would laugh
or brush back her soft hair
and half smile, a stone would glow.

All day I tried to brush aside
the gritty contours before my eyes,
all day I tried to tell someone why
I was acting, and feeling so alone.

I went to bed that night
still unable to see, still
taking stabs at the light,
at the now cold, artificial light

and that night dreamt of spring days
in wide open fields, of the beach
and the heat, and sailing on a sea
that had never seen a stone.

Then a lighthouse on the shore
with a single beacon,
warning me to keep away
from that which would drowned me.

Then the next day nothing,
No stones. Nothing so vibrant
or visual. But a deep feeling
of being kept; captive, separate, alone.
–
email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 10b: The Ceaseless (or Senseless) Din of Repetition

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phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 10a: Lament of the Winds (of the Winds)

Today’s Poem is Lament of the Winds by Archibald Lampman

email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 9c: By This Age

If one believes pentagon
copies: birth certificate,
early enlistment request,
divorce proceedings, letter
of reprimand, court filings,
an honorable discharge,
you lived multiple lifetimes
of agony, of heartbreak.

What have I done, but love one
woman, wake to countless, still,
childless mornings, slept late
on weekends wasting away,
staring out windows under
endless, concussive free skies.

For all the pentagon knows
I was born to you, enrolled,
as ordered for selective
service, each year paid taxes
and wait now for my social
security, for a note
which will list the location,
but no cause for which I died.
–
email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 9b: The Upbringing of a Child

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phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 9a: How much I will miss you…

Today’s Poem is “Susquehanna” by Liz Rosenberg

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phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 8c: Thunder and the Green Leaf

Undone by the rumblings
in the distance. Unimpressed
by countless raindrops pelting,
felled from the sky like bullets,
bombs from airplanes over Nam
in videos from before
childhood, whole forests
set ablaze by politics
and logger’s trucks. Someone said
the Amazon were the lungs
of the world. Somebody said
the shrinking forests had more
to do with global warming
than those noxious emissions.
But out on this lifeless branch,
this one leaf, grown green despite
its apparent loneliness

and locale, when the rains come,
hung in peace, giving, easy
to bend, allows the ammo
to fall near unimpeded
to the ground and perks back up
for another round. It’s how,
in practice and in theory,
the sapling grew big, bending
and yielding, how the oak
grew tall, and how, when this branch
jutted out where no others
cared to go, it was allowed
to grow. Always singular,
reaching towards the sun, palms up
and warmed, catching what water
and what wavelengths most passed on.
Loved, though seemingly alone.

email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 8b: “Punch the Bruises”

An interview with Sara about writing as a form of therapy

email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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If you don’t know who Bill Hicks is…

… you need to find out.

Laugh. Be Appalled. Think. Click Here.

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Episode 8a: Children of the Scorn

Today’s poem is Miniver Cheevy by Edwin Arlington Robinson

thanks to Jilly at The PoetHut

dedicated to Kris S.

email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 7c: What Hands Can Say

These awkward words
lips only wish
they had the guts
to speak. Phrases
that cannot slip
across the teeth,
tied, as they are
to nearby brain
cells, which fire
constant volleys
of cold ideas,
and remind you
of all the folks
these words would hurt.

Those awkward words,
what hands can say,
residing close
to the body,
the hips and thighs
and by the heart,
hands that harbor
no quid-pro-quo
with these neurons,
nor memories,
nor sense of right.
So they can speak,
painful, hopeful
realities.

What awkward words
must certainly
follow “I’ve quit”
or “I’m leaving?”
Lips long to say:
in another time,
a different place,
where lives were not
tangled in cells
of promises,
I would want to
love you. There. Spoke.
Those words only
brave hands can say.
–
email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 7b: Dot Dot Dot Dash Dash Dash

This week’s discussion is about how and why poems encode messages in poems.

email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 7a: What’s behind the incident?

Today’s Poem is “Incident” by Amiri Baraka

email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 6c: Indistinguishable Trees

On his way to work, long
impenetrable crusts
cover the earth, which crews
patch as soon as they crack.

He peeks before changing
lanes in the side rearview,
sees the sun rise, and then
looking forward, mistakes

The horizon and light
for one. For a moment,
two suns, ahead and behind.
For a moment, still time.

