"northwest" poems
the earth is curved - sure y’all knew that.
but to get to the Northwest,
Interstate 84
ain’t le route plus directe
nope curve north to Ontario,
wave to Bex as I cross over
London and Toronto, also can’t recall
which poet from Rochester hails,
or did they shuffle off to Buffalo?
Crossing Erie, Huron, and Michigan Great Lakes all,
brings to mind
my mother’s birthplace,
Last of the Mohicans,
and the three years I did in the Cleveland Penitentiary,
where sun was illegal and baseball was a pretend play
of cowboys and Indians
but by god, it made me
the penitent fella I am today
Look skyward to Montreal,
yes, there he is, the Leo Priest,
the baffled king,
blessing this poetic meet ‘n greet trip
with a smiling unsurprising
hallelujah
Apparently some US citizens still can traverse O Canada,
even if one forgot their passports,
and are not PNG’s (Persons Not so GREAT)
over Minneapolis shed a tear for Diane,
a poet- gone-missing, and wonder if you reader come from
St. Cloud, Fargo or Duluth, Bismarck or Aberdeen,
surely they still speak poetic English there
in a twangy metering methodology - well, message me asap
wow there really is a Saskatoon!
the pilot asks us to lean left in our seats
to help turn the plane
so we go to Portland and not to Vancouver...
me thinks he might be a touch Rockie Mountain High,
considering we are at 30 thousand something Imperial,
as he walks the main cabin with an oxygen mask and a
huuuuuge grin
see the distant Cascades
through a crack in the shuttered windows,
must be close to “the coast”
(as if, harrumph, there were but one)
ah, words in the clouds, ripe for the plucking
must be getting close to Oregon,
where poets grow on trees, woody words like ****
and log-float poems down the Columbia to the sea
gonna drink me some poets
under the table cause this
trip I ain’t no driving and I am already
“flying” ‘n scribing and arriving
on a high tide and a good wind
Jun 7, 2018
Jun 7, 2018 at 5:47 AM UTC
Push a day off to one side
drink in the citrus street light
lock arms with the night
Forty minutes, fifteen thoughts,
a hundred steps to next time
check off the prayers you've tried--
--on frozen fingers. Through
your wind-chapped lips let one more dangle
off your westbound life.
You've been here too long;
You got nothing to lose left,
quiet, spit it out
into the sky
Turn right.
Lay my 20's down to sleep
slept my way through a decade
now open pint glass eyes.
Pushing thirty, since I'm ten
I've been grasping at something--
something undefined
On frozen feet been walk-
-ing south-by-southwest, hands in pockets
clawing empty space.
Haven't got one dime
to toss into the water
but Northwest winds
frame my North-
east face.
Aug 31, 2013
Aug 31, 2013 at 6:34 PM UTC
If you're unclear about love,
return your heart to a place with fog
With clouds created from breathing in the cold during long uphill walks that end in a view of the water
Return the way daylight retreats to the grey embrace of the Pacific Northwest sky at the edge of winter, dissipates in all directions like ripples upon their misty bay
Return the way sunset colored leaves hanging in limbo fall back to Earth
Visions to pieces
Tears to eyes as condensation builds
against the glass of a coffeeshop window and distorts the view from outside and from within
Return the way rain lands on a broken sidewalk in Seattle,
not pouring so much as drifting
through what looks like a new morning
blurred with all the dark nights that came before.
Oct 29, 2018
Oct 29, 2018 at 12:51 AM UTC
Sleeping on the edge of a cliff
facing Northwest
I moved the sun
Now I can wake to its golden bloon
bathe me in the fresh air of daylight
Caressing the nine minute old streamline
Pulling it closer
Like time does to me
And I become ash
May 14, 2015
May 14, 2015 at 1:35 PM UTC
I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper
sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes,
new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind,
and the old things go, not one lasts.
3.5k
homage to Wallace Stevens
I - My Focus pistoned up the rise
and all at once, the Rockies -
silhouettes against the western skies.
II - On the road to Boulder
a pleated ridge crawls north
like a blue whale bound for the open sea.
