Poetry
My Flourescent Persona
February 2001, Narrative Verse
Having just returned from the grocery store, I am with my friends, entering the house from the north side. He begins passing as we unlatch the door, taking note of a florescent orange scrap which lies on the ground. Everybody knows him, he passes the house many times a day. He’s mostly referred to as the guy with the Barbie tucked into his football helmet or the guy that walks like this.
Today he is wearing the usual bright colors, layers of vividly striped shirts, on and wrapped around his waist where he fastens his pink bunny along with other items, trinkets of his personality. The left pant-leg of his faded blue jeans is securely pegged at the knee. Loose tennis shoes chase his feet and his selected headgear is a boxy, brandless, florescent-green cap over a paisley forest-green bandana disguised in more attached finds and an array of ballpoint pens wedged into the band of his swimming goggles. All this set off with a silver-laced smile.
Our eyes meet, though, as this makes our intentions vulnerable we quickly look back to our respective paths. I wonder his name… My friends are already heading downstairs toward the kitchen. I hold back, curious, peering out the small window on the door as it closes. His walk, confident, brisk with a hint of athleticism, exhibits a pause. He turns back toward the florescent orange scrap lying exposed, approaches and stands in observation for a moment. Decided, he reaches down, gathers and houses the treasure alongside his waist, as if he has found a piece of himself.
Temporal to the White Sea (As told by a critter to his kind)
October 2003, Blank Verse
The sea was blue for gravity, appeased,
Had pulled the blood of sky unto her depths,
With cold hand, tucking every tide between
The sands, as space calmly skipped asteroids
Across her breadth. In step with time, she took
A breath, nevertheless, quite hydrokinetic
And asymmetric—just this once. It’s said
Her shadows housed red fire—a vein between
The trenches and mountaintops, aloft, embraced
In nimbostratus—plentiful and racing
At a catastrophic alien pace.
The breeze, She held a sip of mist, permit a taste—
A tease of seasons, nonetheless, displaced—
Then hopped a hill to quench the groves who grew
As tides unto thus high. And as an eye
Who never winks, our clearing fathomed fate
At hand. Her lush grass grasped in fist of soil,
An offering to tempt the wave to land.
Now sea aside and trees asunder, close
We sit in history’s cold wake, the dark
Blue skyline silenced by a cumulous
Rouge silhouette with solar eclipse drawn
Upon—her lunar awning from folklore
And myth, eons beyond this campfire pit.
