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Poetry Poetry has been on the back burner lately, but I have read periodically at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans, and I have a poem in the Maple Leaf Rag 15th Anniversary Anthology, published in 1994 by Portals Press of New Orleans. Here are a couple of fairly recent poems.
Last Request
tattooed dead girl laid out naked in a glass coffin like Snow White or Lenin smooth white skin and cold blue ink no bullet holes, needle marks, or African viruses, it was just an old-fashioned plague of ennui her rock star boyfriend paid for it all and stood sipping martinis in a white linen suit the funeral home insisted on a g-string-- Tharp--Sondheimer, it was-- and a drunken drama critic joked about Twyla and Stephen and puns dancing in heaven on the Great White 2000 miles away
Snapshots Through A Screen Door
soft focus Sunday hair of the dog is silky as an Afgan's ear Japanese magnolia petals covering the rusted metal of a Plymouth that looks older than the Pilgrims grey blue sky colors of Miles Davis's palate at the birth of a cold war outsiders framed the era-- bebop, beats and action painting McCarthy booed, Alger hissed, and spies came in to the cool breeze through screen squares tickles my beard, leaves rattle across a patio littered with a century's ghosts and my own broken toys I press my cold nose to the grid a future archeologist will stretch from a stake in my heart, and take a long drink |