CPJ-Saga 1 – Names and Resets

CPJ-1, where I ramble about names I've assumed and then reveal that I think I've been a poet all along. TBC

A Phoenix in an Olive Tree

S/he most certainly is a phoenix. S/he's alight but not like a bonfire. The only smoke or steam I can see is from the singed olive leaves, not quite aflame but starting to char. Some embers linger on the ground (are those ruined cactus lobes? blackened egg-shells? glowing droppings?); but nothing catches-- nothing rages.

“If You Can Do Anything Else”

I started writing yet another reflective essay about how I'm not writing the way I wish I were writing. I decided a free verse poem would be more compact -- thus, this column of thought.

Impressions & Images (#1?)

Like a swarm of jellyfish afloat in a swell,
an uncountable glut of balloons offer
trailing threads of many colors and
rise away.
If I grab the blue string, will I need
to gather every thread of that hue
to succeed at blues? Or must I
make bundles of rainbow colors, yet
miss the bulbs of indigo I cannot see?

A Discount Muffin

first draft "A Discount Muffin" is the poem I eat tonight. I am ravenous to find nourishment with meaning and its empty calories (so-called?) are filling a visceral space. The mental debt owed to me is the coffer I constructed, empty, to fill for myself from my self, extorting my self in proficient, endless anachronisms.…

Cactus Adonis

I wept Sunday. Cradling an iPhone in my lap, earbuds like IV-lines between my father and me, I sat on the floorboards of my friends' attic, near the brightly-lit hole leading to my room, and finally found my fountain.  Bizarrely, I had not wept at all during this entire painful period and I was aware.…