Conducted

From the persistence of dream we hear the moaning strain

The swelling song which nightmares break

When all have gone who must then remain?



All but they which to dreams are chained

Whose midnight murmurs revolutions make

From the persistence of dream we hear the moaning strain



When all is a dream, then is sleeping in vain

from our imagined darkness, wings we take

When all have gone who must then remain?



In little lines lumbering from where we have lain

From the public square to the poet’s private lake

From the persistence of dream we hear the moaning strain



It is said no man is free from the main

And so as one our minds begin to shake

When all have gone who must then remain?



We ran to bed with hopes to gain

And now without we must awake

From the persistence of dream we hear the moaning strain

When all have gone who must then remain?

Priam

The old half-eaten tamarind of a man
Stands in the mirror watching
His skin sag in the breeze
His neutral-colored remembrances
Are of little comfort now
“...but my was I a sight to behold”
His poetry hangs in the air like a vacuum
Nature spares him this customary judgment
For a pity it keeps unpleasantly
“I really could have been something if...”
Each new haiku runs and
strands itself amid the crowd
as it knows itself unfulfilled like their maker
stacking and piling in the mirror
There is no shining city in the glass
“I guess I’ll go back to bed”

Mastectomy

As she stares at the bottle of pills
The thing that hurts is not the cancer or the cure
But the insistence that a woman is made entirely of two breasts
She bites an apple more sensuously than ever before

Winter in Latium

Once I likened us to snowdrifts
Built against life’s magic winter rivers
Then we phoned one
Another and
The metaphor got clearer
I may be a smattering of snow
Held together by
The infinitely serendipitous fortune;
The winds and shifts
Move me freely,
As fits my passions,
But you are grand and imperious.
In that winter
You are a hawk
Fury of feathers afire
Upon a mouse
Limply unnerved.
Cato the Elder
Trampling through a
Snowdrift
En route to the Senate
“Carthago delenda est”
Next summer in Carthage
I was the water that watched
A city burn
I am as I was: poetic, passionate, fluid.
You Vesuvius filled me with ash

Hi everybody

Okay, so this is my first full-on foray into the world of blogging, so I guess I should let you (the reader) know what to expect. I've been involved briefly in other blogs, but never really had a place of my own to do what I want to do. By now, I'm sure you're wondering what that is so I'll tell you: poetry. For the most part I'll be posting my own poetry, but I'll also occasionally highlight some of my personal favorites, as well as deal with the process of writing in general. Since this is my blog, I'll probably even make comments on things in the world which I find interesting (which is probably not going to happen often as I very rarely watch or read news of nearly any kind). I know that this seems like more of an about me type post, and I could totally see that line of thinking, but I really did it for my own sake, sort of as a way to ease into things. However, since this is going to be a poetry blog, here's a poem of mine:

And death, the quiet unassuming

Member of your cadre

Speaks only when spoken to

Needs not worry about his place

For all of you keep him close by fear

You need not fear him

You are immortal

And were you not

It would still be foolish

For you don’t see that death

Is life’s perfect translucent reflection

Therefore it is just as infinite

As robust, as wild, as impossible

As brilliant across the stars

As alimentive, as restorative, as necessary

As you