Thoughts on the Future, Looking to the Past The value of childhood lies not in the experiences the child hastily wishes themselves out of but in the years later, as the child stands with eyes toward the future and a grateful heart cast to the past. Long ago, if we pull back the vine of …
Visit London: Learning London City With Lists and Food
Learning London City Day One Breakfast, tentative, tiptoing into a corner of the chatting room. I toasted bread, find peanut butter and quirk a first smile. I will spend the next two years oscillating between amusement and exasperation that the British understanding of peanut butter is full of sugar and very little of peanuts. But …
Poem: Every Person a Ripple Of Whisper and Worry
Have you ever felt the gossip in your head, at the table behind or the glare of the mirror as you hurry by? As you go into the long weekend and as September hectic schedules start up after the long, laze of summer, don’t forget we’re all alike. We all worry, we all wonder. Am …
Rubber Duck Pathology: A Poem about the Masks We Wear
Rubber Duck Pathology
First find a carving knife.
I recommend the one used
On turkey and the occasional picnic chicken days.
No machetes, or butter knives.
We are all humans here.
If you happen to have a Semtex vest strapped label
Of some psychological sort.
Stick the pig that strapped you, first.
Then, find your carving knife.
If you happen to have hemp hair
Or butterfly barrettes of various shade.
Pick red or, purple people eater, pink.
Then, find your carving knife.
If you happen to always take a trowel
to cherry tomato parties.
Brush up on biology.
Then, find your carving knife.
If you happen to have concrete light bulbs
Packed near planet high.
Hold a symposium with dirt.
Then, find a carving knife.
Step two. Pick your duck up.
Behead your duck. Yes,
behead. A half slice is for the dead.
Rubber ducks breathe water.
Did you not wonder why they always float?
Let’s play biology.
When you detach the head, set it on cotton. Step three, grasp body
like a fresh oven bun. Now slice.
See the web of bath mould.
Black skein veins finger from ends to centers.
See the glass froth bubbles of cotton soap. Caught between tail feather and foot.
See childhood imprinted in water.
Carve yours in splashes. Bubble beards.
Liquid cotton and railroad boat tracks.
Digested within your rubber duck.
I Ate A Box of Chocolates and Hated Myself For It: A Poem About Self-Image
A Box of Chocolate
I ate the chocolate
I knew you hid it
behind the cheese crackers
in the corner cupboard.
It tasted of superheroes,
beauty pageants, Olympic medals.
It melted on my tongue
into celebrity.
A zero-size, tree-tall,
front-cover, magazine model.
Then I swallowed.
Reached for more.
Until my fingers felt only paper.
I ate the chocolate.
It settles in my belly,
making me suffocate under
a phantom circus parachute.
I have celebrity
with a hall of mirrors.
A rolly-polly attraction.
That’s how the room sees me.
I won’t eat the chocolate.
Ever.
I found the chocolate
behind a cup of soup
in the corner cupboard.
I knew you put it there.
Under the circus parachute.
The crowd thinks
I’m the cannon bomb.
Set to explode.
Maybe I should.