The poetry doesn't come easy lately
From the time you asked me why
In such a frustrated manner that I recoiled
It used to be so easy, you know
With the distance between us
Bridged by your crazy laugh
And my smug smile
Perhaps because poetry is not the words
But the emotions that mandate enjambments
And fill the spaces between the verses
The space is now too big
The lines too abruptly cut
That it ceases to become poetry
And it becomes emptiness.

Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
— Federico Garcia Lorca, “City That Does Not Sleep”


Sporting white top hats, the Sierra Nevada mountains
**** up against the new dawn's Andalusian sky, casting
craggy shadows across the quiet calles of Grenada.
Restlessly, the darkened city churns in its sleep.

Federico Garcia Lorca strums his yellow guitar,
tuning it to a cante jondos, a deep song of duende,
dark heart of flamenco and the bullfight and his own
fatalistic poems: moans of his inexorable execution

at Franco's hellish hands. Fascism fears the poet,
the ferocious oracle of duende, who rips out the
roots of authority, the dark clods of captivity, who
vows to dive underground, digesting bitter earth

like bullets from the firing squad. They shout, Victoria!
as Garcia Lorca's listless body slides along the bloodied wall.
Duende, he once told a lecture hall, haunts death's house.
It will not appear until it spies that fiercely angled roof.

                                        * * *

In the branches of the laurel tree
I saw two dark doves
— Federico Garcia Lorca, “Of the Dark Doves”


His mother bellows on the spirit's wind, over the hobbled
heads of the dead, in search of an inexpressible "new,"
the endless baptism of freshly created things, as Garcia Lorca
loved to lecture. Ending and refrain burn blood like glass.

Few mourners cast a spell over the public patrons gnawing
on his books, seeking some taste of destiny, identity, some
word of the eternal voice of Spain. I am no Spaniard, yet
I claim to be a poet. Garcia Lorca gifts me with his song.

Its maudlin melody marches up my spine, scorches
my eyes, which smolder under the noonday sun, spewing
ashes to ashes, igniting dust to dust. The dark memory
of the buried ruins of saddened Spain steadily seeps

through wilted wreaths tossed at Franco's feet. No
offering for the conqueror, they exude a sickly odor
of offal, of ordinary flesh rotting on shattered ribs.
Gunshot mixes with marrow, smoke fumigates the poem.

                                        * * *

No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.
I have said it before.
— Federico Garcia Lorca, “City That Does Not Sleep”


No one is sleeping, yet the world will not awaken.
The slain poet merits no notice. We bow our
heads in humiliation at the philistine ways
of savage, civilized societies. All cultural wealth

but poetry suffocates in its bed. Duende sends Garcia
Lorca’s poems soaring above feeling and desire,
above the consecration of form. How many enjambments
mire in dark waters? How many stanzas lay bricks

of marble and salt? Garcia Lorca sings of hemlock and
demons, of Socrates and Descartes. But the profane
choruses of drunken sailors shatter any hope for his
new poetic style. They reject all the sweet geometry

that maps the darkened heart of southern Spain, where
Moors and Gypsies set up camp, pulling sleights of hand
on gullible gamblers, assured that Andalusia knows no
other artifice than the machine-gun-fire flights of flamenco.

                                        * * *

In the branches of the laurel tree
I saw two naked doves
One was the other
and both were none
— Federico Garcia Lorca, “Of the Dark Doves”


Garcia Lorca lies on the floor to fence with the phantoms
of his future. His black boots shine in the saddened sun.
The fattened face of Franco appears: an anxious cry for
more water, for dousing naked doves in duende’s black pool.

Writers live and die like newly created roses. Aromas
rise from vast yearnings, inured to the penance of suffering.
Above duende's golden serpent, a crooked soldier salutes
the fruit of Fascism. Dawn's lemons dangle at the edge of time.

Only 19 years embody Garcia Lorca's high-strung calling.
An awkward teen at his writing desk, he scribbles notes
about his mellifluous malaise. Modernismo flourishes in the
shadow songs of caves. Dark doves coo. Duende never lies.

His mother wails, wrapped in her mantilla of Spanish black. Head
thrown back, heels clicking hard, she swirls against the fiery flanks
of flamenco. Prancing like an epic stallion, she nudges her anguished
son: asleep, asleep. Today, duende has entered the dark house of death.

[Log In]

typing...

This…
this digital mansion in which I nest
has leveled down to nearly nothing
but a constellation of pixels
if even at the oddest of hours
at times I lapse beneath monotonous clouds
of screens as well as enjambments of codes, but,
still I discover elements…
elements of eyes, lips, noses
a cheerless reminder of just how callous
a human is capable of being,
but, too often I forget that I’m an android
and now there is something dangerously wrong with my programming
the consequences of loving a human…

[Log Out]

Enginery creators
Create amare from plastic dolls and toys
Women turned girl
Man turned boy
(Hard to avoid)
Passing these kind daily!!!

Slathered in hateful jealously
Caressed in by hating

Hidden babies

Enjambments of traffic jam new era
Terror such the norm these days

Ennui is soo common,

They gam
Like dams overflooded
By falsehoods

Misunderstood seekers
Seeketh in all the wrong places

Guru's of pleasure and fame
Never to be remembered
Ever again!!!

within my retina, a woman
   sits cursive, writing in the flesh,
  words i could no longer parry.

preening through the brightness,
   its extensive turn, spanking the curve
  of the elbow room decrees

   - we are
         to each other
   and away
      we go
         arriving at unknown places -

  yet her
     multiple gestures array.

  woman
your full fathom's depth
      souses the traceless flame;
  trapeze from
      hate to
          love formless, crossing
paths limbless caught in the spar
     of enjambments

    our then aberration of lips
   sutures something bleeding
      profusely; this morning
   holds a torch passed on to
      your body's shade tossed
  out of nascent states:

     we are young
   yet never younger, chasing
    in circles enclosed in dome-hands.

I write for the unreliable reader, the one who reads what they want, whether they want and how they want
- not reliably reading though my eyes and carefully abiding with my well placed breaks in line, my enjambments, separation of themes into stanzas or even a subtle semicolon.

I write for you and entrust to you
my heartache, my headaches
my angst, my joy
my mess ups, my bust ups
my skewed views, my hard pews
my shouts, my sullen frowns
my walks, my sleep
my songs, my guffaws
my control, my dance
my destruction, my elevation
my blame, my late claims
my relish, my shame
my togetherness, my brokenness
my sleep-kicks, my daybreak
my jealousy, my generosity
my rewinds, my reruns
my hospital runs, my mother's hands
my triggers, my pretence
my pride, my bullies
my children, my memories
my past, my now
my decisions, my abdications
my loss, my child
my teen, my adult
my space, my confinement
my health, my ailment
my green, my red
my therapy, my surgery
my war, my peace
my time, my eternity
my kindness, my hate
my tea, my cider
my queuing, my waiting
my coming, my leaving
my life, my death
my ever after
- these are yours.
Just turn the page