Short Poems

When all the sea's high ships
Have dropped beyond my sky
And life's trumpet leaves my lips
And women pass me by -
Dear God, let me die!

Son of an honorable citizen—most important of all, a good-looking
young man of the theatre, amiable in many ways.
I sometimes write highly audacious verses in Greek
and these I circulate—surreptitiously, of course.
O gods, may those puritans who prattle about morals
never see those verses about an exceptional kind of sexual pleasure,
the kind that leads toward a condemned, a barren love.

The world is full of double beds
And most delightful maidenheads,
Which being so, there’s no excuse
For sodomy of self-abuse.

I once a King and chief
Now am the tree-bark’s thief,
Ever ’twixt trunk and leaf
Chasing the prey.

The wolf in darkness
moonlight on her hungry pups
bullet cold as night


(Previously published in Still, Issue 4, Autumn 2000)

How instructive
is a star!
It can teach us
from afar
just how small
each other are.

The winter storm
Hid in the bamboo grove
And quieted away.

The winter leeks
Have been washed white --
How cold it is!

With no companion to my mood,
Against the wind as it should be,
I walk, but in my solitude
Bow to the wind that buffets me.

The wind stood up and gave a shout.
He whistled on his fingers and
Kicked the withered leaves about
And thumped the branches with his hand
And said that he'd kill and kill,
And so he will and so he will.