If I hold the truth in my hand,
dare I eat it like the eucharist
placed on the tongue of a simple sinner,
or savor it like a mouthful of bourbon
before it burns the words wholly?
(August 7, 2026)
Category: words
-
What can I do
with conjugations
of being— beyond
a fool’s confession?
I’ve been here before.Hours hurry past the window
like soft grey mice
skittering between shadows.
The sun slowly approachesthe eastern horizon
as if a mendicant
with an empty bowl.
My impatience vaultsover the obvious words;
I have difficulties
reading as a result.
I crib lines from bookslifting them out of context,
then go down paths
that refuse to exist.
-
The snow, the road,
the woods, the town,
the wild geese, the sleepy cat
are not the snow, the
road, the woods, the
town, the wild geese, the
sleepy cat; the words I use
are not what I am saying.
Like lovers’ conversationslate at night after many years
and a second bottle of wine
are never about what they say:
a metaphor is what is left;
a metaphor is what you fear.
(April 22, 2026)
-
I wrote this a couple of years ago…
“to combat the resistances of language you must keep talking”–Anne Carson
I write most everyday. Since the end of last August, I have filled up two 150-page notebooks, completed close to 80 short poems. I have written, if not so obsessively as now, since I was 15. I write poetry, with the occasional venture into essays like this one. I have trouble with narrative, one event leading into another befuddles me, as does conversation between people. So I do not write fiction. Yet, I do have an interior running commentary on the narrative I am living, snipes and admonitions on my life as it unfolds. To push back against this cruel eviscerating voice, which adheres tightly within my skin, I write. I write to explain the world to myself, to explain myself to myself, to resist the world, which is lain upon me by the world. I write to resist the temptation to settle into myself without a thought. I am uncomfortable in most social situations. It’s discomforting when others try to define me, or attempt to interpret me from my writing. Yes, I am aware that all writer’s expose their minds in their writing. Even writers of fiction expose themselves through their fictional characters. Nietzsche wrote that in the end we only experience ourselves. Yet, I believe there is also a separation from oneself, a leap into the universal other, which occurs when one writes: a transubstantiation of individuality into a larger third person narrator, who watches and observes with more objective, more just, eye. Of course, I also know this is pure bullshit. I am as clotted with my biases and situation as anyone. But it is through writing, through the transformative nature of writing, where a third space can open, and one can enter along with whomever can follow into a changed world, a different, perhaps better place, if only for the time it takes to read the poem. And to keep from being defined, trapped even in these new spaces, I continue to write, to find a way to exist with myself.
(February 28, 2017)
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these wounds will not heal into darker scars
these words will not heal into darker scars
they will burn forever on tongues of flame
they will burn on lecherous tongues of flame
what slow darkness grows in from the edges
what slow darkness reaches in from the edge
there is nowhere to go but further in
there is nowhere left except what is here
caught in this spiral as vast as the sea
the words shift along incomplete circles
what songs can be heard in this vast darkness
what old music must play against the night
unformed patterns shatter into fragments
like laughter breaking across an old fear
(November 4, 2025)
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Night continues to fall, dark upon dark,
unrelenting, cold as eternity.
Yet, tonight a half-moon hangs in the stars.
I try to ignore the fear on the wind,
but it eats its way in, splintering bone.
Ice, like a steel knife rusting at our throat,
parses words to an elemental degree.
What can be said contains but small nuance.
So I write pinching syllables like rice
to keep starvation one more day away,
hoping without hope that what I can say
is enough to carry hope through this dark,
that whatever bit of love which remains
is enough to hold our world together.
(October 3, 2025)
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My world, which Words have created,
has fallen into a deafening aphasia.
Increasingly,
as if rearranging letter blocks,
I misread words in the poem
Like “words” for “worlds—”or
“worlds” for “words—”
Just an aging typo of the mind.
Like a sailor blown overboard
into a raging sea, I cannot
swim within my thoughts,
cannot ride the wave’s surface
without tumbling into the foam
to drown without a lexicon.
(August 28, 2025)
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The conversation continues along
the old tracks of cliche. Clack-clack he says.
Clack-clack, she responds. And so goes the night,
Another milk run no one remembers.
I worry about what I should forget,and forget what I should worry about.
In a forest of clear trails and side tracks,
one word completes the regrets of the whole.
It’s easy to get caught in an eddy,to circle slowly back to past mistakes,
to unravel a gesture’s soft nuance,
to mean more than anyone could entail.
What could he have said? What could she have said?The words are spoken. The cast’s determined.
(May 31, 2025)
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“… craft of culture,
How we go on.”
—Gary Synder
a grandson, eight, who dislikes
my puns and play with words,
intentionally made a spontaneous pun,
smiled mischievously, then ran on
laughing into his future
(April 23, 3025)
-
in the end
by
he did not mention
any more than did she
what was never said
those parts off stagenever explained yet
implicit to the scene
the vast open silencestheir words spoke into
the vast open silencestheir words tried to seal
the resonant confessionswhich adhered
(February 21, 2025)
-
A hawk slips between the trees,
silently like a child’s paper plane.
Here is no truth lassoed tightly
by a smug Wonder Woman.
For what is truth? The mountain
is still a mountain, despite its name.
We see it—imposible to deny—
but we insist words mean more,
tripping over them like shoelaces
as we cower in the short grass, and
listen for air as the hawk descends.
(February 6, 2025)
-
all the meanings, values, irrefutable
definitions we’d/ given ourselves
peel away into broken abstractions.
We have assumed most of who we are,little of which is true, though believable
within the confines of childhood stories.
After the particulars parade pastwith their horrors and delight lost in flames,
we seek solace within our curtained rooms.
Our pets peevishly crawl from the cornersto protect us from the expectations
which cling like the aftermath of a fire.
The shapes and textures of these words matterfor there is little which cannot be burned.
(September 14, 2024)
-
Starting my 44th Notebook in 32 years
I open another, and begin again—
Without an end game in mind
other than to continue writing.
I follow the line as it unfolds
from the pen to the page;
surprising me still, it knows.
(July 16, 2024)
-
I am Tired
by
I am tired of words,
the anxious necessity
to hear, if only
my own stifled whispers.
I am tired of talk:the exchange and banter
enmeshed in daily
guilts and desires.
I am tired of listeningto my stillborn story,
unsure each moment
if I’ve said it before.
I’m tired and uncertain;there is no end, no beginning.
(July 13, 2024)
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