Her ghost lingers
like smoke
from wet embers,
and whisper lines
I’ve rewritten
then attempted to burn.
(October 25, 2026)
Category: past
-
details, like mosaics, decades old
around eleven, the adrenaline slowfall from my red Christmas bike,
ripping skin on loose gravel,
catching the pain across my palms
facts of a sortfollowed by conjecture
the sky was winter grey—I was heading home (from where)
hurriedly (was I late, for what
or just the thrill of speed
or both— fear and joy dancing
together like flames)
perhaps, perhaps
what-ifs’ multitudes unravelwith time and causal doubts
as perhaps twist and spin into now’s
singular, tight, and irretrievable knot
I tell myself I know and knewthe bits of broken glass cohere
but I don’t anymore than I did
I fell, I bled, I musthave made it home
for I am here
(July 20, 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’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)
-
The dogs are disturbed;
their morning routine
has changed. They know it.
They follow closely
as I do not follow
their daily pattern.
They are anxious
for the future
to be the past,
for their bowls to be
filled with kibble
on time, now.
They know the past
is not prologue; the past
is the future; the past is
now. They know it.
Their dark eyes full
of soul follow me
through the house
wondering why
I do not know anything,
so simple,
about time.
(April 1, 2026)
-
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 avengehis 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 threateven 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)
-
I finished the Memory Police last night, but couldn’t summon enough energy to write a response. It was curious. It was interesting. It was ART!! Were there great lines and thoughts? Yes. Did it make sense? Not at first glance, which this response is. The novel (as the blurb on the back states) takes place on an unknown island where objects keep disappearing. Disappearing completely, even from the memory of most of the people on the island. Those who can still remember are taken away to some unknown place, for some unknown fate by the Gestapo-like Memory Police. The last sentence of the blurb says “The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss.” I guess that is true, but only on one level. I would say it is more about the control of a community’s narrative; How history can be erased, and how we all just go along. How writing extends and saves individual memory for the next generations, who lose and save and create their own memories. How small seemingly unimportant objects can embody massive recollections.
Random Thoughts/Questions: None of the characters have names. There is a narrator, the novelist; the old man, who used to be the ferryman before the ferry disappeared, and R, who does not forget. The novelist is writing a novel, which sporadically we (the reader) get to read.Is the old man an allusion to Charon? Are the people who forget dead? The narrator is writing a novel, but loses her voice and can’t remember how to write. R, who used to proofread the narrator’s novels, keeps encouraging her to write, almost like editors who finish novelists books posthumously. Does “R” stand for reader? which is us, as we try to create meaning out of other’s incomplete memories?
Quotes:
“When I was a child, the whole place seemed… a lot fuller, a lot more real. But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow, I suppose that kept things in balance… And even when the balance begins to collapse, something remains.”
“I have the feeling my voice may come back one day if I study the letters imprinted on the used ribbon.”
“I’d imagine you’d be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things.”
“Memories don’t just pile up—- they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord.”
“Each one of us hides them away in secret. So, since out adversary is invisible, we are forced to use out intuition. It is extremely delicate work. In order to unmask these invisible secrets, to analyze and sort and dispose of them, we must work in secret, to protect ourselves.”
“Memories are a lot tougher than you might think. Just like the hearts that hold them”
“When you lost your voice, you lost the ability to make sense of yourself.”
-
“We must ask grace from ourselves.
Our memories.
Let them
release us from the past.”
—Diane Wakoski
I call them forth
to excuse the present:
the responsibility lies
somewhere else,
in someone else
no longer me.
I don’t want to bethat, so I change,
take a step to the side,
and feel them slip past,
like ghosts, or smoke,
unmolested by time.
Then finally, so much,which does not matter,
falls away quietly
like a cicada’s
dry carapace
at summer’s end.
(July 4, 2025)
-
it was just the two of us Lisa and I
too young for children we thought
now they’re all grown and goneand I’m too tired even for regret
(May 26, 2025)
-
Either/Or
by
“I have committed adultery in my heart..”
—- Jimmy Carter
the moments went unnoticed
until days sometimes years later
when the obvious slid past
like shadows tossed through a window
by a passing car late at night
and he realized what had been offered
when the difference in time between what
almost occurred and what he desired
vanished so regret could have grown
from a surreptitious kiss bestowed
instead of the one that was not
(April 26, 2025)
-
At which closed door
does it no longer matter
if it remains a closed door?
Does a story I’ve never heard,
because never told, become
more than my own
through implied genetic hints
and stale romantic longings?
Hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of years, and miles of oceans between
allow one to co-opt, create, and project
a nameless European hero (with a face like mine?)
to pillage and fuck their way into a future
through the tangled heath and ruins of time.
(April 3, 2025)
-
Over the last week I re-read Roger Zelazny’s The First Chronicles of Amber: (Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, Sign of the Unicorn, The Hand of Oberon, and The Courts of Chaos). I first read this series in the mid to late 1970’s. I was in my mid-teens, when I pretty much only read Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels. I think the Amber series was probably my first real exposure to multiple reality, and the idea that we control and can change the reality we are born into. This time through I noticed ideas of ontological basis to reality versus epistemological understandings. Here is a bit from near the end: “Yes. You see, we are hatched and we drift on the surface of events. Sometimes, we feel that we actually influence things, and this gives rise to striving. This is a big mistake, because it creates desires and builds up a false ego when just being should be enough. That leads to more desires and more striving and there you are, trapped.” I don’t really remember any of this when I read it the first time 50 years ago. I am sure I absorbed it somehow, just not consciously. For the most part, I enjoyed it well enough this last week; I mean I obviously finished it again. On the whole it is still a fun fantasy novel filled with sword fights and family intrigue and back stabbing, accompanied by quick insertions of Platonism without being too pedantic about it all. There are another five books in the series; I will not seek them out.
-
always the desire
to be ten years ago
when life was easieras now ten years hence
(March 29, 2025)
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I finished Lost in Austin by Alex Hannaford in a couple of days. It disaggregates the changes in Austin for the worse over the last 25 years (for the most part, with some historical background going back into the 1980’s). My experience of living in the Austin area since 1978 confirms all of what he says in the book. Austin has become too expensive to live in: median income versus median housing costs do not match up. Living in a semi-arid region which is quickly becoming flat out arid due to climate change causes the city to not be “fun” to live in. The increasing descent into right-wing political madness makes the social/political climate unbearable to those attracted to the laid back attitude of Austin. While I agree with most of what Hannaford details in the book about the changes in Austin, I can’t help but think about the old light bulb joke: How many Austinites does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to change the light bulb, and two to talk about how much better the old light bulb was. Austin has always been different to each succeeding wave of people who move here. The book is a fast read, Hannaford keeps things moving. His mixture of personal reflection of “his Austin” with historical facts (most of which I remember as they occurred) make it an enjoyable and informative book. The sad part is that, like him, it makes me want to finally give up on “my Austin” and move.
