Scene From a Shaker Cemetery

The unmarkedtombstones leavean impression The elemental needto tell someonethat you were hereThe same reason the cave people in Lascaux wrote on wallsThe eternal battle betweensimplicity and pride the primal urge to leave a markon the earth, and the spiritualquest to disappear entirely George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications […]

A Scene from Cumberland Bay

Before his sister could budge him out of the way,Mendon climbsdown the rabbit hole to a window in the stars where everything worth  seeing is hidden inside a half-devoured pine cone. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, The Angle at St. John Fisher […]

After Meditating On My Front Porch

I again realize that mindfulness is noticingstillness, how the inkon my paper has more than one color of black and feelsfluid as silk. And how the hard plastic wheelsof a stroller across the street,scraps the gravel, making soundslike crackling embers.It’s noticing the stillness of a solitary pine needle pulsing in the sighing wind. An eternal thing that must be […]

The Persistence of Memory

Before the finneddinosaurs of the frozen deepwere interrupted by the warships of man they cast their love balladsinto the vast abyss, waiting,with hearts as wild and big as schoolbuses, for their own answer. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, The Angle at […]

The Last Days of Summer

God is the original face before I was born. The lost part of my brain, drifting across beginninglesslifetimes, bobbing in the embryonic fluid. God is tortoise tracks and prayers bya beachside grave and the last daysof summer. Why the universe is so hot,crowded, and noisy, yet arrives quietly each lonely evening, on my doorstep, a bouquet of suffocating tulips. George […]

Home

a small childyet to master the written wordknows beautywhen they seetheir mother walk through the door,home from work. A wordless setof hieroglyphics without their brain peeringthrough. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, The Angle at St. John Fisher College, and 3:16 Journal. George’s blogs, essays and letters […]

I Need My Used Book Store

Three Lives, in New York. From Intelligencer I need my used bookstore. The sensuous aromas of waxy skin jackets andmahogany shelves, paperskeletons in an excavatedashram of introspection.I need what it stashes awaybehind a Tom Clancy noveland an old National Geographic.Eureka! That one book, at sometime misplaced in my mind,appearing as a lost symbol ofwilderness, casting a garland-clothed silhouette, as flannel-shirted, torn-jeaned, leather- sandalled […]