"differentials" poems
~
dark early pre-dawn
body suspended between the-dark ochre earth tones of night,
and the teal pealing notes of warning of an impending morning,
signs aborning, me rising with urgency of the leaden half deaden,
torn from the bed casket to venture into a different kind of twi-lights,
nature demanding both intake and outtake, a restoration of balance
but first a bumbling wobbling, the body as carnival bumper car,
installing soon-to-be-bruising for later examination-exhumation,
lurching from handhold crevices in the walls like crazy cliff climbers,
my balance disturbed, eyes try tearing apart the sticky glue of night,
my sense of direction keeping me from free falling into green glass
edges of glass tables, barely, and not always, red cuts evidentiary
“my balance disturbed” words fresh formed, and a poem expulsion
required to balance the unjust scales of spirit soul and the body cage,
patch an negotiated agreement between warring cousins, just a
twenty four hour ceasefire to retrieve the wounded and the
corpses unfounded in the small copses of false shelter,
like my ancestors expelled from Spain, making escape to be
strangers in strange lands, or remain hidden in place neath disguises
of clothes of new poems, prayers for old and new gods
this new poem comes quick like a young man making first love,
for the poem has been written by thousands nights of practicing,
so ready for quick retrieving in a smattering of a few minutes,
expulsion expulsion
what a perfect verbiage to capture the night terrors, the differentials,
the procession path between what was and what will be,
when my balance restored and this poem’s completion installation
in the body of my work, as a nail disguised in the works of my body,
entering by command of the pitch black gods
May 21, 2019
May 21, 2019 at 8:42 AM UTC
Thursday is my night.
Both my sisters have dance class so I have the house to myself.
I have homework.
I have to take out the trash.
I have the most cheerful outlook I've had in weeks.
It seems a thousand pounds of sorrow
have just flown off my shoulders,
sprouting wings and going to pester someone else.
I took out the trash with a hop and a skip,
not even caring that I was still wearing shoes
(Mind you, I can't stand shoes).
As I spun in circles I "whoop"ed and "wee"ed
and the phrase,
"It's a great day to be alive"
leaped from my mouth,
spring boarding off my tongue and over my lips.
I returned to the empty house and kicked off my shoes.
I took a shower with the door open
and the lights on
(I normally keep them off).
I stood under scalding water,
burning away any residual sadness.
I returned to my room and found my spring pajamas.
Normally I shy from math,
hiding in history books
and chemistry worksheets,
but today I dove into the calculus questions,
pencil flying over differentials and derivatives.
Today was no different than any other day.
Except that today is Thursday.
My Thursday.
WHOOP!
Nov 14, 2013
Nov 14, 2013 at 6:32 PM UTC
Like (Chinese) brush strokes I shall find the point on which I’ll pivot turn
Differentials woven in as bristles spin
Ink across the surface although it appears as a two-dimensional space
It seeps further through capillaries reaching depths
Often forgotten
The infinite dimensions within the page
Made possible by the grace of a hand
Devoid of any fate
save the fate of ink is to be writ
the fate of paper is to be written on
save the fate of ink and paper are in
subjective hands
And now a bond emerges from this pair
In a dreamlike movement fact has come
To act and bind as brush binds ink and paper
Fiber Flesh Fluid Foam
A single stroke of inspiration turn
Inward and ‘round the perimeter
Of the page there sits an image of me
(Chinese) Character
Apr 9, 2013
Apr 9, 2013 at 12:13 PM UTC
On Tuesdays I dream of moon-soaked swims among bay-big moons
Silver saucered jellyfish that ripple through our hands
Wednesday nights are underground-
Straight whiskey at the Cantab beneath a canopy of Marlboros and Parliaments
(I’m imagining the cigarettes-
I’ve always romanticized death)
I only think of Sunfish on Thursdays,
Just a single sheet and us and the water
And the thought that we are propelled by more
Than the wind and less than physics.
Fridays are midnight walks through Central Square-
That tree on JFK by the metal gate,
The cab I chased after. Your jacket.
I awake early on Saturdays to your blue wall
And freshly made yerba, lectures on nonlinear differentials.
On Sundays we sleep late,
Wrapped in sub-letted sheets
Waiting for your lease to end before Sunday does.
The ground is gone on Mondays, the sidewalk on Sydney street has crumbled
I feel first-trimester-morning-sick
And the sky is dinosaur-ending dark, thick with resentment.
On Tuesdays I dream of moon-soaked swims among bay-big moons
Silver saucered jellyfish that ripple through our hands
Dec 10, 2013
Dec 10, 2013 at 8:52 PM UTC
She glances at me with a glimmer of lust, the person who lays with me in my bed.
She has approved the dance and we breathe the same air, the same hot and damp oxygen.
