"Postcards to Literature"

 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…

First poem of 2026

 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.

Memory Pop Haikus

 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.

New Poem

 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…

Ignorance

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 Poem

 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.

Maybe I'll hum an old tune

THE SCARS OF POETRY

Empty shot glass left on the bar

whiskey gone

and now for the silence

that will walk me home,

maybe I’ll hum some old tune

or quote some poems,

perhaps it will be Edward Thomas

meeting his destiny at the “borders of sleep,”

or Stephen Spender will chat with me 

about "The very great,”

I’m sure I’ll pause to ask the night questions

about the clouds above me, or memories of Frank O’Hara

may come as well, his parties and a New York City poetry long asleep,

maybe I’ll hear the sound of a pretty voice

coming down from an apartment high above,

filled with the cadence of love and beginnings,

or maybe an old line I’d forgotten

might remind me to collect my yesterdays,

regardless of all that I’ll have company

but not the kind that leaves lipstick on my cheek

and shirt but just scars across the heart.