storms rage without rain
like shrouds across the dry earth
trees drop their dead leaves
each night grows longer
one more minute of light less—
incremental death
i’m tired of trying—
too cynical to pretend
darkness has not come
it is ironic
with the weight of centuries
nothing can be done
the sycamore’s branches fall
I fear spring will not return
(October 21, 2025)
it was just the two of us Lisa and I
too young for children we thought
now they’re all grown and gone
and I’m too tired even for regret
(May 26, 2025)
I wake. The puppy needs to go outside.
The older dog comes along as well
hoping to roust a nervous rabbit.
It’s close enough to six by this time
to feed them, and take my daily meds.
I am tired, and worried about the world.
They finish their ration of kibble
and head happily back up the stairs.
I turn off the light, and follow along.
In the hazy half-minute it takes
for me to crawl under the sheets,
they’ve both tightly curled in bed.
I lay there unable to return to sleep,
and listen to the dogs’ soft snores.
(April 4, 2025)
The grass is dead; heat
and lack of water condemned
it to a fiery death.
The sun sets the sky
on fire; the air vanishes
with the last ember.
The dark cannot grant
reprieve from the constant heat;
our sweat turns to ash.
There is no relief.
Our father has failed us all
The sun chars the dark.
God smells of stale death in ice;
A silent corpse’s last breath.
(March 24, 2025)
I am not a mirror,
a reflection formed
in images I walk within.
I am lost in the projections
along my surfaces, vague
and inchoate like smoke.
I am not a window
where a stranger
in the street may watch
the pedestrian drama
of my life’s denouement.
I am a sack-cloth bag
stuffed with cliches.
I slip my hand in
to find tattered masks
which fall to dust
as I drape them solemnly
across my skin.
(February 2, 2024)
By the time I wake, I’m worn out.
I try to convince myself I slept,
because I have no memory
of being awake. All night’s dark
moments resemble each other;
until incrementally, day breaks
shadows cleanly across the wall.
I can see I am awake. Yet still,
I’m unsure I have slept at all.
My thoughts too are like this now:
ideas and images enter, then part
with only a hint they were there,
like a lover’s perfume on the sheets
hours after she has left your arms,
returning once again into his.
(January 7, 2023)
.
The students used to be enough
of a balm—
their curiosity, their light.
Today the ephemera wears me:
the pointless testing,
the political demagoguery.
It becomes harder to ignore
the razor thin insults,
the slow bleed.
This should be the end—
yet inertia pushes me,
slouching towards another year.
(April 12, 2022)
I feel my life tonight—
the weight, the textures.
There is no wisdom to create
an escape, no simple design
to relieve the recurrent terror.
Outside the wind grabs the trees
by the hair tossing them about
in an ecstatic frenzy.
I step into the growing night
and listen to the trees whip
the pale sky into the dark.
What control I thought I had
flees from me, abandoning
the promise of the light to come.
(April 11, 2022)
by
Tattered like old rags
I’m tired before it begins:
unravelled from years
of worry and work.
Gravity crushes the light
into the room’s corners.
I move, a fragile ghost,
with slow thick steps.
Once again, I’m pushed
back into the grey chair
to stare out the window
at nothing in particular.
I know what to do,
but the thought wears me.
(April 5, 2022)
I look out and see the sun;
I feel no warmth.
I do not want to be here,
but I have nowhere else to go.
I would say I’m unhappy,
but that implies happiness
existed as a measure
to gauge an amount of rain.
If I listed all my faults,
I’d have something to do.
Today was much like yesterday:
hot, dry, and lonely;
The sun slowly shimmers
the surface of the lake, like ice.
(November 11, 2021)
“but in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself”
—Albert Camus
Any tremble
through the trees
contrary
to the first
wind, the
next wind,
or no wind:
always afraid,
so afraid
to simply be,
with no
definition,
with no
place to go,
no
walls left to build,
no excuse
left to believe,
no end;
then again,
no end.
(September 12, 2021)
subtext 