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Hi everyone, welcome to my site - a place of prose and poetry.

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Jo

Saturday, March 24, 2007

you - poem

what if there is no
place to go back to?

a sudden wall erected –
blocking past
and self.

all influences smashing up against it at a sprint – too fast
to pull up
and stop
lost
now

caught only as strangers
on the street –
a study of reactions, carefully observed,
yes,
observed as object,
yes

but never understood
never known
no comprehension

just a picture of a moment of a time you don’t
remember

but it’s not
you
it’s the man
that was

is

was

is




is there a core of you-ness?
or is that you only a web,
a connected span of memories
and shared conversations –

times spent with

times had with

times shared and loved with

love made with







now
the holes just open up and open up wider
and the who you were slips in
untouched
by any of it



they

can only remember a ghost –
the singing memory of a you shining in their minds

but a you blacked out to nothing
whispers silently in yours

there is no place to go back to


there is only now
and the next moment
and the
next
and
the
next

till somehow there are enough moments
accumulated
to make
a life


you
as
you
are

Shadows - a Sijo

Shadows proliferate, shaped large against that blue wall,
scrawled across that cracked pavement, graffitied into being –
tilting the world into a sudden darkness – only I can see.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

How the rhino - poem

Perhaps it’s an obsession –
if such a thing exists
in someone as ordinary as me.

Tucked under the skin, an irritation,
wearing wrinkles in, and folds,
the way the rhino got his skin,
with this grazed remembering
of then.

Nothing visible –
no presence marking the place
where it happened –
so that’s what went on,
yes, I see. It’s evident.


No

stained and rusted patch
of anything resembling hate,
no slimed unease, no surface-caustic spill
that burns and sizzles through
to deeper places.

No, just this mild re-appearing
from the past,

and me
not choosing
to ignore it.

Bohemian - poem

Evening. Cigar smoke.
Your arm around
my shoulders.

You’re talking about changing
the world –

but first I have
to see to the children

Bloodstones - poem

The gems rattle loose
from their settings

clattering onto the much too solid
ground –

vitreous fragments revealed
as truth

in splinters –
and now the glass-sharp
edges

slide
so cleanly
into flesh.