The Poetry of Gary M Powell

Like Joan of Arc

2025-09-13T14:55:00.005-05:00

In a Perfect World, and Right Mind

In a perfect world, and right mind, if it was
I would charge with an invective of questions
With some militance, the stuff of Joan of Arc

Manifesting a certain power, moving masses
Armored in dark, but righteous Armani suits
Against the climate crisis, or my failing nation

Instead, numb to it all, a stolid distraction
Is this salsa still good? How are my stocks?
Is Mom ok, or even getting my texts?

Without audience, I play the strings of poem
Mining symbol deep into the cerebral desert
Holding paradise with the salacious tongue

Playing Jesus to the menstruating woman
Racking up points in another hallucination
Spearing the infidels of indifference

In a focused world, on some clear hilltop
I am Joan of Arc, of salubrious mind
Lifting a torch to a pyre of radiant screens

Here's how to avoid nightmares

2025-09-04T14:47:00.006-05:00

How to Avoid Nightmares

Nightmares, like werewolves, always uninvited
To the neural afterparty, hairy and gnashing teeth
Always wearing their matted furry cloaks
When the dim moon’s miasmatic reflections
Penetrate our rooms with fury and distress
As we hide under the most defenseless sheets

How to avoid the teeth and claws of nightmares:
Look out a window, preferably at the dusky sky
But do not see a bird on limb or in flight, or else
Your dreams will soar into the realm of sick or die
Tell a child it’s all a scam and to not grow up
Observe a cancer patient, then look them in the eye

Touch yourself with honey up to your collarbone
Lift three fingers of each hand to rub along
Your skull’s protruding bumps that you’ve forgot
Imagine how it weighs on a shelf in a catacomb
Lick the back of a photograph of you as a child
Dial an anonymous number and sing a tragic song

Cross your fingers in the tightest clench of hope
Begin to shine like you are a newly minted coin
Then count backward the days of your life
Inflate your lungs as if blown into by a fan
Considering why you often jolted in your sleep
Ponder as you exhale your one fragile lifespan

Finally, to avoid the chilling ones you most fear
Those that lie in wait in your alleyway of night
Where you are most vulnerable in the deepest way
The ones that make you hemorrhage open wide
Make sure to grind your teeth until they crack to bits
And sleep on your left side, or was it the right?

Happy twenty-eighth to everyone!

2025-08-28T13:50:00.007-05:00

The Twenty-eighth Day of August

I know you celebrate this day too
With a planet of kids who quiver with glee
for the 28th of August. How lucky
We are to have the Twenty-Eighth

A very special day around the world
Like it’s our very last day together
Fires lit for dancing around and around
Wondering, arms raised, how to live

Today, 367,000 umbilical cords will be cut
Final signatures dashed onto papers for divorce
The last breath for some, 173,000 sized-up in
Shrouds, furnaces, caskets, pits and pyres

Such an important day we revel in
Parties in such lovely nations that we live
And other places, Chicago, one and a half
Persons will be murdered by handguns

Today, countless excruciating paper cuts
With nearly 500 organs lifted from cadavers
Set into the woozy chests of the unconscious
Who will awake to sons and daughters dancing

For me, it's just a day. I’ll take my coffee
With milk on the patio 6 days into retirement
Work the garden. Otherwise, on this special day
I will try, beyond all odds, to give birth

Memory, tail of a primeval beast

2025-08-27T14:14:00.002-05:00

It is as if It’s not enough

The babbling brook of the fish tank in the kitchen      That’s enough
Dreaming fish      who do not know they are enough      and are enough
Is enough      The eleven sixteen on the clock      of Thursday night     enough
After blueberries have fallen in the street     the size of hail

Not enough the young woman who asked twice     to see my fruit trees
Not enough     those fruit trees a year away    from fruit    not enough    a chat
With Gabriela    on a screen by the Mediterranean     Definitely not enough     to lay
Naked in a bed of human sheets     with storm drips      the tap and groan of drains

Note the sound of each bubble rising    with the deep fish    See how moonlight
Coats color upon them    Enough light    floods the kitchen floor
Pouring a little wine across the evening floor   A percentage enough
To share    if my children      my girlfriend      and friends    were here

