The Woman in Dark Clothes (Poems)

Buy the Book at Amazon.com

Contents

With Our Eyes Closed 

The Woman in Dark Clothes
The TV 

The Hills of Judea (The Woman in Blue)

The Hereafter 

The Planet of the Blind 

Death of a Televangelist 

Here in the Shade of Blue Televisions 
We Open Our Mouths But No One Knows How to Sing

Did You Hear the Story of the Boy who Forgot His Name? 

We See the Flash of Headlines in the Sky 

Denial Is Like A Cloud That Blots Out The Sun 

The Death of JFK 

Death Rides in on a White Horse 
A Fable

I Once Saw Hank Williams Follow a Flock of Blackbirds into a Dark Field 

The King in a Country of Rain 

Anna Nicole Smith in TV Heaven 

A Lonesome Dwarf in a House of Whores 

Confession of a TV Addict 

The Sound of War 

Terror Blooms in the Ghettos of Palestine 

Aurora 

That Invisible Country 

A Girl Called Heaven 

The Eye of Winter 

Carry Me Across the Water 

Song for John Berryman 

An Awakening 

Advent 2012 (Newtown Connecticut) 

The Waves at Midnight 

In This House of Clouds 

Warhol at the Factory 

Above Dam Square 

Nuit Blanche 

The Ghost of a Girl 

We Have No Hymns to Give Him 

Back to the Beginning 

The Goddess

They are like Visitors from Another Country 

For Vincent Van Gogh & Edgar Allan Poe 

True Story of an Incident at Chateau de Vincennes with the Daughter of a Chinese Opera Star 

9/11 

The Missing 

Back Here Again 

Quay Winston Churchill 

Ghosts in Winter 

She Once Believed in Happy Endings 

From Black to Blue 

Long After Dark 

I Saw Socrates on the Road Today

Not as They Once Were 

He Took The Head Shot that Killed JFK 

The Bigfoot Hoax (The Man Who Killed Kennedy)
No More Games, No More Toys 

For Agnes at the Cafe 

Rumors of War

March 2003 

High Condition (Red) 

Of Winter & Wars 

There are No Heroes Here 

Walter Cronkite Dead at 92 

TelePrompTer 

Oceans & Technology 

With a Wave of Our Hands 

A Masked Man 

They're Holding Jesus in Guantanamo Bay 

The Burial of Osama Bin Laden at Sea 

Transformation 

White Orchids & Death 

Her Vanishing God 

The Sleepwalker 

On Our Way Back To Paris 

I Cannot Take It From Them

The Drag Queen 

Basilique du Sacré-Cœur 

Chatelet (Pont au Change)

The Poet

The Riders of the Night 

Too Long in the Wind 

Eros 

I Could Fly a Plane 

The Troubadour 

Neverland 

Hiroshima

The Facebook Song 

Black Coat & Tails (If Looks Could Kill) 

The Eighth of December 

That Imaginary Boat 

Long Into the Night 

The Man on the Blue Horse 

The Moon Followed Me Home 

The Horses 

"There is another heaven & earth beyond the world of men"

Li Po

With Our Eyes Closed

Darkness descends without a sound on the wings of an invisible horse.

No one knows his name, this stranger in love with his own shadow.

We are walking backwards now with our eyes closed.

We have nowhere else to go.

The Woman in Dark Clothes
 
(for Edith Stein)

She adored Husserl, the depths of his thought.

But philosophy was not enough for her.

She became a student of love.

We breathe in the ashes of those burned

in the ovens of Auschwitz.

Flowers bloom out of the dust.

She walks with us in the darkness.

She is familiar with it.

She knows the way out.

They were not aliens from another planet.

They put their human faces on just like us

before they dropped Zyklon B in a hole

in the roof and waited for the bodies to fall.

That they shared in our common humanity

somehow made monsters of us all.

But why should we feel responsible

for their crimes,

when we barely recognize our own?

But the stain remains just the same.

It will take all of human history to recover

from that loss.

We breathe in the ashes of those burned

in the ovens of Auschwitz.

Flowers bloom out of the dust.

She walks with us in the darkness.

She is familiar with it.

She knows the way out.

The TV

They left the TV on for years. No one ever

seemed to watch it.

Often, I could see it through the open drapes

illuminating the room at night.

Eventually the TV caught fire.

Flames shot out from the walls

and the roof.

Someone called the police.

Neighbors gathered in the street.

They opened their mouths in wonder

but no one spoke. They watched it all

like some kind of ancient sacrifice

as they witnessed clouds of smoke

floating up into the heavens,
sending signals to those
no longer left on the ground.

The Hills of Judea (The Woman in Blue)

She walked in from the hills
wearing blue jeans with frills.
She sang a song in a broken voice.
It was the only one she had,
she had no choice.

Some say she took pills
to kill the pain.

She was a stranger here, 

no one knew her name.
There was beauty in her eyes.

