We’re all put to the test… but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it?-Charles Morse, The Edge I am a special forces operative. I enter the lobby of the Daley Plaza and I quickly survey the security looking for any holes. The…
Poetry
The Doorway
The door banged open dustily halting the men’s filthy conversation. She paused there in the opening, a sudden wind taking its cue to wrap around her silken form. Red swollen lips threw daggers at the men. Her word leveled with the finality of a commandment, a gale force whisper, the…
Poetry
The Death of Dusty Brown
I took the reins from Anne and mounted up. The sun was setting across a fall landscape of tall grass which licked my stirrupped heels. I was looking forward to riding again not having ridden a horse in some time. The feel was familiar and I looked forward to the…
Poetry
Ascendancy
The rain falls down the glass, time-worn cracks tracing the road map of my life. Practical considerations have no ascendancy in the pointed monologue of memory or the inner dialog of reason. I can see the light coming through my bathroom window and dancing like music alighting on glistening copper…
Photography
Black and White vs. Color
There are a lot of good photos which would work equally well in color or black and white. The same can be true for leaders of nations, ice cream flavors, and just about anything that is good at the surface as well as underneath. The problem comes along when people…
Photography
UNODIR
Sometimes after a long 12 hour day when I haven’t had a chance to eat lunch or breakfast, and the valet at the restaurant I was just shooting photos at asked me impolitely to move my car because I was parked “illegally”, in his words, in his precious parking lot,…
Photography
Winning and competition
Every step we take is either closer to or further from the land of the living. The problem is, we never know which direction we are heading in until we get there. These words from Jarhead are a good way of indicating the importance of winning. As a kid, I…
Photography
Assassin's Lament
Many of you who have been to my apartment or seen me at work around bugs know that I have a particular sensitivity toward all of the creatures that inhabit the world. This is perhaps best elicited in my so called, “Catch and Release Program,” of bug wildlife management. Here…
Poetry
Love’s Dreamy Breath
Love is air. Lovelessness is the drowning after. I float now in that water. Were I suspended in sweet air, you would see the roses in my cheeks and the clover in my souls. But as you peer past the surface of my rippled sky, your eyes will ungrey a…
Photography
The Real World: Virtuality
Tonight on the Real World: Virtuality, we venture into cyberspace to watch real people presenting virtual people watching a real shuttle launch on a virtual movie screen constructed by real people virtually in a virtual world called Second Life. As an outsider to this mega-project, I can easily say that…
Photography
A Cage of My Own Making
The first time I entered freefall, the moment I fell from the sky, I immediately wanted to get BACK into the plane. If I could have reached out Plastic Man-style and grabbed the edge of the plane’s door, I would have held on for dear life as the instructor attached…
Poetry
Blessed and Damned
I am a luminous being. Look into my tomb and you will see my outline visible as though looking through a veil of cheesecloth. My identity is not the product of man-made fallibility. I have been illuminated by brilliant shafts of light cast about from many sources. That is why…
Poetry
Plump Berries
First I saw the cherry. Then I saw the long dark sweet ink trickling entangled down her creamy curves. Should I spoil her freshly fallen field of pale snow? Would I ever recover from sinfully sampling her unsophisticated sensuality? A hellfire might await me after such a kiss, or a…
Photography
Shot down
All’s fair in love and war. Love and War. Comparing the realities of a divorce to the realities of the war on terror and 9/11 seem fitting unfortunately. The brown skin on a banana tasting just as bad as that old peach. Soldiers of love and war can be paralleled…