We share our thoughts within our created entity, the dance.
We share for a while then sleep for days. We order room service and eat the complimentary mints in peace and quiet.
Oh the thought of love.
Quite intoxicating.
Nov 21, 2014
Nov 21, 2014 at 4:07 AM UTC
~
for T.M.R.
~
*We find our poems in many different ways. Of late,
I keep finding inspiration in the public and private messages that many of you send to me, regarding poems I choose to publish here.
So I repeat my disclaimer,
"any message you send, can and will be used as a poem."*
~
instant recognition at levels so deep within,
what are the odds, given the enormous differentials,
that the kin in kindred, would blossom across two lives,
where the oppositional factoids are exceptional
as if seeded in the fertile soil of the blank spaces,
between each of our poem's words and verses,
there secreted for each other, but gleaming visible
for all to see and uncover, even join in,
uncovering semi-hidden insertions and assertions of affinity
I confess
she stands behind me ofttimes in my mind, silently,
suggesting, reflecting, critiquing a word choice,
a nuanced pressure upon the hand redirecting,
with infiltrating suggestions imaginary
oh wordy me, four stanzas excised,
abstracted from the memories contained within my fingertips,
this, an accolade to the pleasuring of humanizing mystery connectivity,
when she, in the depth of her stylized brevity,
captures more than I, after hours of exercised trying,
in the succinct excalibur of her comprehension
"We are an unstated understood"
Jan 13, 2017
Jan 13, 2017 at 5:40 PM UTC
Crouched in a bath
in a house in my hometown.
5AM and the moon's out.
Kevin hands me a rolled up bank note,
and tells me I'm innocent
all in one breath.
There's blood on my hands,
rolling down my wrist.
Big, fat, poppy teardrops
blooming like the cherry trees
in my university.
Home is a funny thing.
I'm not a cool kid.
Just a drugged up, loved up,
half pretty girl with a good brain.
Mad
after the wrong people
in love with every
broken soul.
I'm just chasing dreams
and welded differentials,
the car turns and screams.
One hand on the steering wheel
and one on my thigh -
can't you just need me for a weekend?
Can't you just
sigh your little promises
and chew my ear?
Apr 22, 2015
Apr 22, 2015 at 6:33 AM UTC
"A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance" – Robert Smithson
Not by drawing a glance,
but casting.
Imagine the studio. What
Molten materials, what
Molds needed?
Who models, and will they
Recognize their eyes, or
Is it their object reified –
The signifier or the referent
Denoted in this indexical
Congealing.
Shy, illicit, bold, flirtations, imperial,
The variations and series of directed looks,
Is this the content, or is the captured casting
The direction - just the path of pointing:
A laser beam, redone in spider web, then
done again as differentials of the air?
And what of the early work, the
Imperfections, who filed down the seams?
And would cracks in the mold shift
The glance askew, revealing
A pliers, a heater, a
Reader’s thought?
Dec 6, 2015
Dec 6, 2015 at 5:05 PM UTC
relax.
not-within me to compose 14 poems
about anyone, but do not test me,
for if there was such a person,
it would be
Timothy
now, not my place to over praise,
for this man hews his own road
among the thickets that separate
humans from each other, and let us
not forget, those thickest thickets
tween a man
and his God
he writes in a style imitative, of
some noteworthy bards, with
whom you might have some
passing Renaissance and Elizabethan
familiarity, the thought of which
attempting to do, frightens me to
my very soul, scored
but what ails me that this-dialogue,
tween an Englishman and a New Yorkah,
who have each a love of the commonality
of tongue, but with a perfume of idiom and
dictionary differentials, that just sweetens
each, my apple pie, and his, pie of,
mince
commenced in 2014, when he wrote to me with
insistence that I not throw in the proverbial
white towel of surrender, for my poetry seemed
to die on the vine, received with lemons and limes,
pleading with firm resistance to not give into
to this
impulse
so here we rest, with many details personal
exchanged, transversed over a great pond
dividing and I permit myself to reveal
but this, he is a much, far better human than
I could even dream of becoming
being
so here we are, 11~12 years on,
and he likes my poems too oft,
calling them better than the daily,
I do not receive the daily, but daily
thank our common God for his existence,
and we share in unison a single word
amen.
Sep 19, 2025
Sep 19, 2025 at 6:58 PM UTC
ill-will generated for all
can connect unlikely differentials
the mind exploiting equality
can measure shared intuition
Nov 4, 2020
Nov 4, 2020 at 7:45 PM UTC
adrift the sky wandering
of moistness sent to hover here
to shed her tears
as rain on
downwind believers
or satan's kin
it is all just
heat
and pressure
differentials
the clouds are
god in
a way
Feb 27, 2017
Feb 27, 2017 at 11:27 PM UTC