Stormy Shore [Free Verse]

a typhoon stalled offshore,
and dreary clings to this place

a miasma written in solid hours

when will clouds crack 
&
let the light in?

just one blue bolt of sky,
showing through a crevice?

my head is in fog,
and I can't hear 
my pounding heart
over the crashing of waves

Disintegration [Free Verse]

crack the tablets:
smash & shatter them
until they flutter into dust,
dust that's wisped into eddies
and sparkles in the creek bed
and is flushed out to sea
and is but a glittery trace
of what they once were.

Spontaneous Ideation [Free Verse]

ideas accelerate to the surface
like air bubbles

from whence they came,
i cannot say

they passed up from below
the lit sea

from the darkness 

maybe, like air bubbles,
they follow a mostly straight path,
but i cannot say for certain
what happens below the light

i catch only the vapor that drifts up
out of the popping bubbles

and it must be gathered quickly 
before it spreads on the wind,
becoming lukewarm nothing...

damn increasing entropy!

Monkey Forest [Free Verse]

in the monkey forest,
i think of 
Sun Wukong & Hanuman
as a macaque 
steals my sunglasses

Crash & Sizzle [Free Verse]

waves roll over 
with a soft crashing
white noise
that splays out into a sizzle
as foamy water
expands flatly over hot sand

until the sizzle is washed out
by the next wet crash

and then more sizzle

and then more crash

sizzle & crash
crash & sizzle

The Great Roundness [Free Verse]

As in Hokusai’s Great Wave,
I watch waves roll over,
before a volcanic cone.

Though these waves are
small & close,
they are perfectly rounded.

And though the distant volcano
looms large over the shore waves,
it has perfect symmetry.

I feel the roundness
&
simultaneous devastating power
of both elements at once.

Traveler Time [Free Verse]

I’m a traveler —
attached only to the place
tethered to my now.

That’s the only place
that exists in any real sense.

The past has no reality
in the present - not really.

It’s a ghost,
a dim and fuzzy figment.

Only thorns of the moment
can prick me.

Past disasters hold no sway,
&
future calamities are acts
of imagination.

Gone to Seed [Free Verse]

abandoned farmstead --
a blip in the flat-wide spaces
of the industrial-agro-manufactured prairie

the barn, dilapidated
the vehicles & implements, rusted

weeds growing from every crack

tall, blonde grass -
waving like ripe wheat -
stands in both front & back yards

something has died on the prairie
something is returning to dust & weed
something is lost

Morlock Memories [Free Verse]

I woke up rife 
with Morlock memories.

What a damnable time it was!

The days when I 
was not a boy,
and not a man --
nothing for which anyone
had a good word.

Maybe I was a shadow:
two-dimensional 
&
wonky in shape.

I was that which 
lived below:
below ground,
below the radar,
below comprehension.

Stampede [Free Verse]

Wildlife charges through the city
like the bulls of Pamplona,

a stampede of death 
from a river of life,

a river that flows turbulently,
crashing and slopping.

Nothing can falter before the stampede.
Each step must land solidly,
each step until one's last.