A taste of my skewed view of the world
Designed with WordPress
The gathering begins as tears
and evolves into celebration
of a beautiful loving person.
Your legacy
is family, friends
and joyful memories.
You are no longer with us,
but always present
in our hearts.
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 284/365.
How many pasts exist that we are unaware of
because they weren’t recorded on tablets or papyrus
in a language we can comprehend?
How many pasts do we fail to acknowledge because
they didn’t leave behind what we recognize as fossils,
pasts that we can’t perceive because
we no longer recognize
complex messages in plain sight?
Petroglyphs that we claim to understand
as mystical spiritual writing
are probably graffiti—ancients thumbing their noses at us, those ignorant future people.
So-called primitives rolling on the floor
laughing in disbelief at premonitions of people
dumb enough to damage their own planet.
How much do we truly know
about what we don’t know?
How many messages have we
misidentified and mislabeled as
“primitive” or “savage”?
Is it us, through our close-mindedness,
who are primitive and are becoming savages?
If we pay close attention,
can we rediscover the mystical and
regain the ability
to see the extraordinary in the ordinary?
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 283/365.
I’m a Murse with a capital M.
The mechanic, electrician, carpenter,
fireman, policeman, and soldier genes
are all totally recessive in me;
therefore, I became a nurse, teacher, and poet.
I’m not your stereotypical all-American man.
Lacking the talent of a handyman,
rather than swinging a hammer,
I pencil lavish iniquities.
Instead of twisting a screwdriver,
my mind is constantly twisting
ideas into knots and words into indiscretions.
Instead of putting out fires,
I like to ignite them.
Instead of shooting machine guns,
I want to decorate them.
Instead of handcuffing criminals,
I tie up my girlfriend or let her handcuff me.
My singing voice sounds like
a cheap can of dog food,
smooth as chunky peanut butter,
so I read and recite
to prevent injury to sensitive eardrums.
Rather than meekly submitting to my deformities,
I choose to
turn the tables on them through paradoxes,
make art of them by crafting linguistic puzzles,
and exploit them with colorful conundrums.
I poke fun at my imperfections by scribbling riddles
and rhymes peppered with irony.
My writing can be kind of cheesy,
sort of dumb, usually audacious,
falling decisively on the far side of reason.
When I read in public,
it’s not unusual to hear a stifled cough,
snorts, or sniggers, to see eyes rolling
like marbles on a warped floorboard,
and, occasionally, to experience applause which,
I suspect, is motivated
more by relief than admiration.
I’m not your stereotypical all-American man
I’m a Murse.
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 282/365.
My friend John (RIP), an army flight nurse, would refer to himself and other masculine nurses as “Murses”.
The image is a cartoon by my friend and colleague, Jim Gamble (RIP), another Murse.
Any time, day or night in Las Vegas,
for forty dollars and eighty-nine cents,
I can purchase a carton
of Timeless Time cigarettes.
There is a violence,
a compressed ambient violence,
to the creeping of minutes,
the marching of hours,
the racing of years.
Trauma stops time,
attained rhythm collapses.
For survivors, time starts over, it resets.
What came before becomes separate.
Time commences with the disaster.
What came before becomes irrecoverable.
Cut off by catastrophe,
time begins with that traumatic moment,
and proceeds into what?
We don’t know.
The once-promised future now becomes the past,
cycles are broken, rhythms destroyed.
Time proceeds into the unknown,
like a rock tossed into the abyss.
Time becomes a wound.
Catastrophe is eternal.
Life changes, no longer cyclic, seasonal,
but segmented, the present adrift in the void,
disappearing into the dead past.
Or is the past alive?
In an infinite line of present moments
in a long, brightly lit hallway
with a single door at the end.
A hall decorated with pasts calling out,
pasts demanding redress, pasts existing
in the present as demands, shouting, pulsating,
guiding us toward damnation
or redemption.
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 281/365.
Inspired by writings of Ben Ehrenreich.
when i tell you my story
there will be discrepancies
in my account.
don’t ask me
to verify my life
by giving you statistics.
that is like
trying to use science
to validate religion,
it robs the world of mystery
and makes me into a sequence of milestones
rather than a human being.
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 280/365.
Raindrops
Pitter patter.
Pitter patter.
Like a thousand cats
prancing on the tin roof.
Is one of them
my missing Matisse?
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 279/365.
Matisse The Cat has been gone for several months, but I still occasionally feel her brush against my leg or hop on the bed while I sleep.
virgo rising
worlds streaming
in drifting fragments of light
islands of stars swaying
bits of pale living light
divinity glimmering everywhere
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 278/365.
Inspired by writings of Kenneth Rexroth.
Shortening days foretell frost.
Cool winds whistle through screen door.
Leaves in westerly breeze—falling.
Cowardly yellow trees disrobing.
Where will they hide?
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 278/365.
Within the tunnel of winter, dead pumpkin vines and frost-blackened cornstalks appear alive, pushing through the virginal snow like a charcoal sketch titled “restful.” © 2025 Bruno Talerico Stafford challenge 276/365.
I don’t believe in god,
but I believe that god
believes in me.
Oh hairless apes, do you realize that
your ethereal spirits are casually speeding
through empty places?
Gaze up at that majestical roof
fretted with golden fire.
In the seventh house, Luna smiles,
Demons and sprites gleefully
orbit Jupiter and Mars
and Earth says “hello”.
Pedigreed unicorns, deities,
minds empty as a vacuum,
are tripping in outer space.
Through open eyes, clear as polished glass,
they observe nothing,
they see every thing.
In the house of rising sons,
rainbow children dream of bodies walking in space.
and souls swimming in Love.
Who dares to end such beauty?
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 275/365.
Inspired by Billy Shakespeare and Gerry Ragni.
Desert Dweller 