How long would the music be withoutseconds and minutes? The feeling of time is different.Put away your phones. Cover your watches.Eliminate all the telling devices. Play Japanese flutes. And ask how long the musicwill play for. How do you keep track? George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such […]
time
No Order of Things
my feet knit the socksthat knit her knitting-needlesthat knit herand send her to the riverwhere she finds the rockthat sets her on a pathto where i’m waiting for herthough neither of us knows it Support Our Dharma Work
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]