The Country Club of walking death,
calls out across the ferns

The 1st hole starts with pain unmatched,
its traps to flame and burn

The 9th hole calls you back to life,
just to send you down again

The 14th hole, a dismal swamp,
your demons there within

The 18th hole where soul’s are judged,
double bogeyed with a six

The clubhouse dark, your blood trail marked
—devil carrying your sticks


                (Overbrook Golf Club: March, 2020)

Labels…
crutch for the unenlightened

Support system
for the crippled mind

(Villanova Pennsylvania: April, 2017)

Labels…
crutch for the unenlightened

Support system
for the crippled mind

(Villanova Pennsylvania: April, 2017)

Hiding in their basement caves,
the ‘journalists’ deride

The light of facts and truth cast dim,
a downward fatal slide

Where once out in the open,
clear vision far and wide

Credibility buries deep
—their fear a den of lies

(The New Room: February, 2021)

To not appease the critics,
success within our grasp

The charlatans of written words,
venom of the asp

They bury deep inside their dens,
ordained iconoclasts

Passing judgment, casting blame
—on what they fear might last

(To T.R.’s ‘Man In The Arena’ March, 2021)

I’m tired of people
slinging hash
   and calling it Haute Cuisine

  The Emperor naked
behind the mirror
where truth still reigns supreme

Waiting for accolades
pity more apt
so they again can void

Leaving their excrement
out on display
— only the rats to enjoy


(The New Room: March, 2024)

If the message complex,
the delivery simple

The meaning the magic,
the words zero-sum

(Dreamsleep: December, 2021)

My heart bled
and writing
was an open wound
As words
poured out
in hemorrhaged pleadings
No suture
or hemostat
clotting their flow
The nearer
the end
the harder it pumped
In gushing
pulsations of
finality  
Bleeding out
what time
— could never give back  

(Dreamsleep: February, 2025)

Without exception, throughout all time,
governments devolve

Aristocracy, the Philosopher King,
benign in his resolve

Timocracy, the city state,
landed and secure

The Oligarch, his army placed,
to rule in peace and war

Democracy, each voice to shout,
as chaos takes the reins

When Tyranny must force its hand
—as socialists have deigned

(Villanova Pennsylvania: September, 2020)

“You play words like an instrument”
someone once said
Each vowel as a whole note
to consonants wed

High praise from a seeker
deftly looking for more
New songs in the making
—words singing du jour

(The New Room: March, 2023)

The past and the future
fold into the present
Conceptually vacant
twice empty refrains
No before and no after
perpetually frozen
The ice of indenture
—this moment contains

(Dreamsleep: September, 2022)

Can nothingness exist
could existence be as nothing

Can something break from everything
—subtraction zero sum

(Villanova University: August, 2022)

Remembering
what you want to say
Forgetting
what you don’t
A writer’s choice
is zero sum
You will
until you won’t

Considering
that time well spent
Brings on
its just desserts
Consciousness
the poet’s form
Twice forward
— once reversed

(Dreamsleep: May, 2024)

No more

Mothballs and cedar assault my nose

The dust mites and stale air dry my throat

A wardrobe that is just that



The lion roars no more

Neutered and robbed of his fire

The last time the words were read



In the darkness of this cell I fear the witch no more

Drunk at her cauldron

Slurred words conjure no magic



Snow driven mountains of pure white

Have dissolved into a gray haze

Footprints like bread crumbs dissolved



My desperate escape blocked

Solid wood between me and salvation

My world made infinitely smaller

-          When the gateway to Narnia can no longer be imagined, the magic dies

(Trystan Colin Behm- April, 2024)

Freedom without question
Truth without doubt
Love without heartache
Hope without pain

Truth without question
Freedom without doubt
Light without darkness
— fault without blame

(Dreamsleep: April, 2024)

Never complain
never explain
Life on the margins
others sustain
Freeing both ends
caught in the middle
Releasing the truth
— solving the riddle

(To Cole Porter: September, 2025)

“If thou wouldst  
be my critic
Thou must
— wear my soul”

(Woodland Avenue Philadelphia: May, 1973)

