circa 1979
The night is close
to the day. My head’s
thick with whiskey
and bitter ideas.
My hands ache. I find
it hard to speak
at length without
losing words, or how
to say them. So, I wait
and listen to the silence
for the words to stop
their emotional slither,
and allow me to go
home, alone again.
(July 16, 2026)
Your hands dance the air
as you sit across the table
describing an event we shared
decades ago in our youth.
We are both there as before;
a sequence of events similar
enough to be the same events;
yet, causality and context shift.
Like Wittgenstein, it dawns
on me slowly that the story
you are telling is not the one
I have told about love’s loss.
You ask why I’m crying;
I realize you never knew.
(July 15, 2026)
As a child, I studied old paper maps;
the folded, stained, and torn gas station maps
Dad used to follow the back country roads
into the Texas oil fields to find work.
I’d trace my fingers down the thin lines
leading away from where I was living
through the small black dots signifying towns
and larger amorphous yellow cities.
I read books with imaginary maps
full of dark rivers, and magic mountains
where characters stepped lightly from legend
and wandered with clear purpose and meaning.
While at home, I’d find my place on maps,
and make a way toward any where else.
(July 14, 2026)
I did not know him
as the child I was
anymore than the man
I have become—
He was a shadow
sifted in story
his deep voice laced
with decades of smoke
before dying
into mom’s revisions
I still don’t know
what I was afraid of
(Father’s Day: June 21, 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 read
book 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)
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)
A few days ago, I heard Stand by R.E.M. It came out in 1988. It gave me a center-point to hold on to in a stupidly difficult year.
In 1988, Beeville ISD hired me to teach 7th grade English at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School. They had recently changed the mascot from the Devils to the Jets because of the “satanic” overtones of the Devils. It was my first teaching job. I had been unable to find an English position in the Austin area, despite multiple interviews. I figure now that I was a crappy interviewer due to my tendency to mumble, talk fast when nervous, over-intellectualize simple questions and to look everywhere but at the person asking the questions. Or maybe something completely different: I didn’t know then which was all that mattered. Beeville needed an English teacher and I got hired. We moved to Beeville, Texas and I had my first classroom. It was a mistake from the start. Within the first few weeks, I had lost control, even if I had not realized it yet then. Although I figured it out pretty fast, but by the time I did it was too late. The seventh graders ate me alive. For the rest of the year I felt completely lost and unbalanced. It was sad. REM’s Stand (as well as David Wagoneer’s poem Lost, which I had taped to my desk) helped by reminding me to think about where I was amidst the chaos of my life that year. We moved back to Austin at the end of the school year.
This post has its origins in a “prompt” from a friend who asked that we write to memories elicited by various songs.
I’m bored
as I write
this poem—
Not too much here
that is not mine
to ruminate:
the mistakes,
and broken desires
left behind
in memory
clot the way
with the pretense
of fate. Only fate
is just the past:
I’m here reading
what I write,
because I’m here,
not somewhere else
reading something
else I wrote today.
Somedays are destined
to be something else
which could have
happened somehow
on a warm afternoon
after a yawn or two,
but then didn’t.
(April 2, 2026)
Walking into the kitchen
I forget my reason
for going; I stop,
and retrace my steps.
As when I am reading
and my attention drifts
lost in the dream of text,
I must return, sometimes
pages back, to regain
myself and what it was
I was looking for before
I wandered through the door.
(February 24, 2026)
Memory is all that we are,
and all that we are is what
we remember. These days
I often forget why I enter
a room as I enter. I’m forced
to wait on the blurred past
with its dead possibilities
to catch up to my present.
We sit comfortably couched
about the room. We confess
our stories again, shifting
scenes to allow for shapes
which differ, to be polite,
from others in other rooms.
(December 28, 2025)
“So many of us use when at our craft/of transmuting our life into words.//The essence is always lost.”
I have read three other books by Borges over the years: Labyrinths, The Book of Sand, and Ficciones. They have all been thought provoking and strange. I first heard of Borges as a fictional character in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” which makes sense as I finished “Dreamtigers” this afternoon. In “Dreamtigers” one of the themes Borges causes the reader to think about is identity. Specifically who is the real “Borges” (and us by extension) the one created by us that we present to the world as us, or the one that created the presentation. “Dreamtigers” is divided into two sections. The first comprised of parable-like reflections revolving around themes of memory, identity, creativity, and mirrors. The second section made up of poems, which touch upon similar themes and images. One of the ideas that have lingered with me after finishing the book is the thought that our unique experience of life which each of us possess and create though our life…vanishes as we die. “Events far-reaching envoy to people all space, whose end is nonetheless tolled when one man dies, may cause us wonder. But something, or an infinite number of things, dies in every death, unless the universe is possessed of a memory, as the theosophists have supposed.” I know that this is obvious, but also profound. Nietzsche said that in the end we only experience ourselves. And Borges extends this with the thought that this individual experience dies with the life of the person. Unless as he says, the universe possess a memory. And even then, that memory is changed and erased by the future which remembers us in their own individual experiences. “There is not a single thing on earth that oblivion does not erase or memory change, and when no one knows into what images he himself will be transmuted by the future.”
memory agitates into vision media res: the precise moment of peak self-revulsion, the inaction, the cowardice, the lie inherent in regret— when nothing more could have been done, nor anything now retroactively applied which can act as balm to the shame carried for decades through the day in those quiet moments on the way to work, waiting for the light to turn green, or some phrase, or song on the radio which tumbles memory’s cascade through the spongey canyons to again reconfigure itself into this contiguous present as some other story without static cause
(December 25, 2025)
then there are the dreams
you do remember
not just wisps
which vanish forgotten
at fingertips’ ends
but the ones that cling
their razor tipped claws
toying with your heart
late into the afternoon
at the end of winter
(December 6, 2025)
My father’s ghost has returned
to haunt me after decades
of silence. I only knew
his decline; now, I’m learning
my own, a slow remembrance.
I’m no Hamlet; to avenge
his death, I would kill myself,
there would not be a question.
Telling that story once more,
I am what remains of him.
At night looking for water,
not as broken as he was,
I see him in the mirror,
frowning at me from the side.
My body reflects his own.
My mom used him as a threat
even after he was gone:
If you could be half the man
he was…if he could see you…
what do you think he would say?
She has been gone for years now,
while he hangs on the edges
darkly brooding as in life,
a storm always eminent,
on the verge of violence.
I saw my future at eight,
and a clearer past today:
his presence was an absence
always nearby, yet distant
like a shadow on water.
(November 16, 2025)
The ghosts have returned.
Along an edge, they tremble
into view, then vanish,
if I turn to look.
It is best I ignore them,
as they roll and tumble
near my hesitant feet.
I fear to step on them.
They are soft like kittens,
but with longer memory,
and a sharper clarity.
Details bend, slowly feel
their way, to insert tendrils
along darker fissures
to occupy spaces reserved
for conflicts of the present,
but now quiver gently
with decades of regret.
(October 30, 2025)
subtext 