Category Archives: free prose

The Purge

I want to burn it all
The filth. The scum.
The self absorbed.
The haughty. The vain.
The rich. The sin.

The Ice Beneath

Dawn tipped ice and snow bunches up
Drifts over and across, freezing in place
Like the way dust finds the sexy curves
Of history eventually finding settlement

Beginning to Fly

The sky is cold winter
Wyoming wind wailing
Nestled in the purple
Choking vacuum of forever

Song O’ The Willamette

Seek ye sounds and hear the collective bugle calls!
O’ osprey n’ lumbering locomotive bawls
Hear its honking trombone plunger muted feature
Garbled warble like the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher

Galileo

Like all the famous
astronauts and astronomers
who spent days
peering at the heavens
I’ve stared too long at the stars
orbiting inside your baby blues
to no longer deny that God exists

The Drought of ’22

The body of missing teen found plastered over headlines
Barely mentioned, the lake and its 500 year low waterline

A society that buries itself in fantasy buying virtual land
Will eventually realize that our bodies cannot drink sand

Prosopagnosia

Night and day’s tied faces to the plainly hidden
Double helical wrapped Christmas morning gifts
Opened up like halos when street lamps kick in

A Love Letter To A Chameleon

Lets revel in this shared Bodhi
Dance forth with wine
And pull the moon
Down over our cheeks

If I Was The Planet Mars

If I was the planet Mars
I’d break free from the Sun’s hold
And escape into the dark cold
Forge a path into the vast black
and never, ever, ever come back

This Muddy Wake

Soon I’ll molt off my sun dried summer skin
And ditch the campfire and beer songs
To a cowboy’s goodbye, a wink and a smile
Knelling his shiny bell and his trusty steed
A sequin stitched requiem fallen fallow
Of Fall’s fraying executioner’s dark hood

Song Of Fawns

Stained holy the color
A throne for august queen
This vale of hearth
My elegant womb

The Yawper and the Mute

Niches determined by force
Like the gravity of breathing
And the sounds you make
when you dream away from me
Our hand clasped curious souls
crawl from their human cages
tucked under cotton bed sheets

My Town

I’m an erect middle finger to the puppeteer
In valleys full of folks sick of California
Doing their damnedest to make California here

Re: Redrum

A carnival of meats
Creaky carousels of subjugation
of the tortured and sentient
Wide eyed and scared
Naked and bleeding
Braised and bruised
Animal corpses splayed
On dinner plates

Solvitur Ambulando

This is my journey
To this goddamn place
I pace just behind the edge
Or at least what’s left of me
This, my purgatory
My paradox
My gathering
My reckoning

The Staggering Marionette

If my poems had lips they would hide in your pout like secret honey
A whispered cache of melody dripping away in a sea of awkward noise

Men At Work

Curse the tailors
For theirs are the blindfolds and the mask of truth
Curse the steelworkers
For theirs are the bullets and barbwire

Born Shy

I live on the wrong glassy frosted frame side
Of a Norman Rockwell doctor visit painting
And the museum security staff roping it off

Undetonated

Rubbing my sleepy eyes
Peering past them
in total disbelief
Like a half asleep
scared latchkey kid
whose hometown
just burned down

Island Of Misfit Kids

Dead baby sparrows and rotting deer
carcasses never bothered me before
Now I want to crawl between my knees
like they taught us when the bomb dropped
I just want to sew up this split atom