Let’s concede the condor is enough     The pepper and salt    together, enough
Probably neuroscience is enough     Enough for now of climate change
Looking up at a blackened sky that pops with beams of stars    so we are told
Will always be sufficient to be the way     it is

And it may just be enough     to swallow the wine     bitter, but loud
As memory     tail of the primeval beast     loneliness     that haunts present
With past     that is as acrid as it is empty   as the fish floating in still motion
To the time honored horn     of the urban train

On a flight to Tunis

2025-08-27T14:05:00.001-05:00

Beautiful Blood

On a flight to Tunis

You are sleeping on my lap

We will awake in a bed

Beneath a prayer to Allah

And eat dates

At the shore for lunch

By the Phoenician walls

Where migrants dash

How cool your skin

After these Andalusian days

Days of fortress and climb

Of conquest after conquest

War in Gaza, bombings

In Tehran, migrant raids

A tax bill that will, again

Cripple the poor

Luckily, through it all

We saw the Museo de Picasso

Learned how to misconstrue

What is seen

How to reposition forms

Let go of the elements of color

Calling attention to that

Which you will not see

Studied how to annihilate

The logic of nations that fixes

Our species on butchery

And other bad manners

Learned how to penetrate

The clouds with lances

Of pigment until they drip

With beautiful blood

A moment that changed the way I see

2025-08-27T14:02:00.001-05:00

Stung

A moment that changed the way I see
Myself in surf on my trip to Tunisia:
Hardly a highlight it hurt so hard and long
On an evening when the sun was gone
After burning us bad in the day

Wading into the cool Mediterranean
Off Hammamet, deep enough where the sea
Moves you where it wants, and you are left
To wonder on its pull. Dark enough the mind
Cannot contend with the possibilities

It was in the second I was watching the sky
Lit by a gone day, dark enough for stars
That the creature stung its fiery lash
Maybe it was caught between my ribs and arm
Or just wild bent on cancelling the night

Precisely at the moment that I was letting go
Of the worries on the beach and considering
Straight ahead of me, in the far distance:
Gaza, caught between the Army and Hamas
That’s when the thing swam up to strike

I could not solve the war of the eastern shore
Instead, a little agony in my side
And a new way of thinking about the tide
How perilous the calm, reliable waves
How painful the fusillade of stings they bear

The Principles of Earth

2025-08-27T13:59:00.003-05:00

The Meaning of Life

To whom can one turn for the meaning of life
When a powerful distraction is a mango and knife?
Turn to the experts:

Neuroscientists speak of expanding consciousness
In magnetic resonance with the body at rest
In the sweetest homeostasis

Buddhists meditate on sutras channeling clarity
Of fire in mind, orchestrating the eight
Guides on an elegant path

Bending thoughts against steel, the ironsmiths
Hammer impurities to oblivion, a metaphor
For purity through elimination

Writers speak of pounding away at the keyboard
For plot, booze and cigarette past midnight
Hanging on every word

Seamstresses are all about patterns, sizing up
What will be cut, stitching together disjointed
Slices into a future shroud

Astrophysicists reconnoiter how tiny you are
Modeling consciousness on a subatomic level
In the universe, infinitesimally you

Why not trust the auto mechanic, wrenching
A gestalt of organs in the whole machine
To keep from breaking down?

Or the glassblower warping an expanding globe
Of randomly arranged atoms of molten solid
As vague and precarious as you?

How to answer this question of life?
Each can help with the trained and worthy task
of savoring with skilled salvo

Already there before you, dangling, ripe
Mango of opportunity in red-orange and green
Lauding the principles of earth

How To Say, You're Not Ready For The World?

2025-05-21T15:21:00.001-05:00

How To Say, You're Not Ready For The World?

How to say, You’re not ready for the world?
How to say, Beware…/Don’t…/Remember to…?

I’m not sure about your future, son
After making war with the animals, the climate
Wears a hole in hope’s traditional gown
And deep hollows hang in the mirror
Of your Mother

How will you fly the world without my wings
Stretched over yours when you leap?
Will yours unfurl?

“Look father!” you say, “Papa!”
In the distance: A speck
Gasping, I see you soar, your shadow careens the city, the world
Your movements, the questions of sages

Our plasticized brains and seas!
Nevertheless
You have unfurled

When The Fascists Come

2025-05-21T14:58:00.003-05:00

When The Fascists Come

If the fascists take over, will there still be flesh
That seizes up in awe on the arms of the sound
Of the boy channeling Chopin's piano?

