The starving artist is a hopelessly dead idea. The artist starved to death. He attained immortality in words. Effigies of idiots. Colorful concepts, paraded through the streets on the shoulders of sweaty men in suits as their daughters and wives strew bright yellow, orange, and red flower petals and dab their tender cheeks with frilly [...]
Category Archives: poetry
Man’s Mid-Life Crisis
I am a forty-year-old man, having my mid-life crisis. I am realizing now that my mortality has been always a constant preoccupation, when all along I had at least this far into life to go. Years to today, age 40; nothing to show for myself save a portfolio and resume. Not even any words to [...]
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The Wheelers
Okay dream-mind, now concentrate. Describe your state. Well, it’s hellish mostly. I feel dreadfully afraid. Guide me, Virgil. The Poet is obliged. This is the circle of Wheelers, long-limbed, thin, apish creatures with faces like men but with the beaks of gargoyles. Instead of hands and feet to hold things and walk around with they [...]
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Evergreen Scent
Mom, I just fell asleep as you were telling me my story. Listening to your voice and resting in your loving arms, I dreamed I entered a grotto. The walls were painted blue. In them were elaborate shrines; orange statues draped with garlanded petals; their bases strewn with red roses and yellow daffodils. It sounds [...]
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Cyclic Existence
The Sun is smothered by Time, the cosmic iron snuffer. Energy is equal to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. Ten billion years: a one followed by ten zeros; not such a significant number to a mind akin to Einstein’s, at a steadily increasing temperature. Earth is an important part of the [...]
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Guru Devotion
Sometimes I think I should have been a… I could have been the… -est. Stop! The master hits the disciple with a stick. The pain smarts for hours afterward. That thought should never have arisen. you double your error by lending it voice. But it occurred, the disciple whined. His tone betrayed his state of [...]
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Amulet against Fate
In the 90s any movie that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger was invested in heavily because Hollywood producers hoped it would be the next Terminator. In Last Action Hero we have a very campy script. A twelve-year-old orphan boy living in a rainy gray city finds happiness in watching movies. His favorite of all is (the character [...]
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Maya Babies
The red sun dropped in my dream. Hey did you see that? I asked one of the tourist bystanders on the promontory. It didn’t set. It FELL below the horizon. This is a very bad omen, according to interpretations. You can guess what it might mean… It is night now and I don’t know it [...]
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Contours of Haze
A bird soars with its white reflection up a river stream. Birds in the blue above burst out of a group of five. Stars explode into dead comet matter. Flights cross green banks – the reflective surface meets its edge and ends. The form becomes a shadow. A dark force caws. A chorus of crows [...]
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Revolutionary Inertia
The dove carried back the olive branch across the waters of Flood. Noah knew that land would be hard to starboard. The great god Poseidon tugged gently at the reigns of his horse, the porpoise, Leviathan. The creature in response averted its gills to swim in the directed way and gyrated its flippers to augment [...]
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