III - Appalachia's intoxicating verdure
never fails to induce in us
a certain mellowing of the spirit.
IV - You 'conquered' my North Face, did you?
Why, I should skewer your arrogant ***
like a holiday lamb culled for the sacrifice.
V - Lewis and Clark looked west
surveying the Bitterroots' frigid expanse.
Farewell Northwest Passage!
VI - Pueblos stranded on Enchanted Mesa -
their rock stairs crumbled to the valley floor.
Should they dive to their death or starve?
VII –Touristas at Big Bend Park
wonder at its pastel window -
its romantic haze a toxic gift
from stacks across the Rio Grande.
VIII – The once mighty Ozarks humbled by age,
dwarfed by the youthful Rockies.
Listen up, youngsters, your time will come!
IX – We de-bussed to seize the dolomites
with our hyper-kinetic shutters.
Pausing for a draught of Italian air,
I felt the whack of an Alpine snowball.
X - Before Oregon's crater had its lake,
the mountain scorched the village below.
Today its azure waters preach only serenity.
XI – Looking down from Shissler peak
to the golden meadow below
where the elk herd calmly grazes.
XII – Do mists veil the Blue Ridge Mountains
or are there really no mountains at all -
only clouds decked out in mountain attire?
XIII – They say that peaks more steep than Everest
soar up from the ocean floor.
Who will scale their sunken heights?
May 28, 2010 – Boulder Colorado
Mar 19, 2014
Mar 19, 2014 at 12:18 AM UTC
moist moist moist moist MoiSt mOisT moIsT MOIST
now stop reading it, say it
moist
it's a weird word
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
a storm is coming
and I can smell it, feel it
MOIST
on my skin- slick
it wisps into my mouth
dirt patches aren't meant to be stoic
the storm approaches from the north, northwest
I am headed that way- north, northwest- approaching it
we have not yet converged but I can feel it
moist
it tastes of dry dirt
not local
nomadic
the clouds are foreshadowing --- foreboding
parting only to show more grey
we have yet to converge but I can feel it
the grey
the parting
the moistness
I am not yet there but I can feel it
wisping through me
I am not meant to be stoic
nomadic
the first d
r
o
p
refreshing
I can feel it. really feel it.
moist on my skin. weird.
the clouds are parting
lightening [effect] thunder [effect] convergence [effect]
I am the storm; its core
moist
grey
parting
wisping
can you feel me
approaching...
Jun 3, 2014
Jun 3, 2014 at 7:51 PM UTC
<•>
BusBusNYC (A Live Love Bus App)
•<>•
if you made it this far, so fare one,
be undressed with thyself and impressed as well,
for thou joints me in holy matrimony upon a living map
where our presences can meet
in virtual real time as if eye new what that meant
but that blue dot is where this body possessed can be located by the nearest satellite finger snaking down from the heavens to Cain mark my foreheads location,
just like on Game of Thrones
don't you desire me, or rather,
the knowledge of mine
whereabouts?
the who of me, that very useful information, can best be
seen moving crosstown on the M72,
which is a mythological bus for in twenty years eye never
seen it come, go, though all its stops clearly marked
see me moving in fits and spurts of bursts of movement,
leaping streets and avenues in a single
unbounded, unstoppable superbus leap
in a city of anonymity where all who walk it streets,
ride the tides of its buses,
all ask a single Job-like question,
regardless of age,
"I am desirable, do you want me?"
eye say the ayes have it,
no,
this is not a great poem
but!
this live bus map app is the dating site ever created by
geeky human cells
alll this virtual meeting possibly leading to coitus
with a stranger while Pandora serenades
with perfect synchronicity, playing and plying us with
Romance for a Violin and Orchestra in F Minor,
a combination musical **** work of
Dvorak-Mehta-Midori
this bus app is
the social media's most immediate,
so meet me on the bus
at Broadway and 86 Street
where our metro cards can be
merged and we will be recognized
as a legal couple(ing)
in the eyes of MTA,
a multi-state agency and be bound in bustrimony
(legally married when riding on a city bus, only)
jeez, a crazy poem, not just, not a good one
but a true tale from the one who rides the buses and only
alights and delights with regaling tales and tellings
of love sortie sorrow maybe tomorrow the busbusNYC
app wil apply itself a smidgen better and
let me love you even with
a good under the hood
bus poem
but!
someday we will,
this, thy poet,
who does desire youalone,
will hijack you and a NYC bus,
and visit the poets from India and
the Great Northwest
won't that be a fabulous poem!
