Noir

From the series, Japan Poems.

Screen black.

The sound of waves

lapping against the shore.

Fade in

to three police officers and an unshaved man

gathered around the empty boat

carried in by the sea.

The poem ends,

the movie begins,

a mystery seeking direction

and the right kind of detective.

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Strangers

From the series, Japan Poems.

We are all pretending

here.

Hoping not for the best

but for not the worst

to claim

unsettle

or overtake us.

The young girl

in the rented summer kimono

taking a selfie with the misty

Kyoto landscape in the background

the middle-aged man

filling up his empty water bottle

with the sacred water spouting

into the stone fountain

the man skipping the iron ladle

they put out to collect water

in favor of something his own

that he can hold and take with him

his own disposable source of holy

the throngs streaming to and fro

a hydra ravenous to devour

a culture’s prized offerings

while preserving through an inventory of photos

the memories of absorption

the hungry ghosts

never appear in the photos

only us

so we remain fooled

able to go on pretending

where emptiness glares the most

and the worst feared finds evasion through hope.

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Passage

From the series, Japan Poems.

If only in trespasses and glimmers,

if only

the passages within

possessed lasting value—

What is that thing,

at the edge of waking,

that thing

without agenda or the burden

of always moving freight?

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Forgotten Temple

From the series, Japan Poems.

Moss-carpeted

stone steps

leading up to

the forgotten temple,

fewer and fewer guests

paying their respects

to these hallowed grounds,

a song of stately decay,

of bones and overgrown grass,

a rusted bell tolling absence

to the fount of prevailing silence—

Do forgotten temples

die from loneliness

or find themselves ennobled

by the ants carrying the sun

on their backs,

the stones conceiving immaculate whispers,

the trees bending down

to eavesdrop on the worms

itching for rain—

what exactly

do we mean

by keeping company?

The quiet life teems

beyond the flagged limits

of loneliness

or its mortally wrought concessions.

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Moon River

From the series, Japan Poems.

To engage

the intimacy

of distance

one must attend

from within

the agency of absence

to sensual contact.

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Portrait in Red

From the series, Japan Poems.

In the hushed expectant stillness of red,

the wall waited for the day

it would no longer have to hold the girl back

or up, waited patiently for blue to pick up

where she left off to become the haughty moon

in the motherless sky.

Some curses last long, and longer still,

blurring boundaries bodiless to the touch—

the girl had had enough,

her infinity a troubling shell of itself,

a plaited trembling.

The girl’s secret assassins knew this well

and truces were out of the question.

In the smallest hours of waiting

to no end

the wall’s pressure

inevitably forced the girl

to break into a thousand small dark shrieking birds,

constituents of a maze now resolving itself,

with each bird bearing a piece of the girl’s lost name,

unlettered, fast-moving, placeless

in its origins

and spacious unbecoming.  

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Web

From the series, Japan Poems.

We, lucent beads of rain,

clinging indefinitely to a spider’s web—

the climate of ephemera.

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Cell

From the series, Japan Poems.

In the loneliness of night

she stares at her cell phone

thinking about her next customer

not thinking about them at all

numb

wondering about her high school friends

what they are doing right now

the ways in which they would judge her

the cold clear haunt

of who or what she had left behind

rising up as a ghost

possessed by glaring vacancies

motel signs advertising

occupancies for least tender

trysts with oblivion

the world burns without ever stopping

no one told her this

in the middle of almost wondering

about something new something different

she is interrupted by a man’s voice

asking how much.

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Process

One of my most sweetly savored pleasures: a freshly printed manuscript.
Completed at the Casa de Currier retreat (May 2023).

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Drama Notebook

Seven of my original children’s plays–The Shadow of Peter Pan, The Little Prince in Egypt, The Myth of Demeter and Persephone Revisited, Mythology Mash-Up, the Nutcracker in a Flash, Aesop Remixed, and Benchmark–are now available through Drama Notebook.
Drama Notebook is a leading resource of royalty-free plays for schools. Ideal for drama teachers, classroom teachers, after-school professionals, theatre companies, and parent volunteers worldwide.
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