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. 

​
Victory Square: California


The War was harsh on all fronts— 
back home women welded,
gardened, sewed, saved, rationed

housing was tight in critical
production regions— 
steel, tanks, coal, oil, ships

especially oil—the fields
Elk Hills
Midway-Sunset
Buena Vista

Fellows
Buttonwillow
McKitrick
Ford City
Maricopa

vital strategic interest
for wartime matériel
wells pumping full bore
day and night, black ooze
staining the ground, gas
burn-offs coloring the sky

and men came to live
in hastily-built wooden
housing blocks separated
by thin board fences, black
faced with grime

they supported the War too, 
Victory at all costs— 
Victory Square 
Victory Circle
Victory Garden
out in the desert the oil flowed
thick and hard

the men labored, cursed, drank
shacked up, worked again
collected their pay, fell onto
spring mattresses exhausted
Victory in sight.

After the War some men stayed
others arrived, collected in cheap 
surplus housing—Oakies, derelicts
child molesters, a deaf-mute
couple, single outcast mother,
roustabouts, fireman, mentally
defective juvenile, school teacher

all jumbled together in the heat
of warped boards, swamp coolers 
the only solace, enormous
grasshoppers resting in the sun— 
children played listlessly
in the dust and grime

Victory forgotten though the oil 
still pumps, fences sag, 
the pit of the Valley, tar smells 
hip dragsters 
champion high school football
Dari Delite ice cream
Standard Oil company town
hard to escape 
Victory Square now.





Life on the Edge of the World

​
Trailer park squeezed between a storefront
discount dental clinic and a muffler shop
hidden behind a broken fence, half-dead
oaks, weeds, garbage dumpster, inside

1950s Fleetwood single-wides in a row
surrounded by flimsy slatted barricades
broken cars, rusted patio chairs, broken
lives, living on the highway, cheapest

housing in town, unseen without street 
lighting, here an old bartender, tractor
mechanic, war veteran, school janitor
tumbled neighbors, men sit outside nights

watching big rigs rumble past going to
the truck stop, the street shakes each time,
windows rattle and their mutts whine,
they sit in gray-faded t-shirts in the heat

sipping cheap beer until it gets warm
then go in to sleep on a narrow couch, 
the windows open for any cool breeze,
nothing to steal here, the poorest quarters

but they're happy for a roof, the anonymity,
the police don't bother them, everyone would
see a woman, drug deal or shotgun, really
it's a pretty quiet place to rot on the highway.