Current projects and a poem

This summer I have been working on two book projects concurrently.  One is the upcoming novel you all are already getting familiar with through my earlier posts on this blog.  The other I have not spoken publically of before now.  That second project is a small book of poetry, a chapbook if you will, of poems mostly on the theme of my moving out West from the East coast and all the changes those things have worked deeply inside me.  The title of the poetry book is Come West: Secular and Sacred Poems, and it has a kind of "Cowboy Poet" flavor to it in many places.

One published work that has already been on the internet is a poem that first appeared in The Beatnik Cowboy last year.  It is called "Hot Sand" and the poem below is just as it first appeared in Beatnik Cowboy last August.

Hot Sand

 

The gusts blast like furnace-fire

In this desert land,

And never does the heat seem more oppressive

Than now,

An oven-blast and a scorched-earth policy.

Such an arid heat that it doesn’t even allow

For sweat,

Much less mercy.