Jul 17, 2017
Jul 17, 2017 at 6:16 PM UTC
What am I thinking about on these hot summer days
besides your cool, coy, cheerful gaze.
Oh, I'm moving forward but still pondering on
of your sparkle in the distant northwest horizon.
I'm thinking of those twinkles in your smile
that travel 1000s of fiber optic online miles.
I'm saddened to read your goodbye... and see you go
You, and your online profile... that is... this thoughtfulbeau.
I'll miss your Hi!, Hey!, Yah!, Yeah!... and your full smile
your patience for my replies... and willingness to stay online awhile.
I'll miss your attempts to banter... and our brief chats
your witty answers... and allergic opinion about cats.
Sigh. . . .
With your goodbye and turning off the dating light
I could choose to wallow in my own spite.
I feel the loss but not rejected or hurt
I'm filled with positive regard and a connective comfort.
Such as nectar turns into honey by a bee...
you sweetened my besotted feelings into endearing bounty.
So it feels right
knowing your heart
has found its light.
A local love
who hears your voice
respects your choice
and hopefully fits
like a warm glove.
So keep your lights bright
to keep each other warm
through the cool and comforting
Portland nights.
Peace out... ;o)
Jul 12, 2012
Jul 12, 2012 at 11:42 PM UTC
I am a Harbor
Moss-covered barnacles
govern my legs, and my back
is drenched in fog.
My wooden walkways creak,
and the wind makes me
groan with loneliness;
but life stirs underneath,
in waves.
Ships arrive at the worst hour,
full of regrets and suspicions,
and aches and envies,
and troubles and fears.
I welcome angry sailors,
the worst of all mankind,
to drink at my tavern,
and dangle their feet
off my docks, and
stare at the sea.
They look
east by southeast, north by northwest,
to home, where only
memories
return.
Some men are bustling airports;
they welcome millions a day,
and millions a night,
see them off to other skies
and do it over again.
But I am a jealous Harbor.
I keep my vessels with me forever.
I guard them with an icy peace.
And relish in the slap of the sea.
And bathe in the salt of the wind.
Feb 17, 2018
Feb 17, 2018 at 8:30 PM UTC
If the green waves in Siargao
and the blue swells in La Union
could meet somewhere and speak,
what would they talk about?
In what language, even?
Ilocano? Bisaya? Tagalog? Español?
Or perhaps the better question is;
what would they 𝘯𝘰𝘵 talk about?
If the waters of Siargao could introduce itself
to the northwest wind of La Union,
I think,
they would create waves more gigantic
than Bondi or Nazare.
And if the eastern Pacific wind of Siargao
kiss the West Philippine Sea beside La Union,
I believe,
they would cause tsunami bigger than Japan's.
The waves would be bigger than anywhere else,
together they would be the best.
Or they could be the worst.
And so God willed La Union in the northwest,
and Siargao further down south in Mindanao.
And so they could not speak, meet and kiss...
Jul 28, 2024
Jul 28, 2024 at 1:01 AM UTC
It felt so real.
Late, late @ night, blissful and boreal.
I thought it was a dream.
Sent from a sweet moonbeam.
I was deep in dreams at around 3.
It was a sweet sleep... just as you wished for me.
I felt a warm touch, like a soft whisper, slow across my cheek.
Not a straight line, but light, lofty, smooth and oblique.
A smile radiated to my right.
A light in my dark night.
It was you!
YOU!
Celeste!
My light on the horizon from the northwest.
It was you!
Brisk, fresh, strong with courage.
It was you!
