You can’t write good til
you’ve written a lot of poems
Here are the bad ones
Read Me
Found a poem,left by a officeron the sidewalkof an unnoticeable building.Like the City’s violation checkerstuck a vivid ticketin your windshield,but for passerby.What did the poet say?We are made of carbon,all in our current formsby chance.By creation.By conspiring.
The Sound Equivalent of Seeing Stars
My–The night wind squeaks.
Or is it the air stutters?
An odd creature is formed
aurally, out of suspension
of disbelief and also noise.
Or, parts of an unseen body
displace its environment.
Next to my air-conditioned
and incandescent filters
of walls, roof, wiring.
It is later than I have
promised myself to rest.
But I keep giving myself
extensions. Could it all
be the balancing
liquids of my skull,
my inner ears? That blank
where I am one of the few
who have no mental images.
And so must strengthen
our other senses.
The Guts of a Blessing
Grace,
when it comes into a room,
is recognizable
but hard to put a finger on,
impossible to still.
Somewhere between
the plummet into love
and wonder at
a new green upshoot.
It comes
to re-balance us
and is gone.
Claiming Days as our Own, 2021
I tell everyone how
I share a birthday
with the Reverand Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Though we commemorate it
on a moving Monday.
I celebrate both.
I claim the whole month.
Country songs ask us
to live like we are dying.
Which we all are.
Our birthdays point out
someone changed their lives
rapidly, seismically, for ours.
My father-in-law loves to say
his birth marks an anniversary
of Mother Teresa’s, though it’s really
her baptism date, another kind of birth.
Now we have twins
starting their 3rd year
on their 2nd birthday,
the last day in February
on a non leap-year.
After the wildest two
years of our lives:
birth,
pandemic,
election,
marches,
and otherwise.
