What shall we do while Gayle King is in space? Cities bombed for ‘redevelopment’. Rubble raked for bones and bread. But keep ya head up; Gayle King is in space! Jupiter needs a COACH outlet. There’s no Sephora on the Crab Nebula. America’s mall looks too small to be great, so says Gayle King from …
Year End Review: How To Do A Reading
Potrero Stage Theatre, first night sound check Prelude A friend calls monthly, like one would check in with a therapist. A mutual acquaintance has brought her to tears multiple nights. Who is open to just listening beyond me? Our years together, she's earned my patience. But one night she stopped and asked about me. How …
Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive – Book Reveal
Congratulations! It’s a book!! Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive is now available from Black Lawrence Press. The bulk of poems in Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive represent attempts to finding myself as a poet, by training my eye to focus on and validate things I found beautiful or curious or odd or all of the …
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A Prayer
https://thedirtyrat.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/img_1187-1.jpg It is often necessary for me to write a prayer. I've done it a few times over the years while I was drowning in life. This one was composed after visiting a website with hundreds of positive affirmations. I scanned over them and assembled one. Its never occurred to share any nor have I …
Poems Are Happening
April being National Poetry Month... But I'm not tripping. Wasn't even intending to attempt a 2014 poem a day for 30 days challenge... But its happening anyway. The last poem I posted, A Small White Bottle, triggered a shower of poems and writing over the last several days. A pleasant surprise. I re-wrote S.W.B. which …
A Small, White Bottle
I hadn't seen her in more than 20 years. I had to ask for a hug. She paused, as to think: Did I pack one? She looked the same; her body neither overstuffed nor sickly. Her hair is different. Long & sinuous. And she's still sexy. Over breakfast, the great shifting of gears of family …
The Only Way Out Is Through
Here is how we whistle for hammer head sharks --steely torpedoes awaiting to be soft served in bowls of sweet meat we won't finish before dark-- let them swim to a shoreline of 1000 suns curved like so many jaws, abutments of bone between now & minutes shook hence in tremors before this island volcanos …
Touch (Abstraction)
There are hospitals where hands are a type of medicine I smooth the tremulous lines along your temples with my palm In these cellular rooms, bodies are worshipped in religions of disrepair We burden our mouths to carry more than language I align your tremulous temples in the rooms of my palm There are hospitals …
Memorial Lighthouse — Trinidad, Ca.
Memorial Lighthouse, Trinidad Civic Club, Trinidad, Ca. -- JCagney Bone spur of the lighthouse Excavated from the hillside By diligent shovels of weather Stands purified under the administration Of the sun; overseer to an ocean Of scales flashing white and green. An old man sits at a bench shepherding the wet painting of …
Hold The Phone
Hold the Phone - Jcagney There used to be one in every house with its own end table or altar. ours was a wire stand crammed with phone books-- the first internet. if you remembered to clean it you'd wipe it down like a baby – its umbilical cord would braid itself over all the stories …
The Dirty Rat 
