This Sunday July 28th at 1pm EDT (1700UTC) we’ll be having a Zoom event to celebrate the launch of Cadence: Life’s Poetic Rhythms and you’re invited. I’m looking forward to seeing my poetie friends on screen and hearing them read their contributions to this fine anthology. Click the link to sign up for the party ..read more

For those of you who do not follow Susi Bocks’ I Write Her site, first, you need to follow her, second, five of my short poems were featured there yesterday as part of The Short of It series. In hopes of getting you to click on the link, these are poems you can’t read anywhere else. Their titles are “Astrophilia”, “Attachments”, “Escape to the Kuiper Belt”, “First thing in the Morning” and “Love Sprouts in Unlikely Places”. Only one of the five is longer than a sonnet, two have dedications to their muses and I stole lines from Tupac Shakur in another. Enjoy ..read more

Bury me in soggy ground heart decomposing a song as bones become stone (My own photo from The Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow ..read more

My high school sweetheart and I broke up over the summer due to the vicissitudes of young romance but my college roommate’s girlfriend would sent him love letters on scented paper. Envious, I’d sneak a sniff when he was out and imagine the fragrance of my next beloved. One Saturday his girlfriend came to visit and my sense of smell was assaulted by her perfume, each waft eroding my defense, until with watery eyes, I gallantly yielded the room to the flowery stench of their love. (for Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt and Living Poetry’s Monday Poetry Prompt ..read more

After a long travel day and a dark night of rain in my own bed (Back home, safe and sound, after my trip to Scotland ..read more

I’ve been underwater for almost a month beneath a gray sky no sun — no moon not even a hope of stars Like a cod swimming in the North Sea through cool familiar waters then plucked from home thrown into a fryer but at least I’ll see the night once more I count eleven meals of fish & chips over the past 27 days, including tonight’s, above ..read more

Plant pebbles in a circle aligned with the tilt of the planet and the stars of the ecliptic watch them grow into stones after centuries — rocks after millennia — megaliths Sing to them the same song your grandmother sang at sunset the words don’t matter language changes faster than the moon but the tune still resonates with the earth I’ve visited three stone circles in the past week, the Ring of Brodgar, the Standing Stones of Stenness and the Sighthill Stone Circle, a modern incarnation. Let this serve as fair warning to my landlords. The Standing Stones of Strenness The Sighthill Stone Circ ..read more

I’m proud to announce that yesterday my poem Red Swallow was published at MasticadoresUSA. I hope all my readers will check out this somewhat true story from my salad days. Here are the first two lines for curiosity piquing. Her crimson fingernails reston my arm, seven seconds too long. Thanks to Barbara Leonhard for providing a home to another of my poems ..read more

A new stone watches The old stones have lichen beards After thunder — sun While the photo of the Ring of Brodgar is mine, the lines are not. I just stole three lines from George Mackay Brown‘s 1992 collection, Brodgar Poems. I’ve been reading his Carve the Runes, Selected Poems and I am in awe of his work. So many great lines that I wish I’d written. For example, in his collection Travelers, there’s a set of twelve Haiku: For the Holy Places and this is one of them: The Northern Sky Orkney turns upon poles of light and darkness A summer midnight, the north Is red with the two lamps of dawn an ..read more

The weather in the Orkney Islands has been lovely, mostly low clouds, sporadic rain every day and a wind to chill a selkie’s bahookie. But it’s not all good, every evening the sun barges through the clouds and barely sets, leaving no room for the night, just a couple hours of twilight. I took the bus to Stromness, the home of the great Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown, and walked along it’s main street which is bounded by stone buildings and is barely wide enough for an automobile. There’s a feeling of age here that is very difficult to find in the United States and what I treasure when I tr ..read more