• WORDS

    “Suppose,” he says “words may be used only once, after that they disappear.” “You mean in a poem” she replies, “or life itself?” Even four stanzas can challenge most except perhaps Basho. Haiku would replace sonnets, villanelles, sestinas suddenly gone, anaphora is self-contradiction. “Imagine,” the young girl mused “sloganless politicians, talking heads struck mute, hushed…


  • WORDS

    He is looking for words. There are no words. He feels he needs to say something. There are no words. He feels deep pain. There are no words for his deep pain. Many are speaking. There are no words to speak. Everyone is looking for words. There are no words. Everyone wants to say something.…


  • THE WALL

    No one is certain who painted the words on the wall. No one knew when the painting occurred, someone noticed the words one morning and told others, and the word spread through town. People stopped to look at the words, but few understood what they meant. Soon there were pictures drawn around the words, familiar…


  • AN INKLING

    Writing is an art form that very many never see but the unseeing of the work is what elevates it to art. This is what you often hear from the unpublished, or even from the denizens of small press purgatory, the one the Vatican will never acknowledge, for the poets corner of heaven is so…


  • A DIFFERENT WORLD

    In a different world, I would write you stories, poems, that would bring a tear to your eye, that would make you laugh even when your mood would deny joy, that would bring freedom to some and loosen the shackles on many, that would reflect peace, that would lighten your burden, that would heal, if…


  • HAVING WRIT, MOVED ON

    She says she sees the whole book in her head before she kills it putting pen to paper. It is there, she says where it dies immovable on the page. I invite the words onto the page as well and hope they take a life of their own expressing my intentions if not my thoughts…


  • BROKEN VOW

    Then there are the days when the promise to write hangs over me like a curse, when the words are just loose associations of almost random letters and they deny, defy real meaning. It is on this day where, when all is set on the page, I move slowly on leaving this behind.


  • ANOTHER GHETTO

    She sits in the bookstore cafe her head covered by a linen kerchief bobby pinned to the mass of walnut curls. She cradles the cup of cooling coffee and stares down at the slim book of Amichai, yielding to the Hebrew letters that seem to dance across the page. I sit at the adjoining table…


  • TO BE, OR NOT

    As he begins to speak, she realizes this conversation will, as usual, devolve into a monologue. It is always this way, and with a finely honed skill, she, eyes wide open, slips out of this moment. She is certain, correctly so, he will never notice. He will fill in her nods, assume she has heard…


  • AN INKLING

      He says he has discovered that the best way for him to write is to ignore the pen totally, to just let it lie on the desk doing nothing. It should be in close proximity to paper, for pens need that to complete their existence or at least to give them purpose to go…