Three Poems (and Extras)

Hello friends,

This week: three poems, two compositions, and a reading.

Enjoy! (And if you do, please consider supporting my work by purchasing The Robots of Babylon or my new omnibus edition Knit Ink (and Other Poems).)

FILM NOIR (Palindrome)

Prepare trope résumé:

Mad, arid antihero.

Man in a motel,
at a femme fatale,
to man in a more hit nadir.

A dame,
muse,
reporter —
a perp.

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DEATH AND THE DAME
(Redivider — two texts: same letters, same order)

Goons hoot.
The mobs cure.

As sass, 
in shades, 
caped developing rifts,
I dealt: 
Rain in gin. Cop in gloom.

Soon, fatales cap a dear madame....
 
****

“Go on! Shoot them!”
Obscure assassins had escaped....

Develop in grifts — ideal training.
In coping, loom....

So on, fatal escapade!
Arm a dame.

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LOCH NESS (Ottava Rima, Pangram)

Upon the vernal equinox,
when all our fictions come to pass,

a shadow leans across the rocks.
Beneath the water, clouds amass:

a nebula absorbs the loch’s
illusions — hoaxes, dreams in glass,

the jostling haze of history’s whims —
until, at last, the creature swims.

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BONUS

I have recently begun a new musical project — a sequence of folk “musical pangrams” for Irish bouzouki, guitar, bass, and percussion. In each composition, the bouzouki part uses all twelve notes of the octave, showcasing the full chromatic scale.

The first two compositions are now available on YouTube:

RHAPSODY IN ROOTS

MEADOW GHOST

Also now available on YouTube is my reading of COLOURSCAPE, an “aelinscape” poem featuring an ottava rima intersected by a monometer Shakespearean sonnet.