Grace, Too-Excerpt

Below you will find a few poems from a collection I am putting together entitled Grace, Too.  Enjoy:

Poem for David Foster Wallace

I was sitting in the

Green lawn chair

You despise

With a Winston

Burning bright on my lip

And I thought about

What that meant

What he said

And why he chose

Blankness

When he had beauty

Pouring off of the

Tips of his fingers

Sad is a slight word

But fills me up

When I remember

Hanged men

 

Referring to the Last Time

Cold coffee waiting unrushed

as the day becomes wrecked evening.

The brief encounter was actually longer

                then the time allowed.

I clutched your lips with severity and

                cried your name in hopes of reverence returned.

                                *

Nothing came

                Nothing saw

                                No yellowed teeth

                                 bared like savages

                                 left untamed.

                                *

And yet, I’m hopeful,

                despite forever becoming only today,

for now, temporary.

                *

And your new blazing eyes

and your gaped mouth utters

fear as water.

Trickling at first, then rushing, then

falling away.

 

Rise and Shine and Dawdle

Mirrored image to placate

the warm weather dawn

in all its sanguine suffering.

 

The day opens as

the piano hammers fall

on the middle C.

And I dwell in mindful solitude

this morning among

the dimly lit ember.

                *

                Nothing to fear.

                                Nothing to doubt.

Without any loss of the numbered door.

                *

Breath

and

heavy lettered sounds

echoing off the parlor door.

 

Guessing Again

I share a cigarette with negativity.

Warm heat in the lungs, piercing,

grasping to air sacs last remembered

                in the December breeze when all was lost.

Merely not victorious, and heart bleeding

                like a crucifix.

I cannot know the why or the when,

                angrily ignorant like Dylan’s Mr. Jones.

                *

What did you say about that?

The cried feral depravity.

The open sored utterance

                unto me.

Respite from the dew addled dawn

                and awake to arriving.

 

Desire This

Existing on a shallow plain

                with no more aching for the lost pages,

I turn for a stargazer

lost among the furtive night.

Faulty headed yet emboldened by the

                free moon hung meekly

                *

Stories written under her

                become a hindrance to burial

                *

I sit anew atop the rusted chair and

breathe the air of gifts

                again and again.

So grateful of the remedy,

creating a gauze of lethargy and

                it’s growing twin apathy.

And I somehow can’t reconcile the

                growing necessity of it all.

                *

I read the book of pride.

Wrecked among the guilty,

                laughing aloud,

requiring a definition to compulsion.