POEM: What is loneliness? (November Poem-A-Day 13)

Posted 13 November, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry, Travel

Listen to this poem using the player above.

Poem #13 for the November Poem-A-Day challenge. Today’s prompt was to write a question-and-answer poem.

What is loneliness?

10:30 p.m.
34 degrees
corner of Western & Tryon
waiting for the #10 bus
with two drunks
& a dead phone battery

POEM: what we choose to remember

Posted 1 October, 2010 in My poems, Poetry, Travel

what we choose to remember

in the park on the hill
trees shade the monuments
to the dead, the killed

mottled sunlight hits the plumes
of a fountain, the breeze
carries mist down the hill
toward the center of the city

a man with twitching legs
smokes pot on a bench
in front of the courthouse

do this in memory of me

there’s a rainbow on the east side
of the fountain
I’m glad I don’t live here

Walt Franklin at Pine Hollow Arboretum

Posted 25 September, 2010 in Poetry, Random Musings, Travel

From 100925 Pine Hollow Arboretum

Here are photos from my trip to Pine Hollow Arboretum in Slingerlands, NY. I took a tour of the grounds and then heard Walt Franklin read his poetry and travelogues. What a wonderful afternoon (with a nice bike ride there and back, too). At the bottom of this post is a video of Walt reading an excerpt from one of his longer poems about trees.

POEM: Water Song

Posted 24 September, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry, Travel

Listen to this poem using the player above.

Another poem written on the Tennessee River in Chattanooga.

Water Song

how many lives have been lived along this water?
what was here before?
before the condos
before the artificial park
before the riverboats full of tourists
before riverfront revitalization
before speeding cars on one bridge
and Sunday strollers on the other
how many souls has this water collected?
what songs have been sung on its banks?
and if it’s quiet enough, can you still hear them?

POEM: On the Tennessee River

Posted 23 September, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry, Travel

Listen to this poem using the player above.

On the Tennessee River

woke up in a Manhattan hi-rise
going to bed a Tennessee riverboat
neither of them is home
home is a carousel horse
I can never quite grab on to
not these lightning strikes
or the rain on this river
home was our shared bed
the sound of little boys wrestling
it’s so quiet now, so very quiet
there are bridges on both sides of me
and I have nowhere to go on either one

POEM: Lights, Camera, Action!

Posted 18 September, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry, Travel

Listen to this poem using the player above.

Another poem written during my recent stay in Chattanooga, TN.

Lights, Camera, Action!

this town is like a Hollywood set
look behind the storefronts
the buildings that line Broad Street
there’s nothing there
the bricks rise to the skies
joggers clot the river bridge
but the heart has been cut out
Walter Cronkite once said
this was the dirtiest town in America
it’s cleaner now – wiped clean of its history
all the people shunted out to the pavement
paradise, never far from a strip mall
there are historical markers
on every downtown street
they are little more than headstones
marking empty graves, the city’s corpse
long ago merged with the soil
covered with the dust of razed landmarks
“Right where Starbucks is, this is where
your granddaddy built tank engines
to fight the Nazis.”

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