My second poetry collection, A Bit Left of Straight Ahead, was published June 2024 by The Poetry Box. The poem “Beauty Sleeping” (below) is one of my faves, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

A Bit Left of Straight Ahead

From the Armchair Stuck in Sand Facing the Ocean

The armchair clad in black & green
diamond fabric leans back, lopsided legs
sunk into the mudflat, a seductive berth

aweather the wind, whose offspring
are the white horses running at the crest
of the waves. A bit left of straight ahead

a bird flies up & glides down, repeats
and repeats, drawing arcs across the sky
and calling all the time – a cry that is half

bird and half spirit, haunting & ecstatic,
an ancient cry with complex harmonies.
It can only be a curlew, named after

its “curl-e-e-u-u” sound, possibly
influenced by the Old French corliu,
“messenger”. This bird’s cry interweaves

with the cries of wind and water
and invites listening beyond sound
to the orphic opening of silence

& discovery of new names of all things
in the cosmos – better names, perhaps.

Beauty Sleeping

Submerged on a bed, bleary brain vacillates
in a hallucinatory haze, in, out, & around
a gallimaufry of garbled images & thoughts,

spiderwebbed with neon clichés snapping
on/off as well. Edit. Revise. Edit. Trim. Cut.
A blue pencil whirls in the sea (soup? Swirl?)

of wordswordswords. Was I a writer once?
Why are my dreams (dreams?) rife with words?
Semi-awake, harsh white walls surrounding,

patches glued to my skin, multicolored wires
snaking to shiny menacing machines:
numbers, graphs, lines arrhythmic

chorus of clicks and beeps. Struggling
against belts strapping me down, memory
lights up again: therapy sessions to grok

my wilding dreams and writer’s block.
Dr. Jacob Grimm is a Jungian trafficking
in archetypes, Morpheus and such—

not a Freudian with stupid-ass couch
and sexsexsex. During my 6th session,
lost in word-streams, abruptly a needle

appears and skin-pops my finger, drug
arriving in arteries, coursing & spreading
up toward my brain, tingling marking

the passage till I plunge into deep sleep.
Over days (weeks? Months?), am lorded
by the same Grimm, now a somnologist

documenting my dream-narratives in short
segments on his podcast. Ambien patches
speckle skin, lack of writing tools & paper

empowering him to steal my stories
& history, and publish them as his own.
I must sabotage this scheme and flee:

burst myself out of this sleep-state,
rein in all the wordsimages, herd
them into place, reclaim them as mine.

This is the beauty part.