But soon he spots drivers
in the far lanes across
medians of iron,
weeds and degrees, headed

Towards their rising. For them,
a clear, prosperous day.
For him, and those like him,
there’s no sun ahead, none.

On the return trek, still
into opposites, to
barefoot women, angry
kin, confused boys with lines

etched in pulp round their eyes,
he blends in with the sky
and the rising night, these
indistinguishable trees.
–
email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 6b: Poetry in the Workplace

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phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 6a: Digging

Today’s poem is “Digging” by Seamus Heaney, from Death of a Naturalist

email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 5c: Once, Every Few Months

You are the antidote
to this poison.
Not the poison
only lolled by your lips.

I could never hope
to sip that balsam kiss.
Instead the poison
of your soft pupils,

the strands of hair

that pat the back
of your neck, and the sweet
curve of your hips.
Even more potent

the poison of thoughts
I imagine you keep hid
in your hearth,
keep alive in a notebook

or a box

you keep locked up,
that could not be unlatched
by a house, or kids,
or his ever boring kiss.

Talking to you,
hearing what a bore
you’ve become, how contented
is the antidote to my imagination,

fantasy built over months

of sleeping late,
dressing you up
as my confidant,
undressing you

as my own flesh.
–
email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 5b: ePrime & Poetry

Roses are red, or are they?

email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 5a: Apologies and Adoration

Today’s poem is “For My Niece Sidney, Age Six” by Amy Gerstler

email: p3podcast@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 4c: Eredità

Daddy, with your ruddy complexion,
which I found
only after your passing,
in a description by the US military
of a young private, an official account
of rising the ranks
only to be torn down
due to questions of honor,
loyalty and honesty.

Daddy, the picture I carry of you
younger than me,
thin faced and tight lipped,
whitewashed by the cellulose
of time, by my memory
of you ordering a book which said
our family crescent was British
and working in an office
which bleached your complexion.

Daddy, only in dying could you tell me
I was Italian, through Brooklyn,
through Ellis Island,
part of an immigrant tradition;
your love of opera,
adoration of the Dodgers,
the secret sauce of your lasagna,
all of it passing in that last gasp
to your son through pale lips.
–
email: PoetryPoemPome@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 4b: Prose, Poetry, the Sentence and the Line

email: PoetryPoemPome@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 4a: Leap

Today’s poem is “…And Three Hundred and Sixty-Six in Leap Year” by Ogden Nash.

email: PoetryPoemPome@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 3c: Portrait Poem

All’s still,

as a head cocks
       scanning debris:
wires jut from under a futon
and loveseat, from under
              the front and side
of a particleboard armoire ,
         the sides askew,

hollow corpses of clothing
     lie newly
laundered, an empty Jif jar
       biding its time
              until the spirit lands upon
a fat body longing
                     for the fridge.

Perhaps then,

throwing off an old blanket,
     tripping bare feet
       over soiled jeans,
he will stop,
       look back
              and spot the waste of a day,
of a life, the computers

bleeding. What shock
       could finally alter
              his lost mind,
                     entice him to face
this disheveled carpet,
raise his hand
to lift the husks of oranges, dripping.
–
email: PoetryPoemPome@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 3b: The Poem as Portrait

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phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 3a: An Invitation to Wolves

Today’s poem is “The Party to Which Wolves are Invited” by Thalias Moss

email: PoetryPoemPome@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 2c: Again to Her Bosom

Who bears our tales, pining
in their illegible lines,
in black composition books

asleep in attics, or at
the feet of beds, in boxes
and chests hid in our closets?

How many sheets, how many
reams of stories lie dormant,
our shoddy masterpieces

piled on-point and off-rhyme,
once ripe grapes on dying vines?
How many raisins crinkling

in the sun never to rise,
our old schemes squoze, the subjects
of their last sittings grown old?

