A Night of the Sidhe Before Samhain

Ah! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow
Lay hidden in that small slate coloured thing!

Autumn comes with a new moon
In a night of dense darkness
With a strong wind
And restrained violence

Rattling dry leaves on brittle branches
And drying green leaves on dying stalks
Bringing birth more crisp and sanitary
Than the birth of spring

In this clean air
This clean darkness.

Crickets sing their last songs
In short stabs of volume
Drowned out by the rising
Rustle and swirl of the wind

The sound of motors on the highway
Bleed now and then
Through the dry wind which blends the noises
Replacing them with

Trees bending and straightening
Swaying in circles and the porch door slamming and swinging.

Rusting wind-chimes hanging from a branch
Join faint tones to the cricket song
As twigs snap and fall in waves
Sounding sand-dry, bone-hard, eggshell-fragile

Leaves are thrown against the screens
Where some cling briefly, then fly
In and out of sight… rising, falling,
Darting until blotted into night.

Tomorrow, for a moment I will notice
The sun is fresh and the light more distant

Pseudo-Sonnet

That soft blush on your white cheeks sweetly lies
To awake the thunder of a young man
In this, no young man’s heart, no young man’s eyes,
The golden hair that calls the lonely hand.
The dark fire of the eyes that ache my soul
The smile that stirs things long since lost or dead,
But self-deception’s torments make me old
When hope is but a lie that must be shed.
How every atom of me longs for you!
How my heart throbs and jumps and sinks!
And in this swooning how I come unglued,
When into truth and bleakness my hope slinks.
This strange notion your touch would complete me.
Unattainable star, the truth yet defeats me.

^

Biography

Although I spent much of my life as a singer, songwriter and musician, the poetry seemed to grow from a different course. While in college, at the University of Southern Mississippi, I received my BA degree with a triple major in Philosophy, English Literature and Anthropology. I received some academic recognition through being the only student at USM to ever receive a triple major. I was also inducted into the Golden Key Honour Society, Gamma Beta Phi Honour Society, Phi Kappa Phi Honour Society and was awarded the Outstanding Student of Philosophy Award. I worked as an editor on a literary magazine that a group of USM writers put out at the time entitled Prenez Parti. I entered graduate school in the area of Philosophy and completed course work for my MA degreee, but am now trying to write my much belated thesis. As for my literary influences, I have found that my favourite era is that of the Modernists. I have always loved James Joyce, William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot. I am out of time with the current state of poetry and seem to be driven to write poetry that is usually long, philosophical and the chronicle of an ongoing and confusing spiritual journey. I am now concentrating on getting that poetry read by others as well as continuing to write. I have two beautiful children, a daughter, Katherine, and a son, Patrick, who are 12 and 8 respectively and take much of my time and energy, but they are a blessing. I had a poem published in an Anthology entitled CELEBRATING T.S. ELIOT that was published in 1988 at the centennial of his birth. I had numerous poems published in the late 1980s through a small local press (now defunct) called EXILE PRESS. I also worked as an editor with this organization (Exile Press) that went on to publish the PRENEZ PARTI series in which I published my own longer poetry as well as working as an editor. In 1999, after returning to poetry after having been lost
in musical pursuits for almost a decade, I had a poem, "The Wild Man of Oroville," published in the CENTRAL CALIFORNIA POETRY JOURNAL. I am presently highly underpaid and working in Public Education (Secondary) and trying to find better pay as well as contemplating a return to school at some point for a PhD, while doing all that I can within my meager means to seek publication for my poetry. I have completed a book-length manuscript of Poetry entitled, BROKEN CIRCLE: EPISTLES OF THE STRANGER, for which I have been seeking publication and I am well on my way to completing a second book length manuscript of poetry as yet untitiled.