• A THOUSAND

    There is a far less obviousbut very important reasonto be a poet, a bit less so, but stilla good reason to write prose.Perhaps you will say that myreason is wholly and solelyaudience specific, and youwould be at least partially right,for if, like me, you are inthe process of losing your sight,or have already done so,…


  • ON WRITING

    Someone once advised methat I should always writewhat I know, for that givesthe work an honesty that isessential to its believability. I should add that he said itknowing I was a poet,and not to cause me to give upany dreams of fictionI might still have harbored. But as I age, I find thatI seem to…


  • DEMANDED TIME

    I’ve made a practicewhich feels more like a demand,that each day I take a fewmoments or more and stopwhatever else I was, orshould have been, doingto write a poem. There are days, perhaps thisone where it seems morea short bit of prose to whichI have added line breaksdespite the protestof the words, condemning themto bear…


  • GREATLY EXAGERATED

    Many now say the age of great literaturehas died, the mortal woiund inflictedby the advent of the self-correctingIBM Selecric typewriter, when wordsbcame evanescent, as suddenly goneas when they spilled onto the page. Others, I count myself among them,believe the wound was not fatal,deep certainly, but yet there remainsa faint pulse, ressuscitation possiblewith the application of…


  • FOR NOW

    Tomorrow this poem willmost assuredly no longer be here,though when during the nightit will slip away, never againto be seen, I don’t know or perhaps itwill return in a form I would not recognize,recrafted by the hand of an unseen editor. It may take on a meaning unfamiliar,or translate itself into a tonguethat I can…


  • HAIKU

    I picked up a bookoff the shelf this morningone hundred haiku it was like sitting downa word starved man, tiredof searching for an alwaysdenied sustenance, and herelaid out before me, a repastof the sweetest grapes,bits of sugar caressinga tongue grown usedto the often bitternessof ill-considered prose. As midday approachedI knew that this was a mealto…


  • WRITTEN ON WATER

    Tomorrow this poem will most assuredly no lnger be here, though when during the night it will slip away, never again to be seen, I don’t know or perhaps it will return in a form I would not recognize, re-crafted by the hand of an unseen editor. It may take on a meaning unfamiliar, or…


  • UNDER THE WEIGHT

    My shelves grow heavy with volumes of words I wish I had written, neatly bound up in books that stare at me, at once bidding me welcome and challenging me to enter. One shelf is set aside for books of pages, blank, on which I have written each day now for three and a half…