Poems

As of October 2011, I’d posted over three hundred poems on this site, including many sonnets and search poems, as well as numerous poems that didn’t make it into chapbooks such as Abendland and Morgenland. I then ceased posting poems here, choosing instead to distribute them via my poem of the week newsletter. Then I stopped doing that too. Every now and then I post a poem here … but not as often as I’d like.

Funeral for Democracy

Summer revolution, flowers in your Air. Nike sweatshops. You are here: be there. For Pericles’ printable version of our democracy has died. Come & join the funeral, bring a Lotus. Or your own war dead. We have shredded our constitution…

Karappo vs Okesutura

Once upon a time in Japan, there was a boy named Karappo. He was empty. One day, Karappo met a girl named Okesutura. She was an orchestra. Okesutura filled Karappo’s emptiness with music. She engulfed him with sound. Karappo fell…

the house that cortez built

he will tear it down himself the robots! the robots! the mud-made robots! each one he sends off into the jungle with a fig-leaf for a heart and another for modesty “ah, yes, fair senorita,” he says, “i built these…

Renga

A few months ago I was asked to be part of a renga with Keiji Minato (a Kyoto-based poet whom I had the great pleasure to meet last year) and another Japanese poet named Hiroshi. We wrote ku in turns,…

Post-holocaust tram

I wrote this poem after visiting Hiroshima for the first time in 2004. It was later published in my first full-length poetry collection, We Will Disappear (2007). While we remember August 6 as the day Hiroshima died, and August 9 as the day the same fate was handed to Nagasaki, I personally was not aware of August 5 as the anniversary of the Cowra breakout, an event that has left its mark on both Australia and Japan.

destinations end

our scarborough fairs deserted the northern end of a platform edges that escarpment hatched the shining bullet & its scythes its golden eye all gone martian destination a blurs some gilded beam where perch my destinys droid parrot whirring its…

federer dunkeln capture

string torque guts au go go strapped comment make a minor jugular apropos one dark leaving freaks his holiness headband brasilia twice mistaken for my ring toss hallelujah taurus maids of armoricas straddled shopping bags donate pipe cleaners to these…