Joni said…
“If I tell you what the song is about,
it won’t be about you anymore”

(Villanova Pennsylvania: March, 2020)
‘Watching Joni Mitchell On AXS’

Poets of convenience
reality to sway
A stain that lasts forever
excuses not parlayed

“Thou Shalt Not ****” long spoken
ancient law upon the land
Religious, secular, or more’ bound
the truth has one command

A billion screaming babies
by curettes scraped away
As smug self-righteous killers
demand to have their way

The pathway to eternity
lined with voices put to death
“Thou Shalt Not ****” their epitaph
—damning your last breath

(St. Josephs University: September, 1972)

Staring
into the essence
of what sunlight
often hides

Within
plain sight
the truth takes flight
— in nature’s great disguise

(The New Room: February, 2025)

No mountain more imposing
than an idea

No gun more deadly
than intent

No cruelty more powerful
than love

No lie more convincing
—than the truth

(Las Vegas Nevada: January, 2020)

We turn a deaf ear
as they live with the pain
of those who we cancel
with biting disdain

Unable to rise
above selfish intent
with opioid bias
our progeny bent

Pontification
colors the flow
young ears once thought distant
to reap what we sow

The world as we leave it
our tracks in the sand
forever to haunt us
—as children disband

(Radnor Pennsylvania: December, 2021)

Explosion / Implosion,
caught in the din

Forces once pushing,
now pull from within

The physicist cries,
as the mockingbird calls

To see past tomorrow,
today in freefall

A binary motion
of polar extremes

All consciousness split
—dark hole of my dreams

(Villanova Pennsylvania: September, 2019)

The vagaries within
truth and falsity …
are greater than
the differences between them

(Dreamsleep: February, 2023)

Perception
is the potion
where pudding
holds the proof

The details
get bedeviled
Martini’s
all Vermouth

A good girl
or a bad girl
the wind
can blow both ways

Looking right
or looking left
the truth
— not on display

(The New Room: May, 2025)

The riff smiled first,
as the raff smiled back

Each knowing the other,
the white from the black

“They’ll never accept us,”
they both would exclaim

“The ‘grays’ have the mantle,
defiled and profane”

(Dreamsleep: May, 2021)

Pushing hard
against the words
the order
disarrayed
The ultimate guest
the consummate stranger
so close
— so far away

(The New Room: December, 2024)

Married to correctness,
divorced from the ideal

The truth becomes enigma,
veracity to steal

Facts bury in self interest,
the cheaters run and hide

All trysts a fated exercise
—philandering with lies

(Villanova Pennsylvania: September, 2016)

Never about
what’s ‘right’

Only what’s ‘right’
—for you

(Villanova Pennsylvania: July, 2019)

When memory implodes
upon itself
All we have left
— is *****

(Dreamsleep: June, 2024)

Yesterday proves…
  “There is no science, to Political Science”

(Election Day: November 8, 2016)

Pieces of immortality,
tinctures of rhyme

Living inside the moment
—wholly sublime

(Dreamsleep: February, 2020)

What once held me captive,
now sets me free

My wanderlust blowing away

The clouds and horizon,
that buttressed my world

Meld, as the night into day

Those words never chosen,
survive on their own

Verses dry, all wings taking flight

What used to confound me,
present, future, and past

Joined as one—in a fusion of light

(Villanova Pennsylvania: October, 2019)

Thankful for the one,
the one who’s never asking
the one forever constant
the one who only gives

Appreciative of the one,
the one forever present
the one beyond all judgment
—the one whose heart bleeds free

(Dreamsleep: March, 2021)

It wasn’t fate
—it just was

(Dreamsleep: December, 2023)

-Only a Poet-
is envious of the dead

(Amtrak R5: June 2021)

You can’t fill your dry spots
out of a whisky bottle
Or chase away demons
with a ***** needle
Or change the future
pointing the finger of blame
The freedom within you
—the power to change

(The New Room: January, 2022)

Living in one
renting the other
Owning them both
then to discover
As owner I’m captive
the tenant is free
In debt to the banker
—remortgaging me

(The New Room: January, 2024)