The unmarkedtombstones leavean impression The elemental needto tell someonethat you were here The same reason the cave people in Lascaux wrote on walls The eternal battle betweensimplicity and pride the primal urge to leave a mark on the earth, and the spiritualquest to disappear entirely
time
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.
After Meditating On My Front Porch
I again realize that mindfulness is noticingstillness, how the ink on my paper has more than one color of black and feels fluid 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 […]
The Persistence of Memory
Before the finneddinosaurs of the frozen deep were 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.
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 […]
Unsolicited Advice to the Class of 2020
Grip life the way a father holds his son’srib bone after a car bomb in a Baghdad market. Treat it with speechlessrespect. Awake each morning in its belly, licking the mucous from the rubberyintestine of your own ignorance. Chase life. As children run after dragonflies.Unlock the jar and hold it like a prisoner of evolution. […]
Home
a small childyet to master the written word knows 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, […]
Cogito Ergo Sum
It never occurred to me beforethat time is shaped like a seashell,or at least the mobile home of a snailmoving along the Jungleland of any forest. If I changed the image to make it more human, time would still look like a spiral, the only differenceis the shape of the fingers which point to it, and the […]
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 […]
The History of the Earth
The history of the earth is aconstrained blessing. With my warm human hands I receive it, knowing that it was the sun that Joshua commanded to be still. It was not the earth. The earthcannot remain still. As we move, with our families, in and out of dying,a flowing, syncytium over the earth. George Cassidy Payne is a poet […]