S.K. Duff
Maplewood, NJ
writeskd
Poetry
... yet the heart of me, my core, remains my poetry. Words filled with hope. I feel that many creative people go through a number of shifts, cycles, and often-varied media to find where their voices are the strongest. As a painter, my poems are very visual and heavily collaged. My method of writing is much like my painting in that it is initially overpainted, then stripped back to a stronger sense of precision.
Scroll Down to see selected poems from my body of work...
The Presence of Angels
Absent of the smell of eucalyptus, the outdoors
resemble a giant Turkish bath thick with air.
The morning ferry scissors across the Hudson,
barely slicing the flannel of fog. Leaving behind
the faint cut of our existence... It’s so dense it hides
whole bridges. Pieces of New York are actually missing.
Landmarks that customarily mark our days have disappeared,
like friends who have succumbed to gray steam.
When did they become only atmosphere? Still present
in our hearts. Today’s density is surely their presence.
Heaven is full of the plague dead and today is proof,
as they hover over the city humid with loss.
There isn’t room for even one more! Our anger
has finally matched our tears, combined to smother
the city with this vapor. Jets are grounded,
traffic creeps, we can no longer travel through it...
Fog horns scream for your mercy.
God, heed this sign.Reprinted from the book This New Breed: Gents, Badboys & Barbarians 2, edited by Rudy Kikel and published by Windstorm Creative Press, 2003 – poem first appeared in The Green Mountains Review...
Kaddish at the 10th Street Baths
On autopilot through all things familiar, zombie-walked
the alphabet avenues, the watering holes where we once ported.
Gorged on latkes at Veselka, sopping tears and grease
with a big slab of yellow bread at our table. Half-conscious,
wound up here, swimming in the stench of men, different
from our Aramis boys of custom. The smells of smudged-out
stogies, gym shoes and chlorine permeating... Seeking escape
in a metal locker, I peel your perspiration from me, after having
held your birdcage ribs to my makeshift bosom. Change
in front of strangers’ bloated white bellies, legs magic-marked
with varicose veins and bypass stitches; spit curls framing
their haggered faces, like yours at “Wigstock” Men with black caps
covering crowns and gold caps hiding tobacco-stained teeth
converse in an alien tongue. Each Yiddish phrase assessing
damages, discussing me. One suggest I sign up for a massage.
“Will do you good. Ask for the Pole.” Upon a chrome table,
a work station from a White Castle hamburger stand,
I lay waiting; until the Great Oz emerges from behind
a plastic curtain: a weathered disappointment in scrubs,
turning eyes back like clocks to Saint Vincent’s. He washes
my body with an elephant ear sponge not unlike those
the orderlies tended you with... Thrashes my back
with stems of Eucalyptus: how this pleasure pains me,
recalling the night a progressive evening of East Village bars
took us one stop too far. Kneading flesh like a fresh
batch of Challah. Periodically coursing buckets of hot,
sudsy water over my stinging pores. Lying, orphaned
toy in a humid puddle. Seeing my face flushed
with feeling, he asks, “Did I hurt you?” – Not enough.
Lutheran guilt. He offers me a cigarette, Hershey bar,
some seltzer and stale Matzos as manifests
of condolence; wraps my waist in a terrycloth shroud,
as he softly rubs my reddened face. Extends his hand
not for tip. Inside the break of his forearm, a series
of branded numbers are burned within gray shrubs.
An unexpected cry parachutes out as my flesh folds
to the floor like series of pleats. Kneeling,
he drapes me over his arm like The Pieta.
Like me carrying your lifeless, 90-pound body
into Emergency for the last time. The crook
of his nose, the same as yours before sickness.
You, who were not Jewish. Nor a survivor.
Reprinted from the book This New Breed: Gents, Badboys & Barbarians 2, edited by Rudy Kikel and published by Windstorm Creative Press, 2003 – poem first appeared in Barrow Street...Still
- for MichaelA tea set smothered in silt, the image of The Times
stands still in my mind as solid as steel, the day steel
became ash. Businessmen fleeing, faces flocked
like Aborigines engaged in a terrifying initiation,
the society of a New World, one that turns boys
to men, scarring them for life. Michael can’t talk
about the pinstripes hanging in the basement, holding
particles of peers, too far gone for cleaning. Years after
the anniversary of the Apocalypse we saw an uncanny wind
kicking up at Ground Zero as if spirits were present,
accounted for... As the flannel ghost hangs untouched
under footsteps in a domestic grave – legs whipping
back and forth from the dryer’s breeze in an ominous
scissor-kick. Images thought drown by therapy and scotch
ascend each day, as the living climbs the stairs with effort,
kissing the wife good-bye and meaning it, searching still
for the light through clouds, the neatly tailored gray
missing from closets, buried beneath layers of humus.Continued Care
- for DebThis where faces with sullen eyes and artificial teeth
are left to dry into Appalachian apple dolls. Here care
takes on another meaning, something more like avoidance.
