Ask:
Who are you
willing to give up?
Then apologize
in advance
for your callowness.
Ask: Who will apologize
to you
when this is over?
(February 12, 2026)
Category: choice
-
It happens right here
in front of us:
close enough to feel
the blood splatter;
close enough to hear
her lungs wheeze;
close enough to smell
the rusty wet iron.
We shrug and move on.What’s there to do?
But scream,
and point fingers;
then wake up to start
another day in America.
(December 25, 2025)
-
Teleological
by
All day the sky lurks darkly:
low, grey, thick with rain.
Across the back garden,
a mourning dove’s arc
becomes itself wholly
in a violent flutter
of feathers and leaves
as it finally drops
deep within the oak’s
dark twisted branches.
I have so many taskswhich take little time;
yet, I do not move.
I’m already here.
(July 18, 2025)
-
I should go pick up some milk,
but I don’t want to go outside.
I feel like I should feel guilty;
and, I do, but don’t know why.
I write sentences starting with there.
There has to be a better way to begin.
The chihuahua sleeps on my lap.
There’s the excuse I need not to move.
Memory raises dead regrets and trauma
until these mundane tasks of my day
can no longer breathe with ease,
and any agency strangles itself
in the detritus left in the tidal sand
of past indecision and hesitation.
(June 25, 2025)
-
another poet sincerely warns us
that in such dark times as these
what with war starvation and hate
we must use our small voices
no matter how simple and off key
as instruments of dire witness
to resist death’s ubiquitous agents
for to do less would be complicit
yet surely we have surrenderedif peace beauty and love
are no longer words in our mouths
we have lost what we espouse
when their language becomes ours
our time is not indifferent to love
(June 12, 2025)
-
rejected again.
what can i say, but this?
and then again—this.
(April 18, 2025)
-
I want to fall
to be in the storm
through the night
the wind breaking branches
above my head
rain lashing the air
with elemental righteousness
instead I cowerin the dubious safety
of this cave
huddled against a stone
with no reason to believe
the rising water
will not continue
until I drown
(February 7, 2025)
-
always somewhere else
in a foreign language
an ocean away
another part of town
the neighbor’s house
never near youin the same room
your blood on the floor
your muffled cries heard
down the well-lit streets
always safe behind screenswith coifed stern faces
stating facts about others
numbers abstract and soft
pushing their deaths away
never the mangled bodiessplattered brains on the wall
never at fault
never complicit
always another lie
(November 17, 2024)
-
Time slurs and thoughts elide undistracted
from light’s rhythms across the cottonwoods
out back. As if on cue, Death rises unencumbered
with trivial fluff, waves, then vaguely walks away.
I could rage forward slashing through obstacles
like a petulant child scattering piles of dead leaves
without resistance to thought. Or, I could stop,
at least for a moment, and sit on the boulder
that waits where it has sat longer than the road
it sits next to has existed. Instead, I chip away
the crust encasing my skin like a sarcophagus,
pick up a few pebbles, drop them casually
into my pocket, then wander off whistling.
(May 5, 2024)
-
if i move too fast then details
which get lost in the blur
tumble away from me as I fall
grasping desperately at roots
protruding from the rock
or seizing bits of grass
that rim the edge of the whole
yet if I move too slowthen the larger view decays
into each profound curvature
of stone I step upon
until i clinch my teeth
in anticipation of intercepting
the wall with my jaw, then
watch my blood follow in slow arcs
behind my shattered teeth
so i stand stillrisking nothing
(March 18, 2024)
-
it’s when you believe
you are someone
that the mistake begins
you are not the nailthe crown fell later
far from your loss
what I wantednever mattered
more than now
and now is too lateto be any more
than a thin fume
a last twirl of smokeafter the ember’s gone
(January 17, 2024)
-
Over time my doubts
determine the desolation
my regrets and dreams
have brought to me.
It is not a stark moon rising
over dead mountains,
but fetid rot crumbling,
wet grain by wet grain,
into a tangled swamp
from which memory
rises unbidden
like will o’ the wisps.
Foolishly, I pursue them
lashing myself
with shame and horror
at what I did or said
in the smallest instance.
Until I am tied so tightly
to the past that I am,
that I am no longer
able to do more
than lie prostrate
across the ground,
afraid and unforgiven.
(October 31 2023)
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