floating and leaving no trace
the smell of rain
is the smell of everything
ground into the earth
into the pavement
the asphalt
rising back up to heaven
the odor of ghosts
phantom deeds
and ethereal desires
to walk in the rain
is to be haunted
by what falls
and what rises
vast blanket of clouds
everything is gray–even
as my vision clears
every movement between them
like a clockwork
made of gossamer and shadows
the heat
long cooled into something
less malleable but so much more
flexible and durable
they stick in your throat
the words
they struggle
under your adam’s apple
a constriction
a spasm of the muscles
poorly coordinated nerves
preventing them from exiting
they stick
“i’m sorry”
try to swallow them down
“i was wrong”
let them
let them
let them open your mouth
let them open your mouth
“i was wrong”
let them be heard
“i love you”
still water
cut by boats
cut by the sun
shining like a knife
across the surface
still water
supporting floating gulls and cormorants
lazily chasing darting sandpipers
–somewhere out of sight
the bark of a seal
a dog shakes the winter water
from his coat
emerging from the sea
smiling as only a dog can smile
in this mix of warm sun
cold ocean and fresh air
It’s my first Friday Haiku of 2016!
—–
osprey on the light
tearing into some breakfast
–new year’s day morning
It’s the first day of a new year and I’ve decided on something new.
I’ve been running this blog for over a year now, just over a year. November of 2014, I decided to try to write a poem every day. At least one poem every day. I wanted to do this for a couple of reasons. First, my novel writing wasn’t going anywhere. Everyone would tell me my writing was good, but no one wanted the novel I had produced. t was discouraging to say the least. And I had this old WordPress blog for years that had been sitting silent and getting dusty. Why not use it to put my poems out into the wild?
So I did.
And two, I really had an itch to write poems. Maybe it had been building up in me for years. Maybe all those embarrassing self-indulgent poems I wrote in high school weren’t out of my system. Whatever the cause was, I had poems that needed to come out.
The result? A little more than a year’s worth of poems, almost one every single day of the year. I think I may have missed less than a handful of times, and I posted other things too. Pictures. Songs that got stuck in my head. The occasional post baring my soul on one or another topic. But really, it all came down to the poems.
Now, with a new year upon, I’ve decided take the WordPress blog and squeeze it into my other social media accounts. Facebook. Twitter. Google Plus (is that still really around?). Even Tumblr. Why?
Because I am indulging myself. The poems here are not to everyone’s taste, but they are to mine. Some are not good at all. In fact, some are downright bad. Most are okay. Some are spectacular.
And that’s not just me having a big head, though everyone who’s ever encountered me knows, my head needs its own zip code.
So enjoy the poems if you can, hide them if you can’t. Because every day for a year. I’m going to crank them out. Good. Bad. Mediocre.
The internet is my notebook in 2016. Thanks for reading.
signs and portents on
viewing an owl in flight
and stationary in a tree
and again in flight
on the last night of the year
the owl, athena’s friend
and harbinger of eternal night,
paused in her flight long enough
for us to view her in a tree
tawny and silent she watched us
and allowed us to approach her tree
while holding her in the beam
of a flashlight
and then she flew again
wings silent
all we could hear were the sounds
of nearby freeway traffic
so much like unceasing waves
the day before we had seen
five hawks
sentinels on lamp posts
lining the road during a drive
and counted ourselves lucky
–a five-hawk day
but what does this night predator
so beautiful and silent
caught for a moment in her flight
in the white artificial light
in my hand
portend for the year ahead?
it waits
not in a place
like a monster you can
dispel with a flip
of the light switch
it doesn’t lurk
in the closet or under the bed
though you can feel it waiting
waiting all around you
that clicking
ticking
of the clock
reminding you that
the year is spent
like your birthday money
that you blew on
a record that you wanted
for just one song
and a magic trick
that was interesting
exactly once
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here's an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,300 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 38 trips to carry that many people.
Words and Feathers 