Poems published in The Dance of the Peacock

 My poems appear in The Dance of the Peacock (2013):

CLAY DREAMS

They make my face
ugly in my own sight
what shall I see in the mirror?

there is no beauty
or holiness left
in the naked nation:

the streams flow dark
and the hinges of doors moan
politics of corruption

I weep for its names
and the faces they deface
with clay dreams



DEAD OR ALIVE

My shrinking body
even if I donate
what's there for research?

devil in the spine
abusing tongue in sleep
or bleeding anus

defy all prayers
on bed or in temple--
the same heresy

oozing and stinking
onanist excursion
dead or alive


 I CAN SURVIVE

I've outlived
the winter's allergies
and depressing rains
in a human zoo

I can live
my retirement too
without pension and medicare:

the wheelchair doesn't frighten
I can live

uncared and unknown
survive broken home
the numbness of the arms
the pain in the neck
and inflation too

VULGARITY

What is there to relish in heaven
if the vulgarity of relationship haunts
even after retiring from earth?

the loose threads of yearning criss-cross memory
I can still feel the river's twisted  flow
toward lower reaches, exhausted and stripteased

the nudity of moon and stars is beyond touch
who cares I evolve or end like them
suspended from a plane I can hardly reach?


LIBERATION

Away from home in academics
sex philosophy and religion
I've been skeptic about all these years
revels of hell in lost memories

couldn't be a new dialect for spring
turn nude with refreshing orgasm

I still wander in my mind with fire
but no heat or light, sterile emotion
routs the spirit to live making
all presences dark and absence

fears are no bread from heaven
nor unfilled emptiness any sky

yet the eagle flies with wide eyes
nose opened to stinking patches
the mud- and ghostscapes that yield
mandate for dreams wrapped in nightmares:

I live preying for liberation
and decay with divinity

Published from: Hidden Book Press, 109 Bayshore Road, Brighton,  Ontario,  Canada,  K0K 1H0

www.HiddenBrookPress.com