Petite Chanson de Démence
My father asks if Genji’s a girl or boy
over and over over family dinner.
It’s not his fault. He doesn’t mean to annoy
Audio
Poems Used to Rhyme
Poems used to rhyme.
In time, the couplets were dispensed.
Incensed, today’s poet rebels from rhyming schemes,
It seems. The writer, newly shedding the shackles of quatrains,
Refrains from even a modicum of lilt.
Cheap Guitar
I will fix up
her guitar now
she is dead,
now it is no
longer a symbol
for how I felt
every day since.
Passenger Deck
Now we are on the ferry we flew to drive to,
It’s enormous engines vibrating
Every molecule, spreading out,
A family of ducks getting out of the way.
Blue Fender Telecaster
There was a time
when it meant everything,
when distortion was important,
feedback held the world back,
delay delayed the inevitable.
What Is at the Heart of it Is a Voracious Clinging to What Is Called Love
I always gripped that thrill, that fuchsia carbonation, swarm of blush-colored
butterflies colonizing the gut, and I believed it meant something beyond
a temporary flush of feeling; it’s what I knew of theatre, of God.