Poems & Stories
Know Your Exits (Great White) [haicai]
Time don’t slip away It panics the blocked egress Of a burning room
O Hotel Leão [poema]
At this level The windows don’t open for anyone In the last hour or so, I’ve learned How to breathe Down in the carpeted fathoms Without the hindrance of a mask I have amused myself while swimming Between the tables Watching the blind fish In a world that knows no…
The Starry Doctrine [poema]
Upon an oaken knoll The seeker rests beside silent water When the ancient trope of flaming bush gathers not Attention enow, more direct lines to heaven Are called for and are so called down Those angels that call themselves holy And fixers of what has come to pass This Earth,…
Realization at the Hick’ry Pit [haicai]
The wide world is full of things That do not belong To me; what a great relief
The Persistence of Dust [poema]
Across the weary river, a ragged stand stands silent sentinel to the current turning backward, and shallows that grow by the day. Pilgrims, driven by craving, migrate from moribund districts, and fight their way up concrete streams to half-remembered city streets. Soon, all will gladly grant gold for a single…
Eulogy [poema]
Stop me if you’ve heard this one, my brother When we laid you to rest it was like watching a library burn down Pouring out of our homes to bear witness It was beautiful at first Until we realized that all our stories Were going up in smoke I tried…
Nature’s Daughter [poema]
She wears the movement of stars Around her neck and beads Of luminous earth fashioned By her own hand She speaks of autumn and how the beast Should not be made to stand down In green pastures awaiting The huntsman’s breath hot Against its leather scruff Enough’s enough She says,…
Self-Diagnosis of the Inevitable Outcome of a Preexisting Condition [ku]
Your cleverness will kill you.
Love is a Hungry Gryphon [poema]
Reading Bukowski in the Laundromat, I flash that it’s been 20 years since the night I worried Love is a Dog From Hell in an obscenely bright emergency waiting room. We had all been up for days and I still remember the long looks from the late shift orderlies. “No,…
The Information Age [poema]
Doggerel pervades As data on the screen Streak like abstract raindrops A flat approximation Of the raging storm outside Amused by our own reflection We chirrup our organs And mouth blackboard profanities Deliberately designed to distract The passive population It’s time to conjure the critic! A single dissonant note Conspires…
The Devil’s Workshop [poema]
In the absence of the spirit A dusty crucifix hangs And throws its shadow unnoticed Across the shifting images On the wall In the absence of the sacred Profanities amass And we, the fallen, bow down In numbed subscription At the altar As pale enlightenment plays Upon our faces of…
O Capitão [poema]
We wait and watch as course changes are wrought The past is past and now begins to fade This is what we called down and what we sought Upon the new man’s head we have all laid Hopes and dreams of the way we want to be Having wrested control…
The Novice [poema]
Tell me old conjurer Where in your spherical Studies and vague philosophies Is explained the complex movement Of a woman? What math applies To the mysteries of a silken thigh? Each a taut universe to be pondered Do any of your dusty volumes open As willingly As the lowliest weed…
Arcata Spring [poema]
Strange quiet the hustled mad City traffics are replaced ramble-shackle clankings of old American trucks on muddy tracks ghost bangings of lumber trains in the silver silent background and growing things rising so fast you can almost hear them greening stretching so hard they’re likely to split wide open and…
Truant [poema]
I awoke at my contracted hour. I’m a union man, after all. Checking the weather and my resolve, I threw a spanner into the gears of the day still lurching to life; and went back to my bed. I realize that it takes more than that to kill the machine,…
Vinyl Hashshashin [poema]
An overturned water glass catches white Smoke from the prick of a pin driven through The thick cardboard of an album cover Any old Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Or BÖC will do—Hurry! Hurry! It’s burning and you don’t want to waste it Hours spent stalking the used bins for gold…
Electricity’s Ghost [poema]
Where were you when the lines went down? Errant energies linger Like perfume gone rogue In the eddies of the places you have passed And me with my feet In a bucket of saltwater Is there anything more conductive? I’ve taken your dead poetry And built myself a dim fire…
Out on the Serpentine [poema]
I walk the serpentine Path where dust settles Late and yellowjackets prey On bones left standing in The middle of the road I walk the ages Past where Gypsies camp Back in the pale shadows Of summer slowly turning to The harvest downwind I walk beside you Now and do…
Pendulum Flashing [poema]
You and I Wander Telegraph Looking for frankincense And myth While the homeless man six doors Down Shakes a cup of coins (silver against tin) To the secret pulse (the jingle of bells) Six doors down (the taste of copper) In the focused heat of autumn We both know A…
Failure to Appear [poema]
Wednesday, the Sun forgot to come out As two million acres goes up in flames Smoke scatters the wavelengths of blue light From Plumas and Butte, suspended in the fog The ghosts of Berry Creek and Feather Falls Hang foreboding in a persimmon-colored sky
History Lesson [poema]
In this narrow valley We are surrounded Smokestacks stand like Indians An assembly of whisperers Their stories stated and immediately stolen Taken by the relentless wind Through the heart of it The lifeblood of the land Runs out westward to mingle Once again with Mother Ocean To be subsumed To be…
Heebie Jeebies [haicai]
I don’t hear voices But sometimes when it’s quiet I hear faint swing jazz A radio plays Benny Goodman and Chick Webb In another room A haunting refrain A particular madness I don’t hear voices Photo/Ray Larsen
The Inexorable March [ficção]
Jerome Michael Gonçalo parked his beater Toyota pick-up in the Vallejo Ferry Terminal garage, made the sign of the cross, and hustled off to the kiosk to pay. He always chuckled to himself when the machine asked how many days you wanted to stay; as if he would ever leave…
The Path to Carson Falls [poema]
I turned off the fire road Where I saw two foxes cavorting Among the chaparral and metamorphic rocks Slipping on schist I dropped Into the green, grey, and remaining garnet And heard the canyon breathing Countless hidden feeder creeks singing Along with naked aspens and pines in their breezes In…
The Brautigan Question [poema]
Careened on the hand-me-down couch Slowly sinking into a misshapen beachhead of cushions I was reading a slim volume of early writings of a dead poet When my wife came into the room asking, “How does it feel to wash your balls with a city?” Well now, that’s a question…
The Message [poema]
Tuesday morning the rain stops. Underneath the swinging bridge, the creek was awake all night and now runs rampant. Cross to the parlor where cool hands have built a roaring welcome. After endless summer days spent steeped in light, oak-bound heat is now released and supplants the gray. On the…
Charges [poema]
I wandered back to the shop, gunpowder and cement dust in my hair, grabbed a cup of burnt coffee and listened to old Ben Greenwood jaw a while. He was tomcattin’ with some poor fool’s wife in Meridian, Mississippi, back in the tarpapered nights of roadhouses built on dirt levees.…
Asylum (Padrão dos Descobrimentos) [poema]
Even as children, we suspected our world was broken—as if our hometown had been lifted and dropped from a much higher place. Everyday during the long summers we explored the edges of the pieces—the spots where the pattern no longer matched up. Thirty years later, it’s harder to get up…
Rocket Science [poema]
We are not standing still We sail the slender edge of a sphere Spinning through space At a thousand miles an hour What if when we die our spirits are merely flung Like a stone into the sky? Like feathers from a hawk ascending Like fireworks marking an epoch ending…
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The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs
—Richard Brautigan
Only poetry isn’t shit.
—Roberto Bolaño
The tigers have found me and I don’t care.
—Charles Bukowski
Román Leão 