Category Archives: Poems

Daily Poem 21: Umbrage

I take umbrage to Aeolus’ fan

When the ensuing clouds disrupt my tan.

Another simple play on words.

um·brage

[uhm-brij]

–noun
1. offense; annoyance; displeasure: to feel umbrage at a social snub; to give umbrage to someone; to take umbrage at someone’s rudeness.
2. the slightest indication or vaguest feeling of suspicion, doubt, hostility, or the like.
3. leaves that afford shade, as the foliage of trees.
4. shade or shadows, as cast by trees.
5. a shadowy appearance or semblance of something.

Daily Poem 20: Quixotic

Are you quixotic, squirrel?

What urgent quest compels you

To keep blurring my photos

When I try to pin you down?

Is it for love or adventure?

Is it for justice or fame

Or to battle armed windmills,

My heroic Don Squirrel?

Oh.

It was just for food.

You’ve ruined my poem.

A silly poem I wrote for a Berkeley squirrel that was bounding around my bench while I was contemplating the word quixotic.

quix·ot·ic

[kwik-sot-ik]

–adjective
1. (sometimes initial capital letter) resembling or befitting Don Quixote.
2. extravagantly chivalrous or romantic; visionary, impractical, or impracticable.
3. impulsive and often rashly unpredictable.

Daily Poem 19: Berkeley

Berkeley on the First Sunday of Spring Break

Locked doors and darkened window panes

Remind me that I’m out of place

On grounds of learning, where, again,

Sagacious stones refuse my wandering ways.

Only the wooded paths embrace

Me on a log-cum-bench: the bait

To bring my ears into this space

Where nature’s bards all play.

A crow calls singing to her mate

And with the chatting creek I strain

To hear his soft reply, then wait

And watch and wonder why she stays.

 

Over the last few days, I was lucky enough to spend some time around the lovely, albeit abandoned, UC Berkeley campus, but now I am headed back up the California coast en route to Canada. The poems for the next few days are scheduled, so anything about the trip home won’t appear until next week (at which point my daily poem project – meant to jumpstart my own production on this website – will likely have ceased).


Daily Poem 18: Flaneur (Convex Mirror)

In dreams I wander through the realms

Of convex mirrors, breaking glass

To find the shattered remnants pull

Together forming a flaneur

Like me who only wants to write

His name in water. Hand and hand

That feel like glass, they smear their sweat

And trace the letters of their self—

But one of them writes it backwards.

Read John Ashbery’s poetic ekphrasis of the painting above here.

flaneur

\flah-NUR\ , noun;

1. One who strolls about aimlessly; a lounger; a loafer.

Daily Poem 17: Recidivism

I saw red gerberas, and as always

I suffered from recidivism; slid

Down, down a snake of board games on the lawn

And kisses in the creek and freezing nights

On an old cot beneath the twisting stars.

re·cid·i·vism

[ri-siduh-viz-uhm]

–noun
1.  repeated or habitual relapse, as into crime.
2.  Psychiatry. the chronic tendency toward repetition of criminal or antisocial behavior patterns.