When the fascists take aim, will the lovers on the beach
Singing from their deep and sturdy gaze
Hear the rifling in their own green voices?

As they leap from trucks (and they will have trucks)
Will they pause in heavy duty boots to listen
To the guitarist plucking the quietest cloud?

Mostly, in these times of fascism, I wonder
If people will clap along with the thunder, if troops
Will outshine the sax, if blooms will turn to fruit.

Will we still sing when we are deep and well alone
Hallelujah? And will it seem to us, when the fascists come
Like cherries hanging on a chorus of song?

You may not see Horaijima

2025-02-16T19:12:00.003-06:00

All Is Heiwa

You have had to wait
For the midpoint of your lifespan
To learn about Horaijima, island of
Everlasting happiness

Paradise Island
So very close, yet, as they say
You will never get there alive
With all there is behind

Behind you, desire
Across silences, a line of ripples
As eight geese caress the waters
In a line of purpose

Intrinsically paddling
Around and around Horaijima
White and black and mottled
And you notice, blinking

Wide-eyed
At their offering: A collective
Swimming salute to the banks
Across from Paradise

Where powerful black pine
The bonsaid pinus thunbergia
Poke the sun that follows the path
Of the curving shore

You may not see Horaijima
So close it is so far, its sugi, straight
Cedar Into sky. However, your body
Curves against mine

On the banks of Keiunto
Island of the Auspicious Cloud
Where all is heiwa, all is heiwa
Again, heiwa

Gray Go The Thoughts

2024-09-21T08:49:00.003-05:00

Every thought is the same
It might start with the shoes
And end with the dark night of the soul
Or a student who flew off a cliff outside of Seattle
But the colors are all there, bright or dim
Maybe black and white, but generally gray
Gray go the thoughts, like soldiers

Sprinting across the pitted distance

Between boredom and terror, their only weapon, words

Some thoughts lean into dismay, or are
Cuddled into the chest of your father

And yet, they all smell at the bottom of your disposal

Its rot always there for you to reach in

And don't forget
How to forget
About that

Make the thought lofty, like the birthday cake you are making for your seven year old
Frost it up without regard to health
Or climate change
And especially what lurks
At the bottom of your disposal

Just put what is real on the cake
I mean the thought
Kick its ass with authenticity
To the ceiling of the cave
With candor like cavemen
Discussing their slow death from disease

Let the thought run away from you forever, unleashed
The fur of which shimmering

Black or white or gray

Bunny Mind

2024-09-21T08:32:00.000-05:00

Once more, I've counted the stones on my patio
And measured out this season's branches of peach, cherry and pear
Again, I've contemplated the slow growth of green
In the water of the bird bath
And only now lay eyes upon a bunny a few feet away

We assess each other's risk
Before I keep down in my unsettled journal
It stays deep-staring into everywhere present
I envy how alert it lasts, how the eye
Takes the whole evening in, through the black marble portal
Of its bunny being

The dim light is enough to manage words
While its faint heartbeat barely creates at all
Wondering with bunny mind, I'm pretty sure
My friend is meditating between the compost and the Buddha
Fondling the very core of a peaceful universe

Most definitely, he feels how lucky this patch of grass
Holding me aloft on this first Fall night
Safe from owls beside this man-being crossing and uncrossing his legs
Scrawling whimsically with a stick in his paws
Whose chest heaves with breath and eyes fretfully dart

Heavy, this three and a half pound brain
Hearing the crickets' raging agony
And not the still hum of our short and cacophonous lives

Remember the Water

2024-08-24T22:05:00.015-05:00

I've just learned that Lake Powell is an artificial lake. This is a jolt, as my last name is Powell. Thoughts of inauthenticity flood in. I begin to question the pure-water associations floating the mind for nearly half a century.

I rode around that lake at age eighteen on a Kawasaki, and swam nude for the first time in a deep blue cove where the waters slapped hard on barren cliffs. Though I was feeling extraordinarily free as adolescent on a motorcycle trip, I couldn't escape the parameters of identity as manifested between the name of this paradise and myself. Powell on the road signs, the name of the waters, and there on my driver's license.

