Long Shanty Poems

There's a Senior's home called the Shady Lane
    and life's curse is at an end.
Where a hundred souls are kept in line
    till Death its message sends.
They built a...

Read More

As dawn unfolds today beyond my fractured windowpane,
a breeze beguiles the ashen drapes. Like snakes they slip aside,
revealing wanton worlds that race and run aground, insane,
immersed in scenes obscene that savants strive to mask and...

Read More

There's an inner/outter counter blank element that defines our earthly countenance transparent transpire to an irrelevant parlor non native nill given gotten gave, positioned ill latently counterintuitive never minded gotten gained heretofore-d hahaha-d wtf-dis thisd?...

Read More

The curtain rises on Bumblebee Babineaux walking self-confidently along Chartres Street.

Bumblebee [singing]: Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride, nobody’s gonna slow me down. Oh, no, I got to keep on movin’… 

Tom Sickley, a disingenuous...

Read More

A sodden dreg with wooden leg is dancing for a dime,

to sacred psalms and other balms, all ticking with the time.

He’s 22, he’s almost through, he’s melted in his prime,

his bane is firm, the canker...

Read More

She, the queen of glamour, they say,
Loves making things flow her way.
Fortunate she was, having earned 
A prince as he, so delectable,
Amidst the beauty of hills,
He made her, the dream castle.
As lovingly, She delivered to...

Read More

the episode took place near the sewer
the boy lay lifeless on the stiff ground
his white clothes dipping in red
a rowdy mob encircled him
like vultures awaiting the surrender of a fighting  spirit
his horrified eyes gave...

Read More

A handful of stars 

In the right pocket of my trouser

Eliminating all the tsars

Inside the child of wild world

Time in a swirl

And another handful of moon pieces

Bridges and beaches

In the left pocket

My room in a...

Read More

Flings and wings and rings rejected…
 Cupid’s arrows fly deflected…
“It clearly is too late” she signed, “to love, adore or pay me mind”

Penciled lines drew cruel conclusions
mocking mirror’s cracked illusions…
Sometimes, in time, I hang awhile,...

Read More

Tell me more about democracy
Nobody is a fool
Tell me more about dichotomy
Go ahead! I am cool
Tell me more about racism
Nobody is a tool
Tell me more about fascism
Tell me more lies about a rule
For dark, darker...

Read More

Its so hard to be different in many ways unique, fresh, oblique
Confronting not conforming, defying not complying
Requires courage, conviction, confidence to be out there upfront emboldened.
Shedding the safe garments of compliance, the safe hat and...

Read More

The House That Jack Built (Part 1)

Fatigued from years of gleaning storms of snow, sleet, and rain,
 I was yet an innocent and therefore unashamed.
 Her smothered walls creaked and her shingled roof leaked,
 The...

Read More

I'm a Piketown son who left his mum
To sail the eastern shores
Spent a year in Gloucester
'mong the barkeeps and the whores

Then a man came 'round to Gloucester town
Said boys I need a few
Strapping lads such...

Read More

A hundred years have come and gone
 to what wonder and tragedies 
  have you belonged?

My father:
Born in the aftermath of a world at war
 danced to the flappings of the twenties roar,
a time...

Read More

The Whittlers

The stately county courthouse was their usual meeting place,
a columned Greek Revival, and a lovely public space.
They sat upon their benches under lofty pecan trees,
wood shavings on their ankles and some cedar twixt their...

Read More

I am a foodie, I must confess, I swim a few laps for exercise
Along come the Mollusk, and to my pleasant surprise
I have no restraint and they look so yummy
I just open my jaws wide,...

Read More

Cast Down



I am a young girl with a delicate mind

to be molded,

Sitting in the front row with a pressed sundress 

and hands in dainty white gloves gently folded.  



My society is a cast system...

Read More

 [Poem read at Sekoto’s inhumation ceremony at the Neuilly-sur-Marne-93 Cemetery, near Paris. Channel 4 in London recorded the reading as they did the funeral rites in the presence of his close relatives come from...

Read More

Sometime ago, I was fat in the land of Plenty.
I lived on the Savanna, and worshipped the ancestors.
Sometime ago, a horde of barbarians came to the Savanna,
They called me “Savage”.  Yet I had no...

Read More

Once upon a stranger
A girl A well intentioned woman
With open and adorned soul
Askance behind silvered eyes and sighs,

Revealing her concealed seraphic smiles
In an unending sequence.
Yielded in gleams in day dreams,
With folklores and odes chronicling her...

Read More

Murderers and rapists they all be
Vlad Putins scumbags, his army
They should all be hung from a tree
For all the world to see. (huh)

(Chorus)
They bombed cities and towns as well
And made the landscape look like hell
The...

Read More

February and its much-vaunted chill
comes down with vengeance, and does what it will,
this lake that in summer jams full with boats
is now frozen over, nothing can float.

Most people stay home at this time of year,
and...

Read More

1. before 16 but after 14

2. 15 cents is not enough to get a gumball in a 25 cent gumball machine, nor is it the way
to pronounce correctly the name of famous rapper “50 cent”

3....

Read More

Where I live is in between
A memory and a dream
Walking a tightrope each day
I light my self on fire
And take a big box
And head down Main Street
The weasels in the front of Bill’s Cafe
Love it,...

Read More

One fine day I was fishing at sea
Two big blue whales swam up by me
They flicked their tails sent up a spray
All I could do was watch and pray

They kept flicking and sank my boat
I'm...

Read More