How many odd, off kilter
lustings live inside these tombs
or in chapbook tomes, never

again to be picked up, soaked up
or coddled? What schemes can we
devise to let these silly

opuses rise, tell the tale
we’ve been carrying along
in flutes of celebration

or bagpipes that whine beneath
our breath, below our dress skirts
and ties? Or simply, do we

let the earth take them again
to her bosom, make them mulch
and fodder and loam, remix

them with rain, with new rhythm,
with a dash of thawing spring
and sunshine, let new stalks rise?
–
email: PoetryPoemPome@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 2b: Interview with the non-poetic

email: PoetryPoemPome@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 2A

Today’s poem is “A Fan Letter” by Amy Gerstler from Crown of Weeds (Penguin Poets)

email: PoetryPoemPome@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 1c: Obsessions in Half-Light

Street beacons twisting
their turn down the road
home

nights when the long moon,
and its cold shadows
crawl

across eves, where stars
are obscured by dim
clouds.

We cling, like children
to flashing taillights,
red

in front of us, spots
backliting billboards,
neon

adverts on the square
face of commercial
space.

Being left barren
in this half-lit age,
old,

I can’t remember
the sun, nor his face,
cease

chasing follow-spots
through the long forest
home.
–
email: PoetryPoemPome@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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Episode 1b: Nouns and Verbs (and sometimes adjectives)

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Nouns and verbs (and sometimes adjectives) are a measure of density in a poem.

The scoring system:

tangible nouns = 5 points
active verbs = 3 points
enhancing adjectives = 1
all other words = 0

/ divided by the total number of words

2.0 being the goal.

Nouns and verbs (and sometimes adjectives) are a peg on which to turn, like the embankment on a race track. A sunday drive versus wild ride.

If you fail to think
about the turns they must make
and give them a hand

you may send your reader
careening
off

a steep cliff

Use Nouns and verbs (and sometimes adjectives) to make a conscious choice about what you are choosing to do to your reader.

Finally, nouns and verbs (and sometimes adjectives) are the foundation on which you end your poem?

Noun - solid, like a rock
Verb - the ear of the reading chiming
Adjective - leaves you breathless

Think about the words you are using and what role they play, cut out the filler, consider your turns (roller coaster versus sunday drive) and know how you want to end the poem, what is the foundation.

email: PoetryPoemPome@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

Episode 1A

Today’s poem is “After Work” by Richard Jones from The Blessing (Copper Canyon Press)

email: PoetryPoemPome@mac.com
phone: 70 425 Poems

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By Midday Monday

audio

I put you out of my mind,
pretend you do not exist,

sit in the hallway hiding
from your light and from the rays

suggestions that highlit dust
on the carpet, became shapes

where babies might’ve stayed warm
or could be where a cat sat

if we brought ourselves to bring
home such temperamental guests.

For now small mounds of clothing,
a remote, last night’s dishes,

the unclean and forgotten
weekends we waste in darkness.

Whatever Lonely Stalks

audio

The sun, whom some
have come to admire,
whom some credit
for whatever light come
into their vacant lives,
and to whom too many
worship and offer praise,
credit for all the trees
with their thin turning leaves,
and for whatever lonely stalks
blossom and lovely stems bloom.

But the sun, whom, in truth,
was an experiment
gone wrong, an accident,
confluence of concept
and biological process,
where at the core
the elements of our bodies,
these slaveships, combine,
with great energy the offshot
fusion of our lives,
each pre-cancerous strand.

The waste filters its way
down to us, to this cowardice
and jaundice, bent yellow river
of our madness. Its Saturday,
we see the eons grow,
threaten to consume us,
watch the little black spots
on the sun turn,
the stretching magnetic arms tug
on us, trying to consume us.

Only running
in a straight line from this
can save us. This lasso,
this job, these ten minutes
before bed when the sun has set,
and we, too exhausted
to imagine,
two who have seen the sun,
and its many lives
only in passing,
only as a brief wish.

Is the poet hiding (Rant in Freestyle)

audio

Guitar Foolin’ ep.2

audio

me singing my favorite villancico (off-key i might add)

The Pain of Your Room

audio

The son, if one existed,
would show at my feet and push
back the shadow behind me.

He’d look toward the sky to see
me shading a blinding light,
beg me move, so he may see

the rounded curve of the earth,
the reality of space,
so his retina could adjust

to the brassy face of God.

I, father in my own right,
would protect as best I know,
the son, and say to him, No.

