Tag: mortality
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Plagiarism
This poem began as a meditation on how renewal can feel like duplication rather than change. Its theme is the tension between natural recurrence and human fatigue—the way life reissues itself even when we wish it wouldn’t.
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Bone Confession
Bone Confession began as a way to name the physical weight I carry from the people I’ve lost and the ones I couldn’t help. The poem grew from a single pulse in the wrist into a record of how the body stores memory—through objects, breath, and the small actions that prove we’re still here. I…
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Shadows and Ghosts and Angels
This poem emerged from a real CT scan I underwent—an experience that felt both absurd and sacred. I wanted to capture the paradox of being scanned for tumors while feeling the warmth of contrast dye and hearing the machine’s screech. The poem resists sentimentality and dramatization. It’s a meditation on diagnostic ritual, the bureaucratic anticlimax…
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Sunset Visit
“Sunset Visit” emerged during a twilight walk through a cemetery near my childhood home. I was struck not by grief, but by the contrast between the quiet of the dead and the noisy solitude each visitor carried—thoughts, regrets, memories. The poem began as a study in light and stone, but deepened into a meditation on…
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Quiet Remittance
Quiet RemittanceI didn’t follow my father’s instructions this time.I just tucked his ashes into my inner coat pocket,where they warmed me with the good memoriesof pregame paella feasts and watching the Hurricanes,in the built over old Orange Bowl now Miami Marlins Stadium.All the anesthesiologists, the lawyers, his employees—his old crew—performed his scattering script line by…
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I Should Have Followed You
I Should Have Followed You “Can I still call you Dorothea?”—even though the black and white lines in the paper reduce you to the habit you wore, arrange you into silence, a name and surname surrendered to the cloistering of lilies. Somewhere beyond this obituary, the grown children you once taught trace grief into their…
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The Nacre of Survival
**The Nacre of Survival** After all the operations, after the slow unraveling, I trace the shimmer left behind, a pearl forming in the absence of what was— the weight of my steps lighter, not in grace, but in uncertainty mixed with hope. I do not run anymore Yet, I watch Tom Cruise sprint, sprint— limbs…
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Lines Written After My 69th Birthday
I don’t get the feminine luxury of being twenty-five again every birthday past fifty.For a year I must live with the snide joke that my actual age is a congress of crows position illustrated in the karma sutra (page 69).Biologically I feel ten years older. Facially I look fifteen years younger. Every year there will…
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Ocean Apostrophe
The ocean still spits up toys and shoesyears after the hurricanes blew threw.The erosion of sand below the water andon the beach display other sadnesses.The unwanted apostrophe between sea and shore,the warning red sky and the calm cerise night breaks into crescents on the bay, each moonbeam an invisible memory.The union of jealous wind and…
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Heavier than Age
Morning heavier than ageleaves the birds weighted to the limbs, unable to break out in riotous morning song.In the distance— a church bell,people in black creeping around-“Heaven. Heaven,” in their earsfor the poor soul laying beneath.They wish to hear only the sea.The old sea. The new sea. Any sea— to catch their tears, drown their…
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A Discovered Graveyard
(After Robert Frost’s In a Disused Graveyard)The dead come along the living unexpectedly,their grassy treads kicking upon their stonesonce upright now downturned in the weeds.They just wish to rest in peace, away from these stumbling fools that wound themselveson weathered marble letters written large: “THE ONES WHO LIVING COME TODAYTO READ THE STONES AND GO…