WATERMARK

a poet’s notebook

Established 02004

fathers

November 27, 2004

Is a working father good for the child?

It’s a question society is too scared to ask: [adapted from an article by J. Murray-Smith] In an age in which everything can be bared, from marital intimacies in The Bride Stripped Bare to spiritual epiphanies (Madonna and the Kabbalah), to political and sexual proclivities, the only thing that is off the acceptable agenda for… Continue reading

Current Affairs, Politics

fathers, feminism, mothers, parenting
June 9, 2004

Remember Me

Remember me, you said, engraving your image onto my skin. You taught me to carve myself into knives, to sharpen my edges against the ones I love. Remember me, you said, crawling into my belly like a stone. You rolled up behind my eyes so I see your face reflected in the faces of the… Continue reading

Poems

daughters, fathers, memory, poem, poetry, sons

Ancestral (Artificial )Intelligence

I do not use AI to write. For me, writing is how I think, and I prefer to do it myself. If/when I post anything here that I suspect or know to be AI generated, I will tell you.

I have changed this from Artificial to Ancestral, after Abi Awomosu @ Substack. This medium was made with human history, human thought. All of it, bright and dark. It is ancestral.

Poems

Please do not assume that I am the speaker/ subject of my poems.

In these times of creative nonfiction and fictionalized memoirs, I think of the poem itself as true fiction: it is most likely not factual, but it must be true.

It is likely to be — it is best if it is — a truth I did not know before I wrote, and may not understand even then.

A poem is my way of discovering (dis-covering) what I feel; sometimes, what I think — but it is not necessarily biographical.

fathers

Is a working father good for the child?

Remember Me