POEM: Below the Stone Dome

The stone dome
bubbled from the jungle
stands stern
like a knob of nothing.

The green growth
that girds that whole hump
is living, like 
some hallowed habitat --

filled full 
of all forms of flora,
with big bugs, and
 all the creepy creatures.   

POEM: Knee-Jerk Speciesism

Photo Source: Ken-ichi Ueda – 
https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/121 [via Wikipedia]
I glimpsed the red hourglass,
vibrating in a stone wall --
a Black Widow spider,
bouncing on a thin web
spun within the void
of an absent rock --
that gap forming the
 spider's recessed hide.

And instead of being happy
that the spider 
had found a fine shelter,
I worried that a child would
stick a careless mitt 
deep into that wall hole,
and be bitten on the hand.

In retrospect,
this seems so unfair 
to the spider.

POEM: A Salty Tale of Blue Skies

The culling ships came, and
brought us deep, blue skies.

Those who never saw them
could not have suspected
that the fast, mad machines
were about to crash hard,
as if on rocky shores,
and no one would be left
to tell our salty tale -
except those azure skies.

POEM: The Power of That Which Bumps in the Night

The last lamp out
dips the room into darkness
[sudden darkness]
and in the nothingness,
before vague shapes form,
a clunking sound triggers the
stab of an adrenaline spike
into ones chest --
mainlined frisson, or fright:

the heart thumps,
the chest cinches,
the stomach lurches,
breath is sipped spastically,
and an involuntary noise escapes 
from some unnamed place within.

The power of strange and startling 
thuds and whumps 
has fueled many a storybook, 
but though the mystery
is rarely solved,
we get over it soon enough. 

POEM: Lighthouse Keeper

The lonely lighthouse keeper,
peering through a deep-set but narrow window
at waves smashing onto the rocky shore,
spouting upwards in a fanned geyser.

So much depends 
upon his maintenance of momentum,

but the better things go,
the more dreadfully boring is life,

and when things go poorly,
there are russian roulette
odds of tragedy.

Like life on a mountain,
but when someone crashes 
into the mountainside,
the mountain-man
is an unlikely participant
in the tragedy.  

POEM: Ripples & Stillness

ripples expand
from some unseen center
where a fish feeds,
and when stillness returns
i welcome its short life

POEM: Starlight

I shambled out to watch 
the fine-fired light
of some bright but distant star.

The message in that moment
was old news -- 
more than ancient
& 
less than relevant,
yet it was
the only news
on offer. 

If one traced
that line of light
back towards its source,
one might find
the source no longer existed,
its last instant
recorded in the caboose passage
of light as it whizzed past. 

POEM: Cloud Life

i watch the drifting clouds
and my mind synchs to their speed
and i wonder whether i'm the cloud
or the cloud is me
and i know that i'm not moving
and yet i feel i am
and i know that i'm not weightless
and yet i feel i am
and i know i can't live aimlessly
and yet i feel i can