Jose Padua: Driving Out of Town on the Day Before What Would Have Been My Mother’s 93rd Birthday
she would have loved the blue and yellow tones of this early evening
Pennsylvania sky as busy as a symphony over the landscape of this small town
so far from Asia
Jose Padua: The Summer of Rock and Other Fragile Ecstasies
But it was also another summer of war,
the way just about every summer is a summer of war.
Jose Padua: The Shape I’m In
it was the middle of a Lower East Side winter and the heat
in my apartment that night was up so high, after being completely out
for a week, that I couldn’t help but feel sexy, knowing I had pork buns
in my tiny fridge
Jose Padua: These Years of Thinking Dangerously
When
the beautiful confusion of dreams becomes a stranger
to my waking hours I start to panic.
Jose Padua: A Poem for Jimi Hendrix and All the Superheroes of My Youth Who Lacked the Power to Live Forever
what was really interesting
wasn’t what they could do
but what they couldn’t do
Jose Padua: Another Friday Night Lost in My Head vs. the Collected Songs of the Filipino Genius
the people have
heard enough of everything
that’s real and want nothing
more than something
that’s easy to believe
Jose Padua: Orange
Auntie Nellie was the first dead person I ever
saw and she was lying in her coffin in the church
in Orange, Virginia after spending her last years
in something like a dark mist…
Jose Padua: Reflections on a Song by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson and Other Intervals Between Two Points in Time
Looking out
the kitchen
window in the
dim early evening
Jose Padua: A Free Jazz Solo for the New Wave Sky
a Saturday afternoon when summer was a deep blue heaven
I could crawl into with my hands waving in the air like long goodbyes
as soon as the sky turned dark
Jose Padua: Blonde on Blonde
telling each other our secrets,
breathing in the sea salt air
and breathing it out again,
dedicating our lives to each other
Michael Simms: Strangers at the Door | Robert Gibb, Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Jose Padua
Here I want to call attention to three mature poets who have done extraordinary work, but have not, in my opinion, received the attention they deserve, and in the process explore different ways one can be an “outsider” in the poetry field.
Jose Padua: These Rhymes Out to All the Nations
every day we stay alive is a reminder
that the universe is a thing of great natural beauty
Jose Padua: Nirvana
enjoying the
path I’m taking
and the unobscured view
of blue mountains
as my hair
slowly turns
gray
Jose Padua: This Curved Road Toward Space
The last time I was charmed
simply by someone’s good looks
it was something like 1963.
