If I hold the truth in my hand,
dare I eat it like the eucharist
placed on the tongue of a simple sinner,
or savor it like a mouthful of bourbon
before it burns the words wholly?
(August 7, 2026)
Category: aging
-
I’ve resigned myself
that there are no answers
that what we haveis only here now
waiting for yearsto be seen
like an old man’s breathon an icy november day
(August 5, 2026)
-
Time to Go
by
I have a tendency, I’ve noticed, to rush
the ends of my poems, to hurry home,
as if I’m bored with myself as well.
I don’t question any more the days
I don’t write. I know I will write,
because I always, eventually, do.
I know someday it will all end.
My heart will stop; I’ll take a last breath;
I‘ll say one last word. But that’s okay.
Life does not have to be an adventure
full of subtle profundity, and radical awe.
It is more often the slow morning after
sunrise, or mid-afternoon’s summer heat
when nothing moves more than a sigh.
(July 28, 2026)
-
The morning is humid and thick with heat.
Yesterday cloaked its version of today
in brighter shades than those of nostalgia:
the past’s certainty belies its troubles.
I live along an edge of some other,Uncomfortable in the skins given
to me for the roles I need to play now.
Like hope, regret is best left to itself.
It is as if I’m stuck in a crevice,the walls widening above and below
where the frenzied wind leaps from edge to edge
until vanishing to violent air.
No opportunities rise with the sun;I feel old, and know the end has begun.
(July 2, 2026)
-
I did not know him
as the child I was
anymore than the manI have become—
He was a shadowsifted in story
his deep voice lacedwith decades of smoke
before dyinginto mom’s revisions
I still don’t knowwhat I was afraid of
(Father’s Day: June 21, 2026)
-
As I lacked the keys
and unspoken passwords
manners and intrinsic tropes provided
to those born oblivious within their walls,
I have never understood
how life works—
There was always
too much
that would not find its pattern,
too much
that had been broken and scattered
like ancient mosaics,
once Roman floors,
no longer conformed
to forgotten wars.
I was rarely satisfied
with what I knew,
as if the next glance,
the next book,
the next conversation—
might reveal it all.
For decades now,
I’ve stood outside
with one ear pressed
against a door
listening
for the right key
to slip the lock ;
for the hidden tumblers
to fall;
for the right door
to admit us all.
(June 14, 2026)
-
There’s a snapshot of my mom
when I was twenty-four
which would put her at sixty-six,
my current age. She looks tired,
worried. She holds her face as if
deeply troubled, or grieving.
I was about to go to Europe—
my first time outside of Texas.
When I was a child, she would readbook after book after book to us:
Little Golden Books: Pokey Little Puppy,
The Little Tug Boat and others.
They all had one common theme:
There’s no place like home, no place but home.
(June 8, 2026)
-
The night is broken in a multitude
of awakenings. The dogs are disturbed
by the full moon’s motion across the sky.
Between their futile barks, I lie awake.
As dawn approaches you pull me closer,
laying your head upon my chest. I sleep,
finally drifting to the edge of dreams
where the world is neither vast nor empty.
Lately I have been thinking about death.Not my own, nor anyone’s I know, but
Death— the absurdly inevitable
avalanche collapsing beneath our feet:
as if I can know more than what I am;
as if I am something other than dust.
(May 31, 2026)
-
This evening the old ghosts have returned.
They inhabit the edges of my vision
whispering their tired secrets to the past.
Like scions of privilege hang in cafes
deconstructing last night’s party gossip,
The ghosts wail their sad regrets-she never said,
nor he listened- Even in death they cling
to their moral shortfalls like life jackets.
If there’s a hell, here is where it festers:the exhumation, through exegesis,
of dead variations left to decay
like tattered banners along the ramparts
pretend the siege was easily broken
and the dull ashen smoke never smoldered.
(May 25, 2026)
-
The afternoon sun glares down without ire
as I step out onto the front sidewalk.
A horned lizard eyes me, suspiciously
tilts its head into the still of the day.
Aware without motion, I am no threat
where I am. It’s warm in the sun, why move?
This lumbering slow beast cannot compete.
It knows without knowing; we are killing
ourselves. Small, hot, warm-blooded, bound in fur,
we were no more than rats when its kind loomed
across the humid landscape. Choking on
our own waste, we will perish soon enough.
There’s no hurry. It turns back, looks at me
with disdain, then patiently darts away.
(May 24, 2026)
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I could write about the dogs,
their usual sniffs and yips
as they go about their doggy lives,
but they are both curled asleep
on the rugs in the front room;
or I could write about Lisa,
who I have loved and written
about for more than forty years,
but she too is quietly napping
in one of the overstuffed chairs
by the back room’s windows.
Outside, the wind waves slowly
through the sycamore and oaks
like a man treading water off shore.
Earlier a friend sent me an article
showing Americans who say they drank
over the last year has declined
by a third since the 1970’s.
This does not alleviate at all
the grey flannel feeling this hangover
has draped across my melancholy day.
(May 17, 2026)
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“How have you made division of yourself?”
—W. Shakespeare, 12th Night, 5.1
I lean over
my sleeping body
run my hand
down my arm
to wake myself—
I feel my presenceabove me—
-time to wake up-
I stir reluctantly,
but I am so tired.
Still I wake enoughto find myself
-crawling back into bed-
once again alone
and return to sleep.
(May 3, 2026)
-
If I understand
correctly, then
I have stumbled
on a rule,
a pratfall,in my case,
accidentally
into a truth.
Not that rulesor truths must
ever exist
necessarily:
here, where I am lost, iswhere the first word falls.
(April 24, 2026)
subtext 