Two of Clubs, Reversed

Don’t assume the 14 year old boy
buying condoms at the corner drugstore
sells them on the side to shy high-schoolers.
Think instead of the 8th-grade girl who
won’t be pregnant at graduation.

Two of Clubs

… suum in ipsa incarnari voluit,
o voluit, … and then the apples and pumpkins
swelling, swollen; blooms slowly spreading their petals
for the bees, whose bellies rub over pollen gold,
the sharp jutting jetting, the peaches glow with light,
everything falls with fruiting, blooming, yes, fruiting …

Ace of Clubs, Reversed

The shadow the leaf remembers
most vividly is revealed
only as the leaf fails,
fades, & falls. But what
does a single
leaf tell us
of light?
Just
that there
was light, and
there was shadow,
nothing more. It is
only holding a branch,
that we can begin to see
the pattern of how light once fell.

Ace of Clubs

the crispness of the intersection
between shadow and source
where the thing
lies
where they touch
and each recognizes
the other as being related
distance makes indistinct
the object
blurs
that casts light
that shapes that sharp shadow

Reversals Begins

I’ve been working on this series of poems for several years now, almost a decade, and haven’t put any of them online, submitted them to a journal, or really shown them to anyone. Then last Friday, at a meeting, I was talking to another poet and described the concept of this. It is a very cool concept, I think, and he agreed. I also think it is highly publishable. Even a possible crowdfunding project! So when I realized I’d given away the entire concept to a poetry publisher, I thought, “What in blazes am I doing?!”

So that was yesterday, and today I want to commit myself to trying to release this series of poems via the blog over the coming year. I hope to put the first actual poem in the blog here tomorrow. All I’ll say right now is that the series is based around the idea of a deck of cards, with some Tarot symbolism, some mythology, some gaming, some life …. It has a pretty intricate interwoven symbolic structure, if I actually get it right. Fingers crossed! Here’s to the adventure!