Category: regret
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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)
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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)
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“The heart lies to itself because it must”
—Jack Gilbert
What fragments have been lost
along the way? What holes filled
with other’s dry detritus?
other’s bland conjectures? These limits
become, over time, tattered as well—
perhaps more comfortable and loose,
easier to disguise time’s misgivings;
easier than telling the truth.
(November 21, 2025)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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the moments
I knew what I was saying
were lies
but spoke none the less
the momentsI should have spoken
but said nothing—
a coward’s act of self-surrender
these embarrassmentsI carry with me
like sacks of dead cats
tracking blood down a hall
I regret what I have donenot what I have not
(February 22, 2024)
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As I putter about the house,
each node, great or small,
where I failed
to be kind;
where I failed
others;
where I failed
my own measure—-
rages
like harpies
lifting their heads,
broken smiles coated
in dry blood.
(November 9, 2023)
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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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Ikkyu Reiterations: The River Vanishes at the Sea
by
acceptance, aging, change, delusion, desire, despair, ikkyu, life, lonely, meditation, poetry, regret, samsara, time, transition, ways of knowing
All the moans of pain,
all the sickness,
he should have left
lifetimes ago.
All these delays,and distractions
have left him
alone in the world.
In all his wandershis only regret:
he waited too long
to see her again.
(August 14, 2022) -
I talked too much, saying little.
Then a decade of unbroken silence
followed without your laughter.
Yet, I still felt the silent traceof your fingertips along the length
of my bare arm, as you spoke.
Our intentions were never clear.Then we left, each to our ways;
and, I became a ghost to you.
(July 10, 2022)
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Like raw clay upon a wheel,
I twist decades’ old regrets
to shape my truth with desire
to be some other than I am.
As if life’s embarrassment
could be stripped away, like skin
cut loose in great bloody skeins,
free from doubt’s infinite knots:
Tangled in old fishing lines,
I am trapped within myself.
The only recourse is guilt
inlaid along my arms’ veins
like intricate red nets flung
across a river’s slow wash.
(November 4, 2021)
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he walked along the quay and listened
to the waves shush each other
as they lay down on the shore
the moon wove between cloudslacing the waves in white
before they sank beneath the sand
he wanted the wavesto wash it all away
what he wrote what she said
(January 20, 2021)
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