In Defence of Travel


Celebrating National Poetry Month: A Poem a Day Challenge

Poem a day #30 is a response to prompts from NaPoWriMo and Write Better Poetry: 1) Write a poem that describes different times in which you’ve heard the same band or piece of music across your lifetime, and (2) write a “remix” poem.

“Counting the cars on the New Jersey TurnpikeThey’ve all come to look for America ” — Simon & Garfunkel

My bus rumbles and jerks, battles
stop-and-go traffic, huffs me home.
I am not a tourist in my life.

No camera, but I record images:
Clouds that are silver, like talcum
powder or a safety pin slicing

against a skyline gleaming gray.
Distant domes rising and sinking
Rivers shadowed in hidden rays

A wind that always swims upstream
Tough map across the laps of rowers
the music in their muscular motion.

Not an Elegy to Lost Love


Celebrating National Poetry Month: A Poem a Day Challenge

Poem a day #29 is a response to prompts from NaPoWriMo and Write Better Poetry: 1) Write a poem that takes its inspiration from the life of a musician, poet, or other artist and (2) write an “near the end” poem and/or write a “near the beginning” poem.

Thrown Away Buddha

Until your scented underarm
appears to me again
I elegize you

below covers, losing my head
in the dust of past
pillow talk

gone cold cases unsoiled
before cloven feet appear.
Good sense remains

a discomfort, wrinkled sheets
to make flat, tight knots
to kneed apart.

For love shakes like a shatter
of daffodils or a pint-size
sip of mulled cider.

I breathe before I taste
the shadowy burning
sense of clove

Better to circle back
to find savior in sweet
pastel touches.

How Angels Still Sound

Celebrating National Poetry Month: A Poem a Day Challenge

Poem a day #28 is a response to prompts from NaPoWriMo and Write Better Poetry: 1) Write that involves music at a ceremony or event of some kind, and (2) write a “color” poem.

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Shap Abbey

Angels still rage on harpsichords
Behind the curtains of the fallen

Cathedral, rip at taut strings hiding
Deep in the bowels of instruments

Evil kings left for them to carry.
For mere remnants remain now

God has walked off, even forgotten
How to sound out pastoral hymns

In neither major nor minor chord.
Just when descending clouds start

Kicking up slews of purple storm
Little winds tremble distant ground

Making musical mayhem, crispy
Noises that sharpen senses keen

Or soft enough that even angelic
Playing still resound from the nave.

Quietly, I listen for earthy tremors.
Reeling beneath the most blustery

Sky, I untie my boots and kneel in
Testament to my crushed prayers.

Unless I have finally gone deaf
Very few of the resonant murmurs

wrinkle my tired knees caps yet
X-ray diffraction patterns show off

Yesterday’s singing bells. In silence
Zephyr sheds its radioactive traces.

Life as Art

the-luncheon-of-the-boating-party-pierre-auguste-renoir

Celebrating National Poetry Month: A Poem a Day Challenge

Poem a day #27 is a response to prompts from NaPoWriMo and Write Better Poetry: 1) Write a poem that describes a detail in a painting, and that begins, like Auden’s poem, with a grand, declarative statement, and (2) write a “new blank” poem.

In this luncheon gathering, I see no meal.
Straight to the bottles, my eyes are cushioned
in grape bunches, multi-color fruit reflected

in tints, well ripened amidst a messy table
top and conversation. All cloth napkins fall
askew, creating textures that mirror white

lace fringing the lady dresses, men muscles
showing from shirts and summer jackets.
Violet gowned girls lean in, elbows poised

to talk and listen to after lunch gossip,
as if fueled and fed to the hilt with only
wine, grapes, and warm summer wind.

May Day

Celebrating National Poetry Month: A Poem a Day Challenge

Poem a day #26 is a response to prompts from NaPoWriMo and Write Better Poetry: 1) Write a poem in “sonnet” poetic form, and (2) write a “hermit crab” poem, one that takes on the form of another type of literature.

One hundred flowers bloom, bulge orange in
stitch of thread, a tender springtime gliding
all to charm youths wearing tattered denim
who march in step, one thousand deriding
all past-time war-time rack and ruin. Still calls
for help stay unheard amid the flattery
culled from piratic planks and gunner walls
all power tilted, a spent battery.

