1.
i cannot move
too much is broken
2.
demons live in mirrors
and are trying to escape
3.
it’s almost tuesday
yet there are no doors
4.
there is a dream
i cannot see
(May 19, 2026)
Category: revision
-
He stopped forgetting,
and began again to see
the shadows in the trees.
No longer willingto hide in oblivion’s
darker eddies,
his questions turnedto soft acceptance,
and he felt free.
Memory shiftedand reshaped itself
to a looser fit,
more comfortableto the details
he wished to deny.
(April 30, 2026)
-
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)
-
O the hell
we must breathe
with the dust
of redemption
as our ghosts whisper
— revising our past —
our skin glows
with angelic sweat
like saints gilded
in gold leaf
over brick arches
in byzantine cathedrals
all these obligations
we must attend to
as the day descends
and night grows
from shadow
nearby
(September 19, 2025)
-
The thing is you won’t live long
anyway
the thing is to see where you are
While you are—
—George Oppen
fool, look out the window
And write
—George Oppen
You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
― Samuel Beckett
I made the mistake of looking at an old “manuscript” from about 15 years ago. I made it about 10-12 pages in before I ran across a couple of lines that I could call good enough to be poetry. There are about 40 more pages to go. I hesitate to go on. I have always over the decades cycled up and down in my opinion of my writing. I know, every writer has doubts. But that does not make it any less depressing when I am plummeting, nor any more justifiable when I am flying high. I remember Robert Frost saying somewhere that he didn’t write experimental poetry, because experimental poem was another name for failed poem. The poem either worked or it did not. If it did, then it was not an experiment; if it failed, then it wasn’t a poem. The old manuscript was not a poem—which was depressing. Instead it was a series of posturing hoping without hope to somehow adhere from one poem/stanza/blither to another without any real attempt on my part beyond “chance” in some misguided belief that John Cage’s ghost would descend to lead me out of the wilderness of my hubris. I take solace in the belief that I knew it was crap, because I put it away and never really looked at it for the last 15 years. I somehow knew without knowing….I am smarter than I let myself be (to use a mantra I said about my students on myself).* My current plan is to plow through the fallow field, and see if there are some living roots that can be salvaged. It will be a trudge. But then, what else would I be doing.
*They are smarter than we let them be.
-
My hands are my mother’s hands:
wracked with worry, the veins
thick below the skin, soft
like earth worms in loam.
My hands are my mother’s hands:holding my face, stunned
that I am still alive, stunned
to walk through another day.
My hands are my mother’s hands:kneading the bread dough
for one more Thanksgiving,
one more meal together.
My hands are my mother’s hands,empty like bones in the ground.
(November 28, 2021/ April 17, 2023)
-
Next to the lake
where I will
eventually drown,
I hear echoes
of what you said then
as if they were mine.
Phrases formed and
familiar enough
to resemble our kiss,
if there had been a kiss.
Something I wrote,
or said, returns softened
enough along the edges
of the dark water’s
crumbling definitions:
a twilight like memory
which slowly diminishes
into the night lingering
only in the dim stars
reflected across the lake.
(April 7, 2023)
-
“In the end one experiences only oneself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
the old sage asks as he dies:
who has my vision—my essential mysteries—
this blind donkey braying
my words off-key?
or the old drunk poetwho renamed himself—
the dream bordello—
then night after night
thirsted for more than water?
(March 6, 2022) -
from a work in progress: “process, not a journey” (81)
summer bears down
without any ambiguity
of phrase
a crucible burns away
the last impurities
without regard
what remains is ash
which with one puff
vanishes
(July 23, 2020)
-
each day I revise
and renew the dream
if not into now then
some other when
where I want to be
becomes possible
for the moment
in which I’m in
dream dreams
dreams too until
all the seams
between seem as
if some other were
only what is here
(May 30, 2019)
-
From “Renditions of Change” a work in progress
Caught in a tight
spiral of self-loathing,
I try to scrape
and cut away
memory,
like a benign tumor.
Yet, I return and return
to each malignant moment,
and paint my face
in ritual guilt,
as if one could absolve
the past, and be free.
(February 12, 2019)
-
It’s not fair to compare
one to the other where secrets
are apropos to a love affair,
or some distant war as far
as that goes. Yet, what’s to be
done to stop it? What metaphor
within yourself were you willing
to sacrifice? As long as one
doesn’t mind water swallowing
your words, it’s simple enough
to drown in any nearby river.
I, too, hold my expectations
at a distance in order to live—
I’m not sure what occurred,
or even if we were just lovers.
(August 15, 2018)
-
I write into myselfa space to survivethe expectations and liesthat have become my home.This is no autobiography,but a bald accusation,of anyone who daresarrive at a readingand not see themselvesinscribed upon the page.I have become myself,naked and exposed,despite interpretationsformed in other’s woes.(September 17, 2017) -
“I Hallucinate my Desire”–Roland BarthesIt was not her,But the clichéHe clothed her inWith which he fellIn love; it wasShe he wantedTo be, not himself—The staid mockery,An easy foolTo be displaced.Caught in his ownClichés as wellAs others, he saidToo much too soon,Or too little too late;As if some otherPast could beRewritten intoAn iteration of allHe could not become.(June 1, 2017)
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