Rain, Somewhere Falling
I sit
sipping coffee
fresh and warm,
quiet morning
around me,
and I think of the sea
and then the rain
falling somewhere silently,
falling somewhere other than here
full of daydreams
empty streets
lonely mountain tops
wistful memories
and things we forget
I've been working on my PhD proposal the last 8 months so poetry had to take a back seat, I've written lines and fragments but no substantial poem in a while. One of the books I am re-reading for my PhD is The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of The New York School of Poets by David Lehmann, in it he quotes from a late 1940s early 1950s memoir by Anatole Broyard about his time in Greenwich Village titled: Kafka was the Rage. Broyard mentions how all the poets wrote furiously in little notepads as if they were writing "postcards to literature," I thought it was such a great line that it inspired me to write a handful of poems, I may shoot for a sequence of 10 postcards. Here is a rough draft of number 3.
Postcard Three
Somewhere in this world
It’s raining and a short haired girl
sits and smokes on a wet fire escape,
glass of wine next to her,
open book filled with inner monologues
whisper the story, it rains, it rains,
she sips her wine, smoke floating upwards…
MONK
Invite yourself to silence
count the clouds
count the stars
count the hours
saying nothing between breaths
Autumn morning cold
no thoughts, no noise,
Waiting for morning
with the solitude of January
with the open journal page
Inviting hope in,
looking out to a dark lake
and memories of love.
Jack Kerouac wrote "Pop Haikus..."
ONE
Washington Heights Memory
Back deck view
Rain falling
TWO
London Memory
Small park
People watching
THREE
Childhood Memory
Winter waves
Diving under them
FOUR
Santa Barbara Memory
Modern art museum steps
You said goodbye
FIVE
San Francisco Memory
Fire-escapes
Cigarette smoke floating upwards
SIX
Berlin Memory
Electronic music
Midnight rooftop bar chats
SEVEN
Portland Memory
Pacific Northwest snow
Lonely streets
EIGHT
Jack Kerouac
Wrote pop haikus
On lonely look-outs.
Washington D.C. Poem
Winter morning,
twenty-degrees of cold and grey,
outside there’s no snow, only silence,
in here I drink bad coffee
with quick sleepy thoughts
in a warm bed,
out there in the world
men and women walk to work already
looking for everything or just a meal,
many missed by no one
or forgotten or wanting to be forgotten,
and I’m here in the East Coast
writing this, reading Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara,
laughing at these wistful nothings…
A poem inspired by my reading of the great Scottish poet Norman MacCaig
Ignorance
I remember standing quietly on winter rocks
looking out to the Pacific,
a child
in El Salvador
near La Libertad, the port of liberty,
where I was had sandy beaches in summer
but winter brought a stretch of rocks
and silence,
Standing there
that morning, watching birds
I couldn't name
playing and diving
Into the blue playground
I smiled at my ignorance.
OXFORD
Sitting on a bench
several leaves fall
one by one
expressing great disdain
for this cold Oxford summer’s day,
the smell of rain comes
and I write
between the taste of coffee
and the loneliness of trees.