Full of life and ready for your next voyage.
I absorbed your smile,
its radiance in the lunar cold.
I just felt
a waiting, a wanting
to behold.
I drifted back to sleep
at first into slumber.
Smiling
Breathing
Easing
Into a dream-like stupor.
I took your hand into mine
as I entered into sleep's dark fall.
I held you tight
to have your back
whenever you call.
I sought to receive you
through your celestial ray.
To be your sunshine
your warmth
your beau
on every day.
* * * * *
I reflect back on
my nights of empty dreams.
I held my thoughts,
as suspended in time,
to protect my heart,
and face my mean.
I sensed your presence and awoke to your signal
Your glow filled my dark room and tapped my soul.
Your distal touch tried its all
To awake me from my nocturnal stall.
It was your simple attention to your awakening it seemed
That simply tipped my trust
of feeling, of wanting,
for fate to create,
an existence
with a sweet moonbeam.
I now ease
into sweet sleep
and deep dreams
of my sweet moonbeam.
Mar 12, 2013
Mar 12, 2013 at 12:20 AM UTC
Finally a place to rest awhile
Smoked and frayed with a hazy smile
Focused on the next few miles
Towards the Great Northwest
Where I can finally rest
The aisles smell of cheap perfume
Like the long entrance to a tomb
Made of rose bushes in full bloom
Instead it's just the *****
Something I intend to use
The mountains still meditate
While I pay the motel rates
But I can't stay a minute late
I'll just skip the bill
Slip out the windowsill
I wish this road would never end
I feel like I'm back home again
But what's around this railroad bend?
Maybe I'll find a home
Or a love I've never known
Aug 18, 2015
Aug 18, 2015 at 11:44 PM UTC
MANY things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes, me-too, me-too.
The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gabble of Jones, Johnson, Smith.
All whose names take pages in the city directory.
I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.
Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow
Knew it-on the streets, in the postoffice,
On the cars, into the railroad station
Where the caller was calling, "All a-board,
All a-board for .. Blaa-blaa .. Blaa-blaa,
Blaa-blaa .. and all points northwest .. all a-board."
Here I took along my own hoosegow
And did business with my own thoughts.
Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence.
2.2k
POLAND, France, Judea ran in her veins,
Singing to Paris for bread, singing to Gotham in a fizz at the pop of a bottle's cork.
"Won't you come and play wiz me" she sang ... and "I just can't make my eyes behave."
"Higgeldy-Piggeldy," "Papa's Wife," "Follow Me" were plays.
Did she wash her feet in a tub of milk? Was a strand of pearls sneaked from her trunk? The newspapers asked.
Cigarettes, tulips, pacing horses, took her name.
Twenty years old ... thirty ... forty ...
Forty-five and the doctors fathom nothing, the doctors quarrel, the doctors use silver tubes feeding twenty-four quarts of blood into the veins, the respects of a prize-fighter, a cab driver.
And a little mouth moans: It is easy to die when they are dying so many grand deaths in France.
A voice, a shape, gone.
A baby bundle from Warsaw ... legs, torso, head ... on a hotel bed at The Savoy.
The white chiselings of flesh that flung themselves in somersaults, straddles, for packed houses:
A memory, a stage and footlights out, an electric sign on Broadway dark.
She belonged to somebody, nobody.
No one man owned her, no ten nor a thousand.
She belonged to many thousand men, lovers of the white chiseling of arms and shoulders, the ivory of a laugh, the bells of song.
Railroad brakemen taking trains across Nebraska prairies, lumbermen jaunting in pine and tamarack of the Northwest, stock ranchers in the middle west, mayors of southern cities
Say to their pals and wives now: I see by the papers Anna Held is dead.
2.1k
From the Northwest corner I caught you trying
to hide the outline of your ambush
in the outline of the moon.
But I spied you careless, ************
Fate is these next two moments
before I pump you full of death.
That middle moment is beyond me,
so bend your knee and confront the ****
***** Joke some call "free will."
And pretty please love me anyway.
We never could have changed places,
But I still hurt the same as you do.