I will not shift, will not move,
any communion you wish
to have with your handsome God

or the world, will come through me,
will bend around me, sift through
the window and the screen hung

inside the pane of your room.

In Relation to the Sun

audio

He moves not,
unless you count
the spinning of this great ball
on its axis,

its hurtling
through space, never
occupying the same space,
movement being

the maker
of time.

He moves not,
in relation
to the son, always shunted
under his arm

or huddled
beneath his coat
and kept warm. The son, stealing
all the covers

all the night,
peeking

through the blinds
in the morning,
who can’t keep his head bent down
though he’s been told

and been told.
Son, who can be
held liable for none of it,
sunbathing

on a roof,
brooding.

The Art Created

audio

The sun,
too young
to know
much of anything

in hope
bends down
to pull
water from the ground

and build
with clouds
his kin
like shapes in play-dough

as weight
and wind
tear down
the art created.

The son,
who forks
and knifes
his mashed potatoes

to match
the hair
he once
knew on his granddad,

whose mum
walks in
and says
to cease. Stop playing.

What He Can Do

audio

The sun, whose arms reach down,
three quarters down the length
of his body, but who
cannot move grains of sand,

not one inch, who cannot
get a man walking down
a dark path to turn back,
whose birth cannot save us.

Our sun, with no power
but to stretch his long ray-
like arms, make vapor dance,
build great turrets of clouds

only to be torn down
by the airs and the land,
whose distance makes him great,
admired and crippled.

Sun who tries, whom we fight,
who hears the father-curse
and mother-cry, so who
balls himself up at night.

Um… (Take what you will of me tonite)

i accidently tripped, fell and wrote a song. I didn’t meant to.

audio

Scars that rise with time

audio

Gauze, which allows us
to look on the sun
without his dark eyes
singeing our dark eyes,

blemishes, pocks on
the body that rise,
lesions without cause
lifting in the night,

skin that with the flick
of a nail, flakes
off just in time for
another to rise.

The sun, blinding
in his brilliance,
the rasp and fear
of his flawed body,

his faulty mind,
lost loves and nights,
when the best choice
was the wrong choice,

when following
orders left scars
across the sky,
scars that rise with time.

Sunday

audio

His light,
held captive
in this chapel,

compelled to live
on the waxed lip
of a candle,

pinned up
on the wall,
depicted as

everlasting,
eternal, gift
from a distance.

We wander,
catch the striped
sun shimmering

through paned glass, watch
our prisoner
flicker. These walls,

the grain,
this tallow,
the wax statue

of our teaching
keeps the sun from
these wood trestles.

We gawk
and pass quick
hands through the flame,

pass the tin plate
and the blame, pray
to the constant

who’s now
a convict
to the quick wind,

to the snuff end,
or just a breath,
our sun contained.

Narrative of Light

audio

In the morning
the son
waddles into our room,
reaches up with his hands

and grabs two mountainfulls
of blankets, tugs himself
up the edge of the bed,
crawling in between us.

We ask how well he slept,
if the storms disturbed him,
the rainclouds and thunder?
“Storms?” He squeaks.

The son
knows none of it, says he sees
himself tucked underneath
the covers with a yawn.

This is every morning,
explaining
to a son
what night is, what we mean

by an overcast sky,
which rolls like a sick day
at school he can’t make up
by getting assignments

In the morning
the son
is bright-eyed and ready
for his long day, beaming

through the arch of our lives,
spilling his narrative
of light across what was
an endless stormy night.

Pyramid of the Sun

audio

Muddled
by the chores
of the day, trips
to the fields to raze
rocks and plow, ignore
the coming and going clouds,

droplets of water hung in the air,
prism beads bending the blinding glare
off at exacting angles, away from the fields.

This shrouded day baths another place, dreams,
landscapes, horizons, to him it’s a pallet, a pyramid,

to the field hand whose eyes wander, imagining its building.

Brittle in the Fall

audio

When you loved me
I would turn
my face
in any direction,

swivel the stalk
of my neck

to catch
you, peering at me,
sense the burning
of your gaze.

The earth
sat on its axis
tilted, unfair,
and wobbled

enough
so that you and I

could never last.
And the lust,
what you
gave and what I took,

dissipated
much too soon,
left me
brittle in the fall.

