Tears from a straw,

heartache from a tumbler

 

Ice from a memory

—fire from my heart

 

(Dreamsleep: March, 2020)

Squandering what you

never had

 

And what you’ll never

—understand

 

(Dreamsleep: March, 2020)

Dying alone on foreign ground,

death gripped his blessed hand

 

Raging hard across the pond,

Manhattan, his last stand

 

An oak to fall on alien soil,

all seeds to heaven thrown

 

His words cast free into the dark,

that ‘Good Night’ now his own

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: January, 2017)

                                                        ‘Dylan Marlais Thomas’

 

The Poet’s real enemy

is time

 

Alone to struggle

—moments to rhyme

 

(Dreamsleep: March, 2020)

The world sneezed,

the demon danced

—the music stopped in time

 

The world coughed,

the demon choked

—millions now entwined

 

The world hid,

the demon searched

—new victims running low

 

The world rose,

the demon dead

—nowhere left to go

 

(Dreamsleep: March, 2020)

Rat-a-tat, Rat-a tat-tat,

the mice crawl through the walls

 

You hear them best when lights are low,

the cat still yet to call

 

Rat-a-tat, Rat-a-tat-tat,

straight up and overhead

 

The world they know—the world you know,

conjoined but never bred

 

Rat-a-tat, Rat-a-tat-tat,

your solitude a ruse

 

What lies inside beyond plain sight

—a kinship to bemuse

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: March, 2020)

Refusing to ever

say hello

 

The coward says

—goodbye

 

(Dreamsleep: March, 2020)

Putting up the white flag,

laying down my gun

 

Turning my back on fantasy,

projects left undone

 

Unlike other enemies,

she’s neither front nor back

 

But lives where only she can go,

where color turns to black

 

Her voice becomes a mimic,

ventriloquist of my soul

 

As words come uninvited,

their letters rhyming whole

 

Resistance now is futile,

my nights pass sleep deprived

 

Mercy vacant, her voice my own

—all victory denied

 

(Villanova Pennsylvania: March, 2020)

Ovarian, Breast, Pancreatic, or Lung…

there’s a look that is shared the same

 

And staring straight into the eyes of time,

all promises gone and reclaimed

 

Each moment borrowed and leased from your fear,

 the walls crashing one by one

 

Tonight no longer a sleep guaranteed

—under blankets of doubt unsung

 

(Dreamsleep: March, 2020)

Is someone profiting on your wishes and dreams,

renaming your parade

 

Like a thief in the night they steal every wish,

their own life at best a charade

 

Is someone else cashing the check you just wrote,

to pay for their larcenous schemes

 

Has your good name been kidnapped, indentured, enslaved

—as you curdle in search of the cream

 

(Rosemont College Pennsylvania: March, 2020)