Ashes to Ashes
I watch the hollowed out building burn.
Sections of roof collapse into the flames.
Smoke occludes the sky like a prayer.
I am complicit.
Smoke and ash smudge my hands and face,
a negligent guilt through willful ignorance.
I am at a loss: I call, I write, I vote;
I make signs for marches.
The flames burn hotter.
They buy more gasoline and matches,
then dance unimpeded down the road
to sing gleefully around the next bonfire.
(April 15, 2025)
“When are we not in a dream?
…when are we not skeletons?”
—Sy. Hoahwah
I don’t remember
the dream before
I cracked my head hard
against the wooden night stand;
the fine grained ephemera,
which held the dream together,
burned like flash paper into the air.
A lightning ball exploded
my darker vision, as the dream,
too agile to cradle, threw me
deftly from sleep onto the floor.
Not existing fully in the fluidity
of sleep, nor the concrete warmth
of the morning window’s light,
I held my head in my hands,
eyes shut, as the lightning flash
faded, leaving only the muscles
in my neck to burn like trees
broken during the night’s storm.
(July 16, 2021)
I find a narrative,
as I age, hard
to patch together.
I cannot mend
all that I have
rendered, all
I have misplaced
in anger, and neglect.
I have no prologue
to explain succinctly
each switchback
I have turned along.
It’s easier to see
a moment without a past;
easier to mind the flower
as a petal first falls.
What scars I have
are well hid; no
stars to weave
a pattern in the sky.
(July 31, 2019)
I hone a knife
against my arteries’
thrum. The blood
slips a sacrifice
into a broken cup.
Worse than a cliché,
I am my own cliché,
a banal aggregate
waltzed about
in a leaky sack.
I vaguely sing
along discordantly,
not truly knowing
the words to my song.
(March 21, 2018)
In almost a religious ritual,
he castigates his niggling doubts
in a timid formality of failure.
Even now, as he folds his thoughts
neatly into another inaction,
a new desire falls softly to regret
like crumbs from a banquet table
scatter slowly across the floor.
Doubt and regret feed each other
a fetid feast lavished with fear.
He imagines a different world
free from this hunger, where he moves
forthrightly without pity, instead
of staring blankly at an empty bowl.
(March 14, 2018)
little of what’s said
can pass without
interpretation—
to encompass within
a new language the old,
a translation unfolds
my metaphor of cloth,
my change of clothes,
my understandings,
like an old television,
flickering in the dark,
slips frames unfocused:
alone, I do not know
What’s left to put on
(February 26, 2018)
by
a dark hallway
opens through him
he is a door
an absence
like an echo
scratching anxiously
at a window
to be let in
he opens as an emptiness
a conduit for others
to shuffle one
fragment into another
in an attempt to align
fragility’s last tremor
(February 3, 2018)
My world’s abraded,
Worn thin, roughly patched.
I’m often unsure what
I do; and, when I stand,
The ground bends and slides
Like a slow-motion
Tilt-a-Whirl
At a country fair.
To find a balance,
I write into the tatters,
To the frayed coherences,
Desperately spinning
New tales to old
As a balm against the cold.
(January 22, 2018)
As if thrown into the sea,
I drown in myself. Adrift,
Worn from lack of sleep again,
I berate and taunt my past.
Each faux pas, each arrogant
Act, repeated and rehashed
Until each cringe inducing
Detail is nailed to my skin.
Time does not layer armor
Tightly enough to protect
Against the internal thrusts,
But rather sharpens the blade
To more precisely dissect
Each vein flowing from my heart.
(December 14, 2017)
by
(July 4, 2017)
subtext 