63 titled works. 96 pages. 12668 words. The tenth in a series of published poetry collections primarily concentrating on free verse but with a considerable amount of experimentation using formal structures. Specifically in this book, there are several haiku sequences that range from traditional to ultra minimalist while elsewhere there are response poems to other writers and, throughout, the persistent themes of self-reflection and social consciousness.
Sample Poem:
I MUST GET TO NINEVEH
There’s no more joy
And delight now also; a deprivation,
Like music, all-too-tedious
Where a thorn draws blood, there your
Passage has been marked, these signatures
Yoking you to that chance
Locality, articulating in the wilderness’
Own muted way, a kinship
Remembered only by added artifice
Intestines identical to city streets, bones laced
In their vaults of pink flesh
Where the gold-leaf of saints has no
Place and the people are the yellow of grasshoppers
Vying in dry pastures
Cu-nei-form of clay until the Lord’s crown
Sacred banquets; much as a river flows
The words of delinquent priests
Hocking whatever popular god was in season, though
Always subordinating myths to politics
But, let the living eat the dead;
Allow the owls of the desert to spread their wings
In the blue tinge of starry darkness
Though I might delay in taverns
And the establishments of the human cuisine
It is only the contrivance
Of delay; a means to suppress
My unsatisfied fullness but, every evening
The dust of the road leading out of town remains
In its taunting cloud and I know, one day,
I must get to Nineveh