Author Archives: presssendpoetry

Author and editor for Press Send Poetry. Marketing for Barcoding, Inc. #Baltimore #Poet

to Alexi Murdoch (breathe)

just home from DC, event at the National Press Club (very cool) and a great lunch with a publishing friend. pleasant day to be sure! listened to lots of Alexi Murdoch in the car and was hit by this… scribbled it while my knee did the driving (sorry drivers around me!!) and here it is (song link is below)~

to Alexi Murdoch (breathe)

sitting cross-legged
Siddhartha I am
in that ancient form
practicing
letting all in my cells
escape in a steady
stream, imagining your voice
deep and beautiful
in that ancient chant
letting the sound of the song
sink me completely down
until you compel my face
to break above

and my eyes open wide
as the fresh air
rushes in.

http://popup.lala.com/popup/504684642182812403

she is a child with sticky fingers

She ran away from home
off from the one brown bench and making friends
with the blue heron with silver wings.

Her sticky fingers
ran skipping through raw and naked waves
during hurricane Floyd’s slip and slide.
Sliced air in spirals swirling
while smoking opium in a
red wig and rainbow Mardi Gras dress
with her new friends,
and the Allman brothers.

Again and again, she licked and
returned for seconds,
loving that manic dancing frantic excitement

almost as much as
the crushing low.

we leave the ones we love cause it’s easier

you never went to visit or
say goodbye.

instead you were walking alone amidst white birch
that looked silhouette black as the sun was setting
and your teeth were chattering. you were blind when you fell.

was it the memories or the premonitions that burned
your corneas and left your eye sockets full of ash?

you feel the dirt piling up under your fingernails
as you dig a place to lay to rest.

hit by a bus on Eastern Ave.

the girl snuffed ink
freshly printed and pressed from every
corner paper and fliers and stickers
on lampposts and street signs.

she stumbled Eastern in a haze
ink sinking into the grooves
of her fingerprints and pupils
and never looking
fell to her knees while her nose
smelled deep the black asphalt.

in floral housedress
an old woman watched
while one wrinkled hand
patted lightly grey hair
matted on that one same side.

on unemployment

I am the cold rain drop sliding down the window
Sliding into my chair with a defeated sigh

Looking at the phone Looking at the phone Looking at the phone

The rain drops make the asphalt jump alive the rain
Pours so hard it makes the world one large gray cloud
The rain only has one way it can go
straight down I tend to follow

Waiting on the call Waiting on the call Waiting on the call

untitled (Alan S.)

Alan, when I should have been crying about you,
I wasn’t. It was suddenly my grandmother’s funeral—
The church looked the same, that one hymn… oh I wept.
And it wasn’t that I didn’t feel the sadness of your death, Alan.
You were young and cheated. It was just
That all I heard and felt reminded me of her death.
All that surrounded me, suddenly,
Shuddered and quaked in my bones so that a flood—
Him, her, them— all those dead and gone came over me.
In that instant, I saw my friends, family,
at my funeral, and I witnessed them weeping. I realized they too
May be crying for someone else.

Twenty-six

Pen on paper. Sometimes I curse learning
those 26, curse that pen on paper.
If you say I’m a writer, I’ll slap you.
Just smelling that pen on paper
makes me queasy, makes my hands shake.
Don’t trust anyone claiming to write original.
Blame the alphabet, blame the ego that
all us opposable thumbs possess, just
don’t trust words on paper.
The narrator lies. The pen knows only one path.
It’s all been done before; there are only so many
combinations possible.

Upon Reading Annapurna

For some reason, I can’t stop reading Himalayan books, adventurous accounts of men and women who have conquered the highest highs on this planet. I needed to jot this down now~ hoping it will lead to a more full-fledged poem. let me know your thoughts!

Upon Reading Annapurna

somehow the ocean child in me
has been consumed by mountains
striking blue glacier passes
towering ice faces
impossible crevasses and
threats of avalanche
Annapurna, a beauty I’ll never know,
doesn’t whisper or whimper
Annapurna roars her mind’s will
imposes all in her frosted shadow
captures us blasphemous ocean fools
and lifts our flat horizon
straight up to the moon.