A chapbook of poems, Inept Love, will be published in 2026 by Finishing Line Press

Prose poems to be published summer, 2025, in Le Culturae: issue 2: Quotitidian

A Puzzling Parade in Which Poets Experience Aphasia Purely as a Ploy to Gain Sympathy from Their Captors 

"No presence had ever been so present to him as the child's absence."

Jean Genet, Funeral Rites

The fathers grew trees whose wood burns thought.  Empty pyres wait us out. Absence sanctifies these mounds and circles.  The land holds its history close to the vest.  My birth mysteriously remained behind to plant praedial mimodrames if not clues.  My bones cut into rubrics discerning pain. Tossed on the earth to testify my fortune and release.  They scribe in place of speech, a palimpsest scripture of wounds.  Fucking peasants living the death-dream hollowness.  Signing it away they too long for silent light.  They pledge to live as unordained stars, not for this particular earth and its catalogues of shade.  But the fine traces they left still seduce, they whisper to possess us.  They pretend they are our lovers.  They'll give themselves to us, to make a name for ourselves.  They embody birth to certify and re-invent figures for a lost ancestry.  They argue a hewn contiguity of mirrors.  Consanguineous web. Even the original explanations trail off…

…are these the translated crumbs?  Dad? Jailer? You want me to pick up each and follow deeper into the forest?  Not all bitterness can be eaten. I am a fisherman, tying knots. Taboos camp about my lips.  They unravel knots, leaving the threads themselves to clot the laceration of speech. Now when I sleep I pull in my double.  The mark on me is mirrored in him.  Now the dreams will compete for sovereignty above us.  The rusted chain of being.  The links themselves leave us alone.  Jesus, it’s about time. The scribes have bound me.  The moment I became aware of it, they struggled in me.  Hobbled me.  I'm rolling in the hay.  They're leading me away in a line with others.  After pasting sunrise on my belly and sunset on the back of my skull, they knocked a hole in the middle of my face.  They are thieves of the actual. I sit with two old men.  They argue.  One plucks feathers from a dead bird, dipping them in cool blood, marking here and there.  Then the other rises to struggle to take all the feathers and throw them into the fire. Together, we three hear the sound sizzling through the woods.  Stones are piled.  Marks are slashed on the trunks of trees.  But I'm not able to follow yet.  I cannot decide whether to scatter their stones.  Or make twenty six new piles of my own devices.  Or give my eyes a substance to mend the bark.  Or deliver a cacophony of gashes on every tree I reach. Stretching, I mime immortality, this is what it could look like. I am interested in seeing these little boxes pinned to paper.  They win us over with a sniff, a kick and a scream.  They win, place and show in the lupine games set before our memory crashed.  They wear a wolf’s nerves and breath. The four walls of the forest whiten as if draining a fat wound.  Systems are left in this blanching.  Hands grapple to regain their color.  The beginning of the sentence is hooked to one wall, the end to its opposite.  There is nothing, really, in the broken bones between. The fishermen convene in the next clearing.  They hush each other, but now and then I hear a raw, impelled voice.  There's an old story drying on these rocks.  Someone once went to steal what the fishermen were saying.  They wanted to know the one word allowed in the net.  This story confirms that the one who hears it never returns.  They are bitter codgers and crones whispering about yesterday.  The origin story simplified for popular consumption. I am taking up this iron and feather hammer.  I am smashing all the rocks here, the rocks with the strange marks.   I'm leaving one provisionally intact.  It has the one word left on it.  Then I leave the hammer in an empty hand forged from the desire to know.  Two of us agreed.  Two of us asked the fathers.  Really, why wait? The chains bother me only a little.  It’s a small measure of comfort to see that the one who must march in front of me is in a similar predicament.  I only see his back but I can imagine well that the little words infesting his skin also eat in his ears like mine, and scab over his eyes like mine.  There are two chains connecting me to him.  One leaves my mouth alone, the other I think is in my hand, dropping traces on the ground.  It matters not at all which is noticed first. The plan apparently is that at night we must stop.  And then choose to sleep in a fire or be exposed by darkness. Your call…or simply pull me into the mute flames too.  The measure of suffering is not what you can endure.  The emptiness itself is as luminous as you need. As we need. No point charting what is not there.  The prisons after planes confirm that liberty and freedom are not the same but that both can vanish in a sea breeze, a fire, or a net trawling the evening skies to catch the ancient stars. No land will be conquered.  No soul shaped for their whims.

