Story edits and a new poem!

My new short story, The Prototype is now on sale at Amazon and B&N and Smashwords! It's been edited one last time over the weekend. It's $0.99! (It's also in the side bar!) ----->

I am also working on a fourth poetry collection. I don't have a title for it yet but I do have  a poem that is nearly complete and I will post it here. It is copyrighted. All rights reserved.

The Trees of Lincoln Street

I remember the trees of Lincoln street.

Beneath their leaves I would sit.

A green isle of deep shade

on the merciless days of summer.

How grand they seemed

stretching from 4th to 1st avenue

like god-hands their branches were covering;

a refuge from a scorching sun.

But one day I came tripping by

and they'd all been chopped down.

Not even a mean stump remains.

Only rods, concrete and cones

and tracts of stinking mud.

No soft, green ivy underneath,

no place for the fluttering moths at night.

Nowhere at all to take in the breeze,

no place to sit and take one's ease.

The trees that were tall and great,

old and standing since forever,

they are gone with nothing left but dead land.

There is no shade from the heat on gray concrete,

which is why I no longer go down Lincoln street.

This poem was inspired by my experiences going down S.W. Lincoln St. in downtown Portland. I once hada white van and the engine blew a gasket so I had to walk to work in the mornings. This was when I had a schedule that required me to be at work before the buses were running. I would pass down Lincoln and see mice (and rats) running under this vast isle of trees down the middle of the street. There would also be moths that would flutter around these trees as well. During the summer, when I had to go back to work in the afternoons (I work split-shift) and the temperature would be in the 90's or hotter, those trees gave wonderful shade. I and many other people would sit on the benches near the isle and the trees were so big that they would shade the entire street on both sides from their isle in the middle of the street. Sometimes, walking down that stretch of Lincoln was like walking into a magical forested place; a different place. It really was magical. But progress demanded that they all be cut down. every last one. Progress, funny enough, demanded by the organization I work for - which shall remain nameless. But it really saddens me that progress and nature cannot seem to exist side by side.

Nature seems to always lose. In the short run, anyway.