Tag: poetry

A Poem: Bully Trigger

Bully Trigger was written in early 2021 as a way to deal with a specific problem that has been bothering me since I was in the 5th or 6th grade. I never liked bullies (who does), and for many of us, that reason is personal. We were bullied ourselves or we saw people get bullied…
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A Poem: Castle in the Sky

The following poem was written in the late 1980s, although I don’t remember the year exactly. At that time, I was introduced to free verse poetry through a creative writing class I was taking. What struck me today (for the first time) was the idea of a castle in the sky, one of the central…
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On Focus: “I saw a creature…bestial…”

Focus, man. Focus. I don’t do this often, and I don’t know if I’ll do it again. Feel free to mark this day as “weird.” “So, what’s new in the WORLD?”Asks a demon in my midst.“Funny thing you should ask,”I breathe out from behind my bars.“I was going to ask you the same.” That was…
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A Primer on Death Poetry for Writers

I have been looking through various works-in-progress, those novels that–for whatever reason–were abandoned on the side of the road while the mind went looking for a gas station down the street. One of them, Driving the Spike, made me think of two of my favorite reads: Stephen Crane and Japanese Death Poems, as presented in a…
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On Research: Extrajudicial Killing, Maggie and Me

As I do the research necessary to write another novel, I find myself running into things I didn’t think existed. Some writers might need a little inspiration, and the archive of legislation through the years is certainly broad enough to provide that inspiration to many people. But that’s not what this is about.

A Poem: Cloud 9

This poem is one I wrote in 1988 or 1989. It is, most definitely, “Crane-ish.” I love this poem, and I hate it at the same time. I guess that’s art, is it not? Despite its rather positive message buried in negativity, I use this particular poem as a reminder of horrible people who promise…
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A Poem: Glass Bottom

I’ve been on a few glass-bottom boats in my day, but I’m not 100% sure why I wrote this poem. I remember sitting in a dorm room in Alaska in 1992 and hammering this out on a $1500 laptop with a massive hard drive attached to a dot-matrix printer five times the size. Oh, to…
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