Lake Powell's coastline was warped by massive undulations just like my adolescence. It was longer than the West Coast of the U.S.A, or something unbelievable like that.

Come to find out it wasn't born until the 1960s. Just like me. An electric and recreational project like so many postwar marriages. Glen Canyon would be filled up, yet it would lay there underneath for decades, under the heaviness of water.

It's taken twenty years of drought to reduce its levels to a kind of desert oasis, says the clickbait. Some want the levels back, for boating, the beauty, for the economy. Farmers, merchants, indians, the tax base, they're all fighting hard. And of course the others; the natural order of things.

The Colorado River now moves slowly on its level plains swamped in muddy waters, becoming a verdant hub of plant and animal life. You find things here that haven't thrived since the early sixties, says a biologist.

When you are depleted, your levels lower than decades, consider Lake Powell. Consider the birds on their new limbs, and their meals crawling up trunks. Yet listen to the indian drums echoing off re-emergent cliffs, a farmer snuffing a dirt clod between his thumb and index finger, or a cash register in silent remembrance of higher levels.

But mostly, remember the water, how unbelievably wet and vigorous against the body after a long ride in, lapping, lapping.

I asked a Dalit man if he liked his job.

2024-08-22T19:38:00.000-05:00

Upon Asking a Man If He Liked His Job

I ask a man if he likes his job
As it’s a dreadful industry, death
Stacking sticks of wood, then shoveling
Their white remains into the depths

His torso is varnished in the sun
Its glow and he work side by side
Kissing sweaty on the quarried blocks
Slick and final and steep

To the river where the dead
Are wrapped and left for ash
Where holy grounds meet flow
In layers of trash and weed

Spent wreaths and ribbons cast
On stone cut rough and polished underfoot
Textiles, awash in waves and wind
Tossed in the sorrow of piles

His white rough cotton wrap turned grey
Is soaked in perspiration and fume
The burn and wind enwrap his body
Against a sky that scorches flesh

His squint dark eyes accepting time
At the holiest of spots in heat
The incendiary force of which by choice
They are brought in wraps of orange

When the wind is wrong, the air
In its ironic humid smoke
Wafts up the steps like barbeque
Still months later in the throat

You could call it camaraderie
Beside him in humanity
If my ticket hadn’t cost more than
He makes in a year

At the lowest of the castes
He rides these steps of fate
I ask him if he likes his job
And his response lights a flame

His father, and his father, and so on
Six generations to his knowledge
Counting firewood by body weight
Stacking, lifting, shoveling

God wants me to do this
He says, through a smile of teeth
Stoic and willing, unencumbered
By the larger question

But by a man lying nearby surrounded
With fresh leaves, an incense cake
At his head, his wife leaning
Over his purple sunken eyes

My fellow gazes on the dead man too
Imperceptibly nodding, sizing him up
Slow, like a heartbeat, counting
His weight in sticks and blaze

In the Oaxacan Waves

2024-08-01T13:11:00.003-05:00

Oaxacan Waves

Up and down goes the
Parisian woman
Not a day over thirty
In the Oaxacan waves

Not quite sixteen,
My son, the lucky boy
Swims the swells. Blue
Pacific glee is all around

Together in water, about as much
As life allows a son
Freckles and teeth, as
Her breasts dance the surf

Minnows underneath
Dart unrestricted in their youth
As if, in silver and gold
They too sea

Can I cleave to this, stirred
By plump je ne sais quoi
And skirt the sorrows of the seas?
Can he escape the drowning?

We laugh, degajé to death
The evidence is in
She twirls at impact
As he dives under

You Are Lucky

2024-08-01T13:01:00.002-05:00

You are lucky, you tell yourself. You saw it happen: A tree that sprung from the soil two hundred years ago sprawls along the ground. It had bent in winds so much more hurling than these.

This evening, on your walk through the woods, you've seen it fall! The mouth is agape, gathering and gathering. You watch, watch the space the tree had inhabited. Sky pours into it's space. No one is around except you, and the animals have gone silent at their limbs.

