Today marks the 12th anniversary of the publication of my first poetry collection (a verse drama where every poem equals a chapter in the narrative), The Oxytocin Opera! Lots of memories for this one, including staging a full literary rock opera with a musician friend of mine. To celebrate its May anniversary, I thought I’d share a few poems on this page this month taken from both that collection and/or others from the time period I wrote this (about 2011-2012). Here is one of my personal favorites from that collection. This poem was also subsequently published in a college poetry journal called Dark Matter.

If you like what you read here and are interested in reading the complete verse drama, you can still order it on Amazon by clicking the link below. And if you do choose to get it and you like it, please consider leaving me a review. Thank you so much and enjoy!

Click Here to Buy The Oxytocin Opera!

Sally + Mike

Beneath the balcony, Sally + Mike is spelled out in clumps of dead palm bark and seaweed on pale sands.  Its author used these same crude materials to draw a heart above their names.  The moon climbs its ladder over the Atlantic.   Its light unrolls a royal carpet across the surface composed of diamonds that travels from one worn-edged corner of the earth and leads to this specific section of shoreline below my hotel window.  I think I see Coleridge walking on the water, bringing bread, fish and a big dead sacrilegious bird to everyone on shore.  

Why have I not seen this before?  The way a full moon transfigures the breakers into shadowed horses galloping to their death on the shoreline.  The madness of white-capped ghosts and clouds at breakneck speeds left to right across this water color painting drip drying off an Earth-sized page.  Waves jot their formulas down on an endless blackboard, followed by their solutions – simply erase the problem.  If the stars were our tonight, the beauty might be too much to bear.  

Walking along the coastline, the high hotel windows behind me flicker and flutter television nightlights, staving off fear of the dark and of sleeping alone.  Me, I’m watching the ocean’s programming schedule tonight cause it’s much funnier than a sitcom and truer than reality TV.  The voices in the waves say, “If only you could hear the stories we hold.  Your little problems would mean as little to you as they already do to the world and us.”

For now, it is enough to stare into the ocean like a bathroom mirror and say I love you but you can be so much more than this.  Realize you’re not important to the world and most in it and you will be everything you’ve ever wanted.  “Watch me,” says the sea.  “I will teach you why these things are true.”

I watch.  An apt student.  The world shifts in its seat and begins to slip away from vision as breakers dissolve like a billion Alka Seltzer tablets.  Nothing can be more important than this.  Than watching everything disappear and come back again, this show on endless syndication.

At dawn, Sally + Mike still waits in the sand, but its creator is nowhere to be found.