The Man with His Back to the Room
Selected Poems 2000-2005

These poems, created over a six year period, speak to the personal & politcial turmoil & trauma of those times. The imagination bristles, the language / clear & uncompromised.

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She wears a scar

that curves from her lip across her cheek to her ear.
She was cut by a man who found her home &

when she smiles (which is rare) it rises like another mouth &
puckers like it would open & speak &

when she runs (which is often) her features tense & her new mouth glows like a wire – hot & powerful &

she wears one glass eye on a thong around her neck to see in the dark & a needle taped to her leg &

she flies a black flag with a man’s face at its center & has etched a red scar on its cheek & the number 6 between its eyes &

at the end of her street she’s painted a door in the eight foot wall & when she must, she opens it & runs through &

down the hill to the river & to the ship that carries her back
to the beginning.

A Dressing Gown

It may have once embraced the moist & perfumed skin of a Japanese Geisha as she plucked the strings of her Samisen & sang praises to her prince . . . It

may have served as the leisure robe of a dark-eyed Tahitian goddess as she tempted the passions of a lusty sailor from Lisbon or Marseilles . . . Its green

satin sheen may have once graced the long lean body of a fiery courtesan from Barcelona or Paris or Marrakech . . . &

who will know & who will come to tell.

Today it hangs in the privacy of my bedroom where my lover comes to treat me to her unique & eager style of love &

when she lets it slip Oh so slowly from her shapely shoulders it colors my dreams with its red & yellow peacocks & pheasants & soaring hawks &

as she straddles my mouth & treats my lips to her exposed sex I hear the peacocks scream & feel the hawk’s breath in my ear & it’s then

I roll her on her back & ride into the night remembering the light & tawny lovers of the earth & the dreams each has shared with each.

This Is A Story Someone Is Trying To Remember

If I can,

I will tell you of the deer dying in the yard & starved pullets
that wander in circles in the snow &

how I need to find the place they scattered my father’s bones & to hear my mother’s final words.

If I ever can,

I will tell you again of my need to caress my first wife & not be thinking, ‘Would Gloria take me back as I was.’

When I remember,

I might tell you volumes of lies that disguise faces & florid afternoons with wine & sesame cakes & visits from . . . but

chances are slim & the train will leave soon & before I go I wish you well &

warn you of the blizzard that will come in the night (as it will) & the family that eroded as some do &

the marriage that was doomed & the evil that kids do to one another &

if you remember to tell this story as it was told,

I will send you a letter with a number & a key & when you find what
you are looking for

maybe you will remember me.