Read Your Fortune, Sir?

Murky—like the poem you were so 
Intent on finishing you missed

Seeing that fly buzz by only to end 
Up a black dot flailing 

The dregs of your coffee cup.

Tangerine

“The commune of Poetry becomes so real that [the poet] sounds each
particle in relation to parts of a great story he knows will never be completed.” 
--Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow 

The dynasty 

Of Song, tangible as 
The word sounds— 

In this instance 
Joyous, a small 

Round, reddish-orange 
Object plucked 

From a mandarin’s 
Bough. 

Existentialist Angst Is No Laughing Matter

With the world
Exploding

In bloody stitches, you keep 
Laughing at yourself because 

You think laughing is good 
For you, you must be 

Joking. 

Late Deep Sleeper

lux in tenebris lucet

 
What’s with you, trouper? 
On stage

You made many a move 
To draw the curtains,

But the sun’s still 
Waiting in the wings. 

Trickle-down Economics Broken Down By One Of The Haves

It’s this way you see 
His ledger rife with minuses, 
Two plus two never making four, 
This good-for-nothing no-account 
Too poor to know the score he 
Put a double-barrel up his sinuses, 
Nothing made sense anymore. 

Reverie

           “The Jasmine” 

Whether it gets dark 
or light 
the jasmine stays 
always white.
  —George Seferis 


remember

wherever 


jasmine

flowers 


absent

mind


makes

sense


all day,

all night.

"In The Beginning Was The Word"

—for my A and Ω, Eleni—who knows me better than I do myself 

Why is it when I at last 
Give in and grudgingly promise 
To translate a few of my more 
"Knotty” avant-garde poems 
For you, my not-so-comfy with English 
Better half, half-way into them I get 
That nagging sense you think 
They were all Greek to me too, 
From their promising beginnings 
To nowhere in particular 
In the end.