I sweat and **** ashamed.
I hug my Mommy tightly,
trip,
stand up,
and still play to win the game.
May 17, 2013
May 17, 2013 at 1:41 AM UTC
Everyday I am born to gods relaying
lineage through winged messengers.
****** radiance enkindles immaculate retinas
in solar flares
and picturesque mornings' idolatry.
Tones entrancing, blue jays
or northwest mockingbirds,
their range of majestic differences
eluding attentive innocence,
elation ebbs to pain's perpetual flow,
streaming hypno-suggestive claims
finding me inexorable
to beliefs I've not died.
Impassioned voices usher me through,
by mid-day I've learned
to speak their tongues,
strange hisses
and twisting trebles
an attempted appeasement for
conforming to continued cyclical living,
instinct selection seeking final detention,
rebirth a trapped evolutionary trait.
Dreading each twilight,
coping through whichever maiden
may allow my musings
to conform to her form
for the night,
overlapping until I
am but a shadow
dominated by her presence,
her brilliance illuminating every scar
of the side perpetually left
to the dark,
enlightenment held
in the warmth of her touch
until she too
falls beneath the horizon.
Sun setting upon this silhouette
and whispering tomorrow
in stagnant sleep speak,
settling to sacrifice's sufficience.
I fear this rest.
Gleaning premise from barbaric genealogy
qualitated as residual spatial pandemic,
leaving this life cycle
reduced to just one more death.
Oct 21, 2012
Oct 21, 2012 at 9:17 PM UTC
the coast, it is just as you promised.
elusive--
the white stones shifting beneath my feet,
this wind. this rain,
the way the steely sky
trickles down to kiss the sea,
the indistinct rumors / hints / echoes of mountains
where the mist has slept with the trees.
vast, inconsolable:
the cliffs whisper to me
of their endless
journey to the horizon,
and captured in this fragrant
brushstroke of balsam and pine
I feel the damp northwest morning
soak into my skin,
and suddenly there is
an itching of feathers
and salt in my veins.
{evergreen, wild}
for a second,
I bite into the marine chaos
of these dancing whitecaps,
and it is just as you promised.
untamable.
pacific.
Feb 27, 2016
Feb 27, 2016 at 7:50 PM UTC
I DON'T blame the kettle drums-they are hungry.
And the snare drums-I know what they want-they are empty too.
And the harring booming bass drums-they are hungriest of all.. . .
The howling spears of the Northwest die down.
The lullabies of the Southwest get a chance, a mother song.
A cradle moon rides out of a torn hole in the ragbag top of the sky.
1.9k
CLOWNS DYINGFIVE circus clowns dying this year, morning newspapers told their lives, how each one horizontal in a last gesture of hands arranged by an undertaker, shook thousands into convulsions of laughter from behind rouge-red lips and powder-white face.
STEAMBOAT BILLWhen the boilers of the Robert E. Lee exploded, a steamboat winner of many races on the Mississippi went to the bottom of the river and never again saw the wharves of Natchez and New Orleans.
And a legend lives on that two gamblers were blown toward the sky and during their journey laid bets on which of the two would go higher and which would be first to set foot on the turf of the earth again.
FOOT AND MOUTH PLAGUEWhen the mysterious foot and mouth epidemic ravaged the cattle of Illinois, Mrs. Hector Smith wept bitterly over the government killing forty of her soft-eyed Jersey cows; through the newspapers she wept over her loss for millions of readers in the Great Northwest.
SEVENSThe lady who has had seven lawful husbands has written seven years for a famous newspaper telling how to find love and keep it: seven thousand hungry girls in the Mississippi Valley have read the instructions seven years and found neither illicit loves nor lawful husbands.
PROFITEERI who saw ten strong young men die anonymously, I who saw ten old mothers hand over their sons to the nation anonymously, I who saw ten thousand touch the sunlit silver finalities of undistinguished human glory-why do I sneeze sardonically at a bronze drinking fountain named after one who participated in the war vicariously and bought ten farms?
1.9k
Some nights I forget to sleep. Keeping secrets in my teeth.
