DAILY PHOTO: A Beach Near Bokonbayevo

Taken in Kyrgyzstan in the summer of 2019

POEM: White Light

blinding white light,
followed by:
ice cream brain freeze —

above
&
between the eyes

like a red-hot poker
boring toward the pineal gland

some reveled in that feeling

others thought they were test driving hell

but whatever else it may have been —
IT WAS.

DAILY PHOTO: Manipuri Landscapes

Taken at Loktak Lake in May of 2017

Hibernation’s End Haiku

yellow light
of the setting sun
warms high branches


city unlocked,
birds and beasts return
to the background


crow perches
on a cast iron railing —
watching


wary people —
spring-thawed hibernators
rejoin world


bright flowers
bloomed, lived, and died
in my absence

DAILY PHOTO: Inside the Glass House

Taken in January of 2014 at Lal Bagh Botanical Gardens

POEM: Dull Boy

i’ve got no time for silent shouts

they take too long to vibrate my bones,
and i’m not sure that Time even exists —
maybe in the sense that i exist,
but not in any REAL sense

 

mystical snapping fingers
keep slapping me up against the NOW
and it hurts in the incandescent filament of my soul —
the part that precariously wiggles,
under constant threat of sizzling out–

 

and — in doing so — would leave me a dull boy

DAILY PHOTO: Flint River

Taken on the Flint River, near Albany, Georgia in 2012-ish

POEM: Scenes from a Park Bench

In days before hell swallowed,

I’d sit on a bench reading news,

and watching how lead ducks followed

while marching down in ones and twos.


They went into shallow water —

floating time bombs, drifting slowly,

wishing they hadn’t sons or daughters

to die among creatures lowly.


“The end is nigh! The END is nigh!”

called a junky from yonder shore.

He was twisted and floating high,

and had too much of being more.


But now my window sits broken.

The land is flattened as my mind.

Moving lips tell not what’s spoken

from a vantage point wedged behind…

DAILY PHOTO: Roots, North Bay Island

Taken in December of 2018 on North Bay Island

 

Literally: the Dumbest Poem Ever

He held half-baked ideas in
his twice-baked brain.

He’d grab his umbrella when they
shouted, “Make it rain!”

–the umbrella he should have left for a
friend stuck home under the weather.

But his glasses were bent out of shape, and
he was hell-bent for leather

So, he couldn’t find his coat, nor gloves,
nor ass-less chaps.

And, thus, was running better late
than never — perhaps.

He couldn’t afford to miss the boat
that had sailed, my friend.

He needed his job, ’cause a penny
earned was one he’d spend.

When told he was skating on thin ice,
he maxxed out the AC.

All his blessings were disguised too
well for him to see.

He’d thought he was okay when told
he had stiff competition.

–the nuns taught him to fix that with six
Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition.

But they said his co-workers were
really on the ball.

He’d have gotten a Pilates chair,
but was afraid to fall.

When he heard the new guy was up-and-coming,
he got up and left.

He wanted to be thick as thieves so he
went out for a supply closet theft.