Don’t talk about it

I toil mostly in obscurity. But which writer does not? / Except for those few who are feted, adored, and / lifted so high. Until they pass from favor & are knocked / back to the second-rank, never to return to / the heights from which they sipped / the better champagnes ...

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Categories Photography Poems Poetry

Glimpses from way out there in West Virginia

There is much to rue about living in West Virginia, run, as it is, by empty suits and chuckleheads. But every time I think of leaving for a bluer state, this one floors me with the views from being way the heck out in the Mountain State.

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Categories Photography

What I could be

I could be the man the boy / dreamed of being. I could be the / boy the man dreams of remembering. / I could be the man who saved his mother. / I could be the man who fought his father, / who finally and everlastingly / thrummed some sense into / that thick Latinate, hot-blooded, / black-haired head…

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Categories Essays Poetry

After all is said, done, and launched

As David Byrne cries in "Born Under Punches": 'I'm catching up with myself!' Below are some things I am catching up on, myself, after recently launching a world premiere in West Virginia's capital city which was fabulous and exhausting to birth.

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Categories Essays

Looking in on the old grain silos upriver, before they go down

The only sounds I hear while standing at the foot of the silos is the whip and whoosh of occasional traffic on W.Va. 2, a trail mix of various birds charting out their personal space in song, and now and again the wind whistling through the portals of these abandoned legacies of a pre-industrial rural heartland.

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Categories Photography