I'm neck deep in thoughts of you.
Drowning in words.
Great Lake blues.
You can't dig up whats dead.
So from Huron out I'll bury you in my head.
Kept secrets in sheets of my bed.
Moved out to where roses are red.
Midwest
Northwest.
My compass is ever changing.
Im unsure I will ever settle.
The girl that always keeps you waiting.
Jun 9, 2015
Jun 9, 2015 at 3:20 AM UTC
A summer’s hand on bewildered torso chest,
her love: the best kept secret since their escape
to Brest that time in Spring,
Northwest France with its untamed waves lapping at the
hull of The Sea King in the harbour, half mast.
But with every try, harder than the last,
he did not respond to her see-through glass
appeals for an apology-
over two-hundred-and-seventy-minutes
wasted on the TGV back to Paris,
a holiday cut short by her wandering knees,
wide apart in another man’s apartment.
For money was passed in sweating palms
for a day’s encounter with her good looks and charms,
though the men never knew
about her man back at home,
designing the new tourist information
for a cheap weekend-stay in the heart of Rome.
What he bought to the marriage:
stability, safety, security and their baby.
What she bought to the marriage
mainly tears and daily anxiety.
But they both knew the complications
and the clauses of her contract,
agencies would delve deep into the contact’s history
to make sure they were legit,
but it never hid the fact that she had
intimate encounters in hotel honeymoon, champagne, new linen suites.
May 8, 2013
May 8, 2013 at 9:04 AM UTC
~
her tidal forces pull me in,
her halo soothes my soul within;
illuminating, ether's glow,
to my cheek her kisses blow;
lunar whispers draw me deep,
beckon softly, bid me sleep!
~
*post script.
tonight's moon, a waxing half, wears a halo full,
above a thin marine layer in my
Pacific Northwest sky.
difficult to photograph, yet so easy to love!*
Feb 17, 2016
Feb 17, 2016 at 1:50 AM UTC
I.
I wear the stern face of my ancestors,
the apron-clad Scandinavian matriarchs
who built me from rock and bone.
My husband, my good friends, my family, my colleagues
all affectionately name me "intimidating."
They say:
"You're the strong one."
"We'll send you to win the battle."
"They should have known not to cross you."
They name me fighter,
mouthpiece,
leader,
and stand like tin men in legions at my back.
I am obliged to march on;
I cannot remember a time
when my feet have rested.
My banner waves in the northwest wind
and I hold it, dutifully,
fearing its inevitable fall
as my arms shake.
II.
My arms
shake.
Wind camouflages
this constant trembling: the
fabric of my
flag
whips and ripples and any
falter
in its course
is blamed on the wind, but
veins shrink - skin
shrivels - muscles
shake - I am no Atlas,
my
breath slows
sharpens
stops -
III.
I am a dry sand-castle:
one touch will obliterate me.
I am the brittle leaf on concrete:
one shoe will shred me.
I am dandelion spores on a plain:
one gust will erase me.
IV.
In my chest beats the soft heart of my ancestors,
the ruddy-cheeked Scandinavian matriarchs
who built me from soft earth and azaleas.
So name me weakling,
broken-down,
dependent;
give voice to all of me.
Lift this banner,
and give rest to my weary shoulders.
Hold me in your arms
when I need to collapse.
V.
At times,
even a general must be carried by her soldiers.
Mar 31, 2015
Mar 31, 2015 at 11:10 PM UTC
My young, eager eyes lapped up the forest as fervently as they could.
Novelty was what they hungered for, as my axe did for ****** wood.
It was fresh. New.
The Pacific Northwest wasn't ready for us.
Wife and I moved out here a couple months ago with the promise we'd make a good, honest living out here.
Y’know, these trees are so beautiful… real shame we’ve gotta cut ‘em all down for a whole lot less than what we was promised.
Progress… for what?
I don't think I wanna do this anymore…
but I must.
Onto the next tree. Hope this one's easier to cut down.
Feb 5, 2025
Feb 5, 2025 at 7:51 PM UTC