Where I'm Calling From (cut find moon telephone)

On the face of my wife
there was a sliver of moon, cut
by the shadow of itself.

I waited for four days.
I have littered the house
with burger wrappers
and pizza boxes
so that I cannot find
the telephone.

The Market (rise ring public meat)

Storefronts opened. Cuts of meat
gleamed despite the fog encroaching.
The devouring public’s shouts and barterings
rose to a din.
We made our way between clusters of shoppers
and hunted for that one thing
that might come to become dear to us.
Now, what remains, is only a ring.

Update Schedule

This weekend two employers contacted me with job offers, so I'm going to have to establish a posting schedule for this blog. It's a good thing, since I've run into the problem of having a bunch of inspiration at the start of a new project, and then the well runs dry for months at a time.

While I won't be able to update on a daily or every-other-day basis as I've been doing, I think I can manage a three times a week posting schedule.

From here on out, I will do my best to post new poems and other writing-related content on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Thanks to everyone that's been visiting the site. I'll have more "4word" poems for y'all on Wednesday.

Summer Job (roof gold viper lodge)

The viper’s bite made my ankle swell,
lodged between the roof shingles.
I don’t know how it managed to get up there,
but as the wound began to leak gold,
I understood that that
really didn’t matter.

Redecorating (oak magnetic brick rubber)

That oak desk was magnetic to you.
You sought it out amongst the brick pillars
edged with bicycle tire rubber.

Four Word Poems

I went poking around in my external hard drive and found some short poems. Some of them are alright, by my standards, but why I've decided to post them here is an effort to get myself writing again. It's hard work to get a full-bodied poem - or at least the bare guts of a poem - to come out in one shot. This is, I suppose a glimpse of how my wormy little brain works when I use a writing exercise.

Partial attribution should go out to Nick Gaudio - former roommate and one of the smartest writers I've ever been lucky enough to know - for proposing the writing exercise in the first place.

Bob Kaufman's Future Blues

It is the time for choleric filial
piety and organ donors
to cash their checks.
It is time for pipers to be paid
in crackerjack prizes,
fake tattoos and miniature
Chinese fingercuffs.

A generation without a Beat
to lead it into tomorrow,
trail-blaze paths with wheat threshers
and napalm.
A generation without a poet to crucify,
only celebrities who don’t scream
unless you pay cash up front.

We are in the times
you envisioned, nightmare.
Times when poetry would be forgotten,
when Jazz would become a lost art, and
forms of shadows dance
on the back walls of libraries
before they are decommissioned.

The new poet stands alone in the desert
with his peyote trip worn off,
with no more sorrows or fuck-puppets
to write about anymore.
The black sounds you heard
evade him;
they know better.

Like Noah, we few will wait for a sign.
A sign that it’s safe to touch
a solid earth of hot beatitudes.
I can now speak fluent Japanese
and I have taught the children
how to speak Beat.
When a pelican carries me a chicken bone
engraved with Sanskrit,
detailing the perfect recipe
for oatmeal cookies,
I will know to head to North Beach
and find you.

Public Service Announcement (Covering my ass)

I created this blog six years ago to satisfy a course requirement in college, but I've decided to re-purpose it to expose my work to a wider audience.

I will do my best to update regularly, whether it's a poem or my thoughts on a news article or some of my literary criticism, but please be aware that my work is primarily reserved for publication and if a post is picked up for publication, said post will be removed from this site.

Also, please do not try and pass my work off as your own elsewhere. It's bad enough I don't get paid to do this, but once I don't even get the credit for doing what I do, that's just fucked up.

I realize I may be writing this to no one, since no one really visits this site, but in this day and age I have to cover my own ass.

Amnesiac Phrenology

Kinetic energy and molten sensations,
weapons-grade amnesia and plate tectonics of the skull -
its boiling rock is diverging and converging while
black sounds in the temporal hemisphere are erupting in arc volcanics.

Weapons-grade amnesia and plate tectonics of the skull
send aftershocks that shake transform boundaries in the lips and eyes.
The black sounds in the temporal hemisphere are erupting in arc volcanics
as pooled ether cools into obsidian nights.

Aftershocks shake transform boundaries in the lips and eyes,
creating ridge-lines and hot, infertile valleys of resent while
pooled ether cools into obsidian nights of
rememberances - of old scents and honeyed colors.

Ridge-lines and hot, infertile valleys of resent
surround rigid pools of dewed memory,
rememberances of old scents, of old, honeyed colors
of aprons and the click of heels, of parasols and pinstripes.

Rigid pools of dewed memory -
of laughter and mustard flowers, the white
of aprons and the click of heels, of parasols and pinstripes -
bubble and evaporate, soon becoming cumulonimbus reminiscence.

Heavy with laughter and mustard flowers, the white
clouds darken and release memory on the surface -
it evaporates on contact and returns to the sky, and
the skull is covered in soothing reminiscence.

The clouds darken and release memory on the surface,
where boiling rock is converging and diverging.
Soon the whole skull will be covered in cumulonimbus reminiscence
maintained by kinetic energy and molten sensations.