I’ll quit, become
an artist,

give up
the green and profits
to paint canvas
images

of you:
orange and yellow
burning against
the blue sky,

auburn
lace on the spare clouds,

and you, falling
to the ground
behind
the still horizon.

The Long Light Ain’t Right

audio

The long light ain’t right, odd lines,
not a beam invisible
from a flashlight, but shuttle
or plane pieces cross the sky

debris ablaze in a arch
of speed and matter, alight
and smoldering, plummeting,
tail or meteorite

a wish singed, breaking apart
through the atmosphere, pieces
falling ceaselessly to earth,
turning what mattered into light.

First, Beginning With Fire

audio

First beginning with fire
lifted from the still ruins
of some lightning strike, the ash
lot of a forest struck down

by the unborn Gods, stolen,
passing singed hand to singed hand
along the now visible
night path to science, to here,

where we make our way along
yellow glowing roads, along
thin strips of highway
with blinking and comatosed

and halogen eyes, where we,
with our vacuum of reason,
have captured the light, forced it
to face forward, and to march,

though it sways around corners
and peaks over hills and blinds
us in the flat glass mirror
we use to reflect behind.

A Lighthouse, And Old

audio

Attention, like a slow strobe
that peers into the ocean,
that can spot a passing ship

and warn her before she splits
her precious cargo onto
the sharp shores.

A lighthouse and old, pensive
as our first radar, spinning
with his back turned to no one,

standing and spotting a light
onto the land, then the rocks,
then her hull.

He can adore her only
in passing, with a harsh glow,
then turning onto the next

alluring thing; fertile ground,
beachhead, the dicey edges
and waves, vacant.

So Rooted

audio

If, all day, one could sit
in this dirt, so rooted,
in this moist temperate earth,

unchanging in the trunk,
with just leaves, like fingers,
that could pitch and angle

to the light, with just arms
that crack and sometimes die,
there would be no measure

for time. What one could know
would be narrow, no taste
for ethnic food, travel,

dating outside your race,
not leaving for college.

One would barely taste love.

What was known would be well,
an old farmer, Edsel
rusting in a field,

the water of the pond;
knowing what hue the light
shadows at your feet, then

marching overhead, then
with sureness like science,
admiring, as it dies.

The Night’s a Tiger

audio

The night’s a tiger,
its light stripes making
their way from the street

through the forest trees,
those weighty paws thumped
on the sallow chest

of the earth, making
no noise, but breathing
whiffs of the rank flesh
and blood of the kill,

its fur like the wool
we cower beneath
to protect ourselves
from being eaten

by the beast behind
the slats of blinds, cribs,
from the dark monsters
of our own dreaming.

The night hunkers down
in a tired heap
and summons us. Come

to the open jaws
of the beast, feel
safe enough to sleep.

August and Partly Cloudy

audio

The sun, who has always loved,
has always burned, the young sun
who today rose with lofty
intent, to be brilliant. Sun,
in pajamas with patterns
stitched on the front, sun who woke
to an overcast morning,
…………a front
……………….rolled in over night
on a gust, yawning behind
a thick grey blanket, but who
sees no less keenly. Our sun,
whom we spot in passing, peaked
through a hole in the ozone,
through the door of the bedroom,
…………gutsy sun,
……………….whose reactions
create the morning. Our sun
whose willed anguish we call gusts;
typhoons, cyclones, hurricanes,
fog rose on a placid lake.
We stretch our arms out trying
to sift apart the clouds, tug
…………so the sun
……………….may come to dry
out our sopped earth. We invent
machinery, pray, retreat
to the tropics. But the sun
feels none of it. He burns,
a sleeping form at midnight,
a cool breathing that heals.

The Light at First

Audio

The light, at first,
is not brilliance
nor even light,
but lessening
of the darkness.

And maybe this
was God before
opening day,
his hazy face
awoke from sleep,

the dilated
eye of the womb.

And maybe this
was the first steps

of my someday
soon to be wife
round the marble
wall of a cold
and crowded room,

a lessening
of the darkness,
at first a blush,
cause of the curve
of atmosphere,

a purple-blue.