Daniel Wilcox

Daniel Wilcox’s wandering lines have appeared in many magazines including The Danforth Review, The Write Room, Wild Violet, The Copperfield Review, The Recusant, and Word Riot. His first book of poetry, Dark Energy, was published by Diminuendo Press. Before that he hiked through Cal State University Long Beach (Creative Writing), Montana, Pennsylvania, Europe, Palestine/Israel...worked in a mental institution, and taught students literature. He lives with his wife on the central coast of California.



Ventura Beach

cleaning up

on the beach street,

swaying date palms feather-dusk

fading crimson

but miss

gang scrawl

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Markers

The pressure

Presses down, sure,

All four billion years

On to gleaming cars,

Glaring windows

On Maui's narrow beach shore--

Juxed up against a worn

Row of ‘withered’ gravestones

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Cape May Light

Back then

Her young wedding eyes glistened

More than the prism-ed Fresnel lens

That centered our lives

On the Jersey shore;

Now here,

From our rising 'light-tower', my sweeteyes’

Warm loving brilliance still

Signals out guidance through violent storms,

To those lost in the raging sea of conflict,

And her belled joy sounds through blinding fog

To endangered others--

So many lost ships passing in the night.

She’s a Keeper.

____________________________

The Mystery of Modern Life

In the listless California Court of Youth--     

The ceiling hangs above

Ulterior of design, with modern

Swung high, fluorescent lights

And metal struts--

Chuted up to emptiness

Two stories heaving roof-ward

(Rap on wood; pound on the sky)

The narrow void vaults to exposed

Plywood and 2 by 4's held by gray bolts;

Barren, a structural stark

Harkening unsheltered.

And hanging down

Five sprinklers,
Ugly like brazen guit,

Flaming silver gilting.

No windowing

No clarity to reveal or to break,

But plenty of blank concrete walls, like a pound

And within the court-slow winnowing of chaff,

Young human flotsam of driven

Dysfunction; the noisy squeak and clatter,

(Much flutter clapping, endless clamoring,

Like a shrill barking), of the air conditioner

That assaults all

Below, and the rising and lowing

 Of the murmur of twisted throats--

Aberrant sons, a few daughters.

Waiting, they’re caught in a catacomb

Of tarnished amber stare; tagged.

(Maybe hiding Cerberus' baleful gaze),

All bluster or snarling survivor.

The intercom calls the next delinquent.

In this blockhouse of modern design;

No light from without, one youth stands

Jaded with a hardened glaze.

He pulls a timid

Chihuahua from under his coat,

A large dog bark collar tight around its neck,

And passes the quivering skin and bones

To his pensive mother.

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Missouri’s ‘Job’

Said one surviving son—

“My Father, Father, why?”

Against the suffering onslaught,

According to ministers, 

The priestly ‘preying’

The brass knuckles slam,

Supposedly a gangster god’s attack;

Lacerated and lambasted humans

By the shaking of wrathful condemnations,

Ravaged by Calvin’s sovereign despot

Slaughtered in another mighty wind*--

That savages so many around the world,

The global news gone timelessly old,

Voltaire’s Lisbon, ‘jobbed’ again.

Selah.

"This is a miracle," after the torrential wind,

Intoned one smiling survivor,

Not the slash tornadoing through or his quivering

After the savage attack, not nature’s debacle

Nor the historical, but rather

When his little sister, a virgin delivered

From the wombed ruins

One among countless thousands injured;

Not seven days later, nor triple sixes!

Beware the sign,

Only hundreds dead, and a few

Stained ones of the public cloth;

So many sons and daughters who do not rise;

To quote the Preacher, “Mere breath,”

Another ‘whether-vein’ rake-off

For now torn-assunder winds flail the supplicants,

Selah,

The  memorial ‘patients’ of Job.

One wept, endlessly

Crucified weeping.

*Job 1:19 and world news articles        

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