But still we scrub our faces clean, awake
blossoms that are nothing more than hope
parade with banners tucked at armpits gate
a chance spring gloves clean white as soap

Our breath always held with our dreams at stake
a promise of may or may not: We wait.

Madam Takes Her Seat


Celebrating National Poetry Month: A Poem a Day Challenge

Poem a day #25 is a response to prompts from NaPoWriMo and Write Better Poetry: 1) Write a poem  poem that recounts an experience of your own in hearing live music, and tells how it moves you, and (2) write a “memory” poem.

IMG_1599Dancing is what I always wanted
so much, not the spotlight so much
as the ability to fly fast across a room.

Lifted high as if from my armpits
I yearn to straddle the air the way
white noise fills up the empty spaces.

Sad piano permeates the wooden plain
as a I take flight in soft rhythm. Foreign
pulses still forage, surround the night.

Still, pebbles are garbling my feet
with off-pitch songs trailing my heels
with petals ripped from my toes.

Still, I hear a distant heart beating
or is it my children crying for me
to fill their cravings for time and touch?

Day Dance Dreaming

Celebrating National Poetry Month: A Poem a Day Challenge

Poem a day #24 is a response to prompts from NaPoWriMo and Write Better Poetry: 1) Write a poem that involves people making music together, and that references – with a lyric or line – a song or poem that is important to you., and (2) write a “a time of day” poem.

Round midnight
I can hear it, your seeping
desire, it pours long, fine
metaphor of wine,
a witches brew song
I fall face down
in the carpet

imagine you straight
and tall, singing
late to the stars
from the soles of your feet
your lips give way
magnolia

sipping on the microphone
leg muscles sway
with the last time
a man stroked your back
ingesting the intoxicating mix

sultry talk of the horns
another gloat of the moon
I float on longing
savor the tickling
of the trumpet
your indolent tune instructs

I am innocent to such
flash floods of feeling
yet limp with the dark
tattoos burned
on me as a lark
by lonesome soldiers

Still you can
take all of me
at dawn.

Middlemarch

Celebrating National Poetry Month: A Poem a Day Challenge

Poem a day #23 is a response to prompts from NaPoWriMo and Write Better Poetry: 1) Write a poem that focuses on birdsong, and (2) write a “book” poem.

I remain optimistic
when I can still hear
Darwin’s bird calling

at my door as was
George Eliot. Cradling
Origin of the Species

in the tresses of her
dress, she wrote a giant
book called nothing

less than Middlemarch.
She held a clear path
walking a slippery slope

middling religion and science
toning her craft to balance
belief and knowledge, words

to signal across centuries
Nothing molds humans
like an evolutionary plan

even if its just whispers
the sing song of birds
chirping by the year.

Things That Speak Love

Celebrating National Poetry Month: A Poem a Day Challenge

Poem a day #22 is a response to prompts from NaPoWriMo and Write Better Poetry: 1) Write a poem about something you’ve done that gave you a similar kind of satisfaction, and perhaps still does, and (2) write a “tell me/do not tell me” poem.

A young mother picks up and licks a pacifier;
puts it in her baby’s mouth
before he can scream

A man rests his head on the broad shoulders
of his football player son to hide
his tears of pride

A kitchen worker slips out the back door
of a restaurant hauling boxes
of leftover food

A homeless woman laden down with plastic
bags stops to pick up
a fallen glove

The wind carries a flock of geese in formation
through the night sky lit
by a spring moon

The darkness of midnight revelry is illuminated
by strings of light and the shining
face of a clock

Mining My Mother’s Mind

Celebrating National Poetry Month: A Poem a Day Challenge

Poem a day #21 is a response to prompts from NaPoWriMo and Write Better Poetry: 1) Write a poem in which something that normally unfolds in a set and well understood way  — like a baseball game or dance recital – goes haywire, but is described as if it is all very normal, and (2) write an “at a blank” poem.


When I sit here and attempt
to dissect some heady
argument make meaning from swirling air

compose a pithy verse
even render life in brushstrokes
I hear the hot water running

for your bath, smell morning
sausage and coffee percolating
down the hall from my sleep

inflated dreams. You are still
here among the extinct

faces that grasp my heart
and guide my handiwork.

Taskmaster of perfection,
ambitious to the hilt, I traverse

your mountain, seek ledges
to climb onto for respite.

yet orange lights up
the horizon burning back

the slightest breezes so
I will never cool nor calm.