There was a wound she could not hide.
Her hair had a touch of gray.
There were lines in her face.

She sang a song in a broken voice.

It was the only one she had,
she had no choice.

She walked in from the hills
wearing blue jeans with frills.
She sang a song in a broken voice.

It was the only one she had,
she had no choice.

The Hereafter

How many clowns would fit into a toy car in the hereafter?

Imagine them piling in. Imagine the laughter.

We search for poltergeists in a darkened room.

Will there be space enough for them to bloom?

We wake in a world of make believe, as we hover between

what is seen and unseen.

We scan the brain
and enter into that mysterious terrain.

Human consciousness is a mystical thing,
seemingly held together with two tin cans and one lone string.

We look out at the heavens from a darkened room.

Will there be space enough for us to bloom?

How many clowns would fit into a toy car in the hereafter?
Imagine them piling in. Imagine the laughter.

The Planet of the Blind

Light shone all around them but they did not see it.

They had eyes but they remained closed.

No one analyzed their dreams.

No one even knew if he they had any.

Like Oedipus they walked in a world of darkness.

They existed in a land of unknowing.

They built war machines.

In air conditioned rooms, they piloted drones

by touch and dropped bombs

on innocent women and children.

Whirlwinds of dust blew all around them.

Radioactive clouds darkened the sky.

Ultimately, they considered themselves blessed
by their blindness.

When the end came, no one cried,

no one was left to tell their story.

Light shone all around them but they did not see it.

They had eyes but they remained closed.

Death of a Televangelist

They claimed children would be blessed and would impart wonders
to others by touching the TV screen,

that the dead would be raised by being placed in a room

with a TV tuned to their programming, coming from signals 

high in the sky. (Surely the moon

witnessed their conspiracy to defraud viewers of their savings.)  

Even as the pope abandoned his papal palace,

they continued to broadcast their gospel of prosperity

on satellites worldwide.
They flew not on the wings of angels

but on the wings of private jets.

In a platinum pink bouffant wig (like a drag queen in a John Waters film),

the one sat beside the other.

They lived in mansions paid for with promises

they could never keep. The fault was not in the Gospel.

The fault was with them.

(God is not a genii in a bottle to be bought and sold.)

Paul Crouch is dead. But his body will not be resurrected

in front of a TV screen tuned to TBN.

He is caught in the eye of a needle.

There is no need to send any cash.

Here in the Shade of Blue Televisions

Here in the shade of blue televisions,

we winter in the outer dark

and cast our nets

into an ocean of stars.

We wait for a signal.

We long for a sign to guide us,

a word, a beam of light that will render us

sanctified and whole.

We cling to scraps of paper in skyscrapers.

(The world is ruled by admen

and conjurers,

lobbyists and salesmen.)

The dead live among us.

There they stand,

those that we once turned away,

long hidden in the folds of time,

now transformed,
made new again,

born out of invisible waves,

crashing on an invisible shore.

Here in the shade of blue televisions,

we winter in the outer dark

and cast our nets

into an ocean of stars. 

We Open Our Mouths But No One Knows How to Sing

While a dictator is deposed, monsters wait in the wings,
their eyes shining in the darkness.
From the top of the world everything seems so small.
From the top of the world is a long way to fall.

When the student of a poet guns down thirty two people,
her books suddenly fill the library shelves,
she is interviewed on TV, her books begin to sell.

After over one thousand are gassed outside of Damascus,
the president asks congress for authorization to drop
American bombs to rid Bashar al-Assad of his ghosts.

We open our mouths but no one knows how to sing,
even the stars have lost their meaning.
From the top of the world everything seems so small.
From the top of the world is a long way to fall.

Did You Hear the Story of the Boy who Forgot His Name?

Did you hear the story

about the boy who forgot his name?

Did you hear the story

about the girl who did the same?

Here we are again.

Take my hand.

I'll show you something grand.

Don't be shy.

We can fly.

Take my hand.

I'll show you something grand.

I'm not a ghost.

I'm not a shadow.

Don't turn away.

Did you hear the story

about the boy who forgot his name?

Did you hear the story

about the girl who did the same?

I'm not a ghost.

I'm not a shadow.

Don't turn away.

Take my hand.

I'll show you something grand.

I know you've been told all this before.

Don't be shy.

Open up the door.
I know you've been hurt before.

Open up the door.

Take my hand.

I'll show you something grand.

Take my hand.

I'll show you something grand.

The Children of the Past

"Never war I am thinking of children who are deprived of the hope of a worthwhile life, a future." Pope Francis

We sailed on an ocean of regret,
until we found a land where we could forget.

We see the flash of headlines in the sky.
There are no more bargains left to buy.

We hear a siren song that fills the air.
We hear a whistling in our heads.

We are done sleeping in our beds.
If you woke us we would fall.

We once were the children of the future.
We are now the children of the past.

We sailed on an ocean of regret,
until we found a land where we could forget.