Things change over the years. We grow up and away from childhood and any abuse endured therein. If we’re lucky, we one day come to realize that we now live in a different timeline, one where those traumas are but dreamlike memories only half recalled.
timelines
The ephemerality of life and self has been a subject of personal reflection for as long as I can remember. This has given rise to the occasional abstract poem, such as this one.
Dis-integration
Wrote this while sitting in a Starbucks in the Portland area. A woman sat across from me with her infant child, and I found myself moved by the way she interacted with him—and reflective of the disparity between that infant’s experience and my own.
The Mother
This poem, my 13th hybridanelle, attempts to depict and convey one of the ways I look at ’being’, what a being is, and how it is connected with its self and other beings. The title is Latin for “mind song” or “psychic melody”.
Anima Cantus
Publication History:
Art Arena (web-based) — November 2005
For the unity of marriage I used Katrina as the metaphor for life’s struggles. And for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina I used matrimony as a metaphor for unity. This is my 12th hybridanelle poem.
Matrimony
The night; the wilderness; a stream. Here silence takes on new meaning, and it includes a movement of sound. Here stillness absorbs new significance, and it involves touch and motion.
Halflight
Publication History:
The Alchemy Post (web-based) — November 2005
Within my mind there has always been the nagging notion that maybe we are not actually what we think ourselves to be. That all of our experiences are manifest, projected, from powerful minds that reach out into the void of space to touch one another and interact. I talk of stars, the stars that pepper the night, the endless billions of stars.
Starscape
Publication History:
Tales of the Talisman — September 2006
We are stardust, the stuff of stars. So everything we experience is star stuff. Our feelings, our hopes, our dreams, our pains, our losses, our deepest sorrows—All stardust. Even infections and malignant growths are the stuff of stars. Everything is rolled up in the same karmic stream of coming and going.
Stardust
The meaning of our existence here on this little ball of blue, green, and brown has been shaped by the birth and death of ancient suns. As we author our brief existence, etched on the papyrus of our world’s surface, we borrow from long established texts—The text of suns long ago extinguished; the text of nebulae rippled in darkness; the text of dust and gas thrown through the void by the blinding glare of a newborn gaze on the cosmos. This is the intertext of our existence, and one day, countless ages from now, some new world adrift in the darkness will spawn sentience, and somewhere therein we will be, silently lending shape to its nascent subtexts.
The Intertext
Publication History:
The Alchemy Post (web-based) — November 2005
Written for Mahmud Kianush, a poet from Iran who used a couple of my ghazals in part of a BBC radio series covering the history and evolution of the Persian ghazal. It was a 12 or 13 part series, broadcast in Persian, and my ghazals were included toward the end as examples of how the ghazal form had found its way into other cultures and languages.
Having my work with the ghazal recognized by an Iranian scholar in this manner meant a lot to me. Thus was I moved to write and dedicate this ghazal to him. Most of the imagery is derived from his book of poems, Of Birds and Men, published in 2004 by The Rockingham Press.
Stardrift
Publication History:
Art Arena (web-based) — July 2005
The Ghazal Page (web-based) — April 2006
I found myself writing this after dreaming about an encounter with my father’s ghost, I spent that day reflecting on his suicide—when I was ten—and its far reaching impact on my life.
Father