The fear of looking at life at its end. Eyewitness to more death
than living. I confess, the smell of waste and Brussel sprouts
do take some getting used to... Still, I stay, looking into
craggy eyes, like those of a caged gorillas, also captured
from their true lives. Distant relatives, with so much going on
underneath, in spite of all outward appearances. Some dance
like clothes on a line empty of bodies, yet fully inhabited.
An inevitable something snaps them back and forth.
Maybe this is why we use the expression “get the wind
knocked out of you” – Referring to that ethereal substance
that fills us, making us a present as kites gliding
over nothingness; even when it appears that one’s feet
have taken cedar boxes for shoes.Empty Bowls
The Gods of bric-a-brac
have taken up shop in this shiny
display of mud transformed,
heavily frosted in moss fantasia
and peacock blue glazes...
Each, a mini-shrine to a child's hands,
the empty bowl of a full heart
earnestly pinched and coiled
to imperfection's perfection --
laid out before us, an imaginary feast
where the angels of hunger
return to dine amongst we
mere mortals, to glutton on the sweet
delicacies of seven year old's’
most evangelical intentions.Memorial Deja Vu
All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke
Like black flies we buzz
through these archival arteries.
Parasites. Sponging chronicles
of cattle wagons and blood rivers,
diphtheria and deprivation.
Standing before a black and white sea
of shaved heads, behind me an ocean
of hair swept into a display vestibule.
A mountain of leather shoes. A landscape
of eyeglasses. So much of us taken away.
A short film shows a starving man
eating the dressing of his wounds.
While nearby Nazis grind souls
into sausages, fatten up on beef
brisket and blood pudding.
In an alcove allotted to medical tortures
practices under the guise of science,
it’s as if tables of Zyklon B have been dropped
into the air conditioning ducts. My lungs feel
heavy with the residue of suffering.
The contents of these earnest walls
seek to rehabilitate humanity, converting
the converted. Still, the Bosnian “Cleansing” lingers on.
Daily, newspapers emit inky clouds of recall,
like squid we repeatedly expel our own darkness.
Reprinted from The Ledge, Number 23, Summer 1999AIDS Baby
I held a child wild with fatigue.
Her arms flailing like a marionette: fighting
her body as if it were someone else’s.
Tears broke from her face like gunshots.
Wounded. While I held her I talked
in a honeyed voice. Oozed about
her future in the tangled ball of world.
Where the strings of injustice
can be undone if one is prepared
to face the challenge. She could
be better than President if only
she had a good night’s sleep
and a cure. She nuzzled in,
brushing my arm like a crocodile’s
belly, as she were comforting me –
accepting my dare. I felt her
tantrum whisk from the room like a
spirit leaving an angel to rest.
Reprinted from Many Mountains Moving, Fifth issue: Volume II, Number 2, 1996
To the right is a poem I submitted to Winning Writers for their annual War Poetry Contest.
Winning Writers finds and creates quality resources for poets and writers. In addition to this Contest, they also sponsor , the annual Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest.
To see this poem and others - follow the link below:
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SELECTED RECENT POETRY PUBLICATIONS
Amerika, Art & Understanding, Barrow Street, Bay Windows, Blue Violin, Body Positive, California Quarterly, Cape Rock Review, Cathartic, Chattahoochie Review, Chelsea, Chiron Review, Christopher Street, Common Journeys, Connecticut Poetry Review, COVER magazine, Erotica, Erotic Readers and Writers Online, Evergreen Chronicles, Excursus, Expressions, Fag Rag, ootwork: Paterson Literary Review, Global City Review, Green Mountains Review, Hamline Journal, Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Kiosk, Knocked, James White Review, LAMBDA Book Review, The Ledge, Many Mountains Moving, minnesota review, The Native, New Poetry Journal, Onionhead, OWL magazine, Poets Against the War (online), Poet's On, Provincetown magazine, Ruben's Quarterly, Soulspeak, Spoonfed, VICE magazine, Winning Writers.com, etc. (multiple issues for some of these periodicals, included in as many as eight editions) AND MANY MORE...
SELECTED POETRY BOOKS
THIS NEW BREED: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians II, Creative Windstorm Press
Voices of Courage and Healing, HarperCollins
When Life Mates Die: Stories of Love, Loss and Healing, Fairview Press
We Are All Friends Here, Provincetown Arts Press
American Poetry Confronts the 1990's, Black Tie Press
Maplewood, NJ
writeskd