You reflect on the initial crack that turned your head, the slow motion of its falling, and the air that swept up in a warm gust. Yet, you mostly stand at attention. It's as if by waiting, the dissipated sounds might be followed by pheromones, or a breakthrough. There will be time for calculations later. Concerns for your safety haven't even occurred. You have witnessed something sacred in this moment. You stand quiet with ringing in your ears from the cracking and that final snap of its trunk. This is worth more than what you've been eyeing in the showroom, or real estate, or trips you've craved for a while. As your eyes close, you recall friendships as a child, how your lungs filled and fainted with laughter--how everything smelled and everything meant and everything spacious.

Spacious like the gap in the canopies before you when your eyes lift. And when a single bird begins to chirp again, you know it's time to keep going. And so you do, with the sun now beckoning at its extreme angle.

What Can You Do?

2024-08-01T12:41:00.004-05:00

What Can You Do?

Although the air quality alerts
You're hiking again
For clarity. A determination to
Live some way or another

Or have your lungs
Fill and faint with laughter
When you come across the poor thing
Laying there ahead

In the calm best light
With the sun looking curious
From the haze of the fires in Canada
And there she is in front of you

What can you do
But soak a cracker in water
Lay down a few cherries
Avert your eyes

Step back on the path
To ease its alarm
Decide that you cannot fathom
Ending its life

Watch it spin
On its dusty side
The back legs limp
Make the center

In circles of pain
From a raptor
Affliction, or snapping
Of spine

What can you do
But soak a cracker in water
Lay down a few cherries
And carry on

Except for my Sons

2024-08-01T12:16:00.001-05:00

School is closed again today

Half way there, I slow peddle to a dock, lean my bike against the railing

The color of lake is the same as sky And the rail is gray with shadows. The grayscape penetrated only by a rising carp about to die

The Court of the Oceans had made it clear that we might sue for their warming

All picnics are cancelled through town. Children will stay on screens in bedrooms while fans churn the air

After the storm, trees and choirs and fun runs and electricity are down.

Down it all

Except for my sons, I would dive into the deepest sky. Hop the rails to some cobalt forest. Close the system down

I would swim to the wide dark center, close to where it all began

Except for my sons, blooming extraforcial beings. And this duck and I, floating on a curtain of dock, sharing this gray and open expanse, free as birds

A Holy Place

2024-08-01T12:02:00.003-05:00

A Holy Place

You may sit wherever you please. Here, a menu, there are the services. Fan blades begin to whirl above your table

Burnt oil wafts up and out the open wall over the colors of vendors in the market

Yes, you'd like water and fresh coffee. The market women note you are dining at a place they will never

The one with menus handed to the customer. Where the silverware matches, with tablecloths, glossy, new and red

And you utter thank you again and again. That is a fine choice. You sit proud and contented, the only one in the room

Some places are sacrosanct. Incense proves this, as does the pretty print of Shiva hovering above waters

And the restaurateur standing attentive in a Pepsi mirror

In The Clouds

2024-08-01T11:40:00.005-05:00

In the Clouds

In the clouds, there will be no shaking journals or dancing diaries
Zero neatly scrawled pages of velum, with tea stains or tears
Absolutely no outpouring of love, nor bloodletting of any sort
So many confessions will be spared online

It is to say the future will read nothing of our discontentment
Spared the strata of our favorite illusions, in bound pages
Honest, unedited, discovered in its feces and scars
Instead, the clouds will pour constantly of disinfected rain

We will wonder how paper. If rough drafts. Contemplate pens
How the earth could not stop bleeding. But mostly,
What early man scrawled and spat at the rudiments
Of sheets

A few nights on the Uros Islands of Lake Titicaca, Peru

2022-08-20T18:00:00.001-05:00

Uros

You are tired after ten hours on the luxury train
Taxis and dark-sky boat to the floating islands
Tonight’s bed has twenty-four kilos of blankets
You cannot sleep for the flapping corrugated scraps
Clacking and warping to the milky way

Yet it’s perfect--your body is saying--says a blue
Blip somewhere on earth that is your body
We are weaving sapphire love in the hovel of a room
Unabashed as the sheet of stars across Lake Titicaca
Aloft, upon wobbly mats of totora reeds

The island waves. They must dream of cutting
Hoisting, drying, laying, laying reeds to stay afloat
Could it be that feet sink in with every step?
It could be his knock at 8:37am, handing me my phone
Which has charged in his hut, or how he tells me

