Since I’ve stopped working, my brain has been busy manufacturing dreams. Some mornings I’m exhausted from all the hills I climb looking for my hotel or all the trains I run to catch (waking up mid-stride). Last night I ran into Samuel Beckett and George Harrison. They were waiting for Edgar Allan Poe to show up. There were ukuleles everywhere and George was teaching Samuel how to strum and croon. I picked up a banjolele and we jammed for a while ignoring the fact that Sam wasn’t much of a uke player. His timing however was distinctive, and he had a way with silence that John Cage would have admired. When you least expected it, he snapped his fingers and blew smoke into the air. Ed never did show up and the dream unraveled like the first scarf you knitted.
retirement blues
every sunset
a suspended chord
is a regular contributor to haiku, haibun, and tanka journals. His fiction, nonfiction,
and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Flash, Rattle, Modern Haiku,
KYSO Flash, MacQueen’s Quinterly, SurVision, Haibun Today, The Haibun
Journal, and Contemporary Haibun Online (the latter for which he served
as content editor from July 2014 thru January 2020).
His chapbook of haibun, tanka prose, and prose poems, Ethiopian Time (Red Bird
Chapbooks, 2014), was an honorable mention in the Touchstone Book Awards. His chapbook
Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018) was
a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2018. He is also the author most recently
of a collection of prose poems, haibun, and senryu, My Thology: Not Always True
But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019); and an e-chapbook, What I Say to You
(proletaria.org, 2020).
