I have nearly 300 poems in public in many different places, both online and in print, in several countries from the US and UK, to the Philippines and Malaysia, Hong Kong to Canada. I often write on natural themes, showing our place within the grand scheme, based on my travels around the West.  Recently I have been responding to other odd prompts— stories of people and places. I'm a semi-retired English teacher in California, without a chapbook to my name. 

Abandoned Houses


Empty shacks like sun-bleached
skulls: eye sockets are open doors,
windows are mouths grinning into the yards
filled with broken cars, stick fences leaning
like rib bones against the wind half-buried 
in sand, the skeleton decorated with 
scattered pieces of machinery, tires, shoes, 
chairs, cactus, plastic toys, steak bones picked
clean by coyotes at night, later covered 
by drifting weeds, abandoned houses 
stare down the empty highway
as I pass in a hot cloud of dust--
failing to consider who would leave
a 1939 Frigidaire on the sagging
back porch before driving away 
for the last time in defeat.



​
Naked
—most bright where most naked
                  -Richard Eberhart (1950)

if I lie under bare stars
on the bare ground
or stand on a stony ridge
poised between a salt flat
with heat waves shimmering 
and a rocky outcrop,
balanced in white glare,
I become a brilliant force
an emanation gathered
from summer and sun 
radiating outward against 
the desert
and I am naked, exposed
to the shriveling heat
as bare as these rocks
their flat incandescence,
vulnerable to the hot breath
a door into the underworld
in plain view,
and our nakedness in that light
reflects our puny arms
our futility on that ridge--
we are most bright where
we are most naked