I have received 4 calls in the middle of his night
It could be Mateo, who is three, wearing my glasses
Whose face is wide as a handmade quinoa cake
Or his sister, Geraldin, in a dance between Mateo
And adulthood. Or, it could be the grandfather on the roof

Or is he the father?—dismantling boards to move in a day
A whole building, wrenching nails from the roofbeam,
Sounding in the lake breezes like andean birds
Or last night, climbing the teetering ladder for a
Dissertation, above the lapping waves, on sky

An entire island of reeds blown by the wind, creaking
It is to say, disorientation, and you have slept late
into the natural float of time, and coca tea, and reeds
Have been gathered and the man at the apex must
Descend to rap on your door with your phone

Going with Elliott

2022-07-04T16:21:00.002-05:00

Going With Elliott

In the morning, nerves crook like they always
And birds sing dirty again, uninterrupted by
Trucks charging double sound below their canopies
I can’t decide if the room is the height of heaven
Or, with these low-slung thoughts, an abyss

I smell more like my grandpa every day, while
On the coffee table, a borrowed map I splayed out
With a glossy sky--exotic and crisp--goes limp
After a humid night, draping like a tablecloth
And I wonder if I’ll be punished by the library

We will go there, this new woman in my life
This place with border crossings and altitude
With the dead curled into pits in the arid hills
And as interesting as the trip folds out to be
All I can imagine are her breasts in the Andes

Gusts make leaves quake on the Fourth of July
Will we get on for weeks in travel’s centrifuge
As we do in clumps of live and wayward hours?
Lastly, will the branches of another continent
Chirp as singlemindedly, beckoning the hoary day?

Listening to Jazz on a Saturday Morning After the Invasion of Ukraine

2022-04-03T21:51:00.003-05:00

Listening to Jazz on a Saturday Morning After the Invasion of Ukraine

What hope gives us, I note while making breakfast
Is a palm facing up, a gesture beyond words
Not a course of action, nor to defend against
Lomaya dveri--in Russian--breaking down doors

Remember your childhood, how it was possible
To gather fragments into place, order the chaos
To cypher the codes to someday understand it all
And the stars would not blow out in night?

Blown into dust, broomed like a mandala by monks
In a drone chant, this hope, scattered as it is
Through woods unknown, to its borders where silhouetted
Trees burst with sticks and leaves thrust into spring

That’s all we’ve got: This peculiar hope, the stars and sticks
Listening to jazz on a Saturday morning after the invasion of Ukraine
What can one do but hope about a war, cracking eggs
Being careful of shells and the counter measures?

As if we are getting to know what has been for years a thing unacknowledged

2022-01-16T16:26:00.009-06:00

The Arne Norell Sirocco Safari Chair

My sons bring up the chair
That no one likes to sit in
In the corner of the living room

One has looked it up:
Cognac leather, rosewood
Era, Sweden, and so on

With more value in pairs
Yet our mouths hang open
At a lonely chair’s yield

We hover around it
Concoct an enigma
Touch its skin

As if we are getting to know
What has been for years
A thing unacknowledged

Just a chair in the corner
Slid carefully over maple
Into the heart of the room

Sitting, surrounded, I feel
The supple charisma of 16
Year old patina

How much could you get?

What would you buy instead?

Go their young tongues

Unlikely, its new value:
Bounded by children
In a stark light

If only I could stop remembering

2021-12-19T18:11:00.006-06:00

From Here to There, and Back Again

I found an antique door to match
The others upstairs and finally got it hung
In my 121 year old home
With some penache

Restoring something to its original
A cause celebre, or chasing after the wind
Says King Solomon. Nonetheless
I’m looking up

The neck muscles groan a little
And a headache comes on, but the tangles
of the hammock don’t keep me from
Rocking a while

With another cup of coffee
Remembering what responsibility was
When the kids were young, when rocking
Was not for me

It would all be capacious, this space of life
Except that the man on the internet cautions
To carry a load heavy enough
To hurt a little

Even if you’re taking up a burden
From here to there, and back again
To fog the lense, the omniscient lense
Of your pathos

And so, I have hung a door
With precision, drilled the latch strike, refurbished
The dusty innards of the mortise lock to click snug
Shut like 1904

If only I could stop remembering
The laughter, going back and forth to Minneapolis
And the resolute smile of the woman
I loved