Humans and Humans

I’m a needle looking for a thread. Your thread, any thread. What once made whole cloth now rips the human head. So I weave knots in this web of webs, waiting for wind. 

Sit with me, let’s listen, a chorus unravels before us. Gut-check a poet’s endnotes* Devotion is purchased online. The apple’s original sin was that a human touched it and made up stories about it later. Fabricated a tapestry of excuses, invented a sleep. Then a snake.  Against the familiar flora marked by the poet’s decades of sensible boots, I want to know how he left these lies.  He found nothing between him and the bones that matched, and oh what a wing dive of assurance he wove with them. I cannot know this dirt and smell of leaves and still water there in Blackwater woods.  I, like you, am basted to this screen, your screen, any screen.  I click the button to buy fake silence. It’ll come tomorrow, thrown in the ivy.

I read what he left, surprise still legible until this borrowed account expires. His words leave sacred silence but my fetters still form. For instance, a campfire in the high Sierra plunders my version of verse. Fire proxies my cradle of norms.  And how do you explain how the lifetime of witness that is in my hands fell from a screen of commerce? This is a different set of emperor’s clothing.  It must be.

Here's the deal, truth may no longer be beauty. We know too much now. Everything is at hand and our hands are missing.  Fifty years of her artfully perfect puzzles bookmarked on the menu bar and I still lose the thread in my own terse fifty minutes in a middlebrow office with an MFC. An inner inmate sews a child’s memory of jail.  Parenting reverses to show the tags. So, failing cuffs, what does keep me strung along if not sitting in the custody pondering text? The data of my head’s curse: sitting zazen in these [terse] probations? The archived social media site of the Hero’s Journey hosts a pattern of multiple likes.  The kid wants attention and is addicted to the fear of not being liked. The Blackwater poet’s way prioritizes search results with the key words of letting go®. This must be wisdom unable to be shared, given its ancient provenance.

Can I ask him with the marble-white skin to come back from death to save our cult of ex-believers? From the tribe of aces, a dirty sleeve kidnaps my poems. I do apologize, I ask too many shaded questions. It’s so unwise. We both know that devotion only flows from pure dots, easily connected.  Seamless heartlines.

Stopping in traffic with you. Pressing refresh. Waiting to board with you.  How much is lost by grabbing sun or moon on demand. Controlling the heavens means we have lost control.  Flattened by singularity. Sending you an attachment.  Attaching what’s left of you. Looking for a parking place with you in the passenger’s seat. Walking through the oily, fragrant eucalyptus grove with you in the mind’s eye, a camel’s coat of partial, partial touch and letting go (your credit card is saved, you have permission to use this, to use me).

 Three poems published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal May, 2025.

The Broken Tree

you are out on Bear Mountain
like a pilgrim
with an empty quiver --
you’re hunting nothing
but pines and manzanitas
walking on logging roads
whose pitch, crown
and water berms
of gravel and clay
stumble your feet –
you needed to breathe
the trees today
 
you look up
to hurried clouds
of a storm coming soon
and so you’ll stumble home
 
you know
there is an uncanny tree --
a tree you named --
on the other side
of this mountain
 
you’ll pass by the tree --
a redwood that stands
among others of its kind
all straight as telephone poles --
tall redwoods piercing the sky
with limbs as thin as spears
to snap in storms
and stab a man
to briskly make a widow
 
although you are man
with a husband,
he’d be bereft too
should winds launch
these lovely spears at you
 
the pilgrim’s way
has just the right risk
 
*
this tree you’ve named bends
unlike the others --
huge branches bred
to stretch the air
and run parallel to earth --
branches thick as a trunk
 
the strange arms spread
to stretch against
the common nature
against the usual world
as though to welcome
both inverted wayfarers
and hungry grey squirrels      
 
a candelabra of spongy bark --
an icon of oddity
sparking with its inordinate form
a fire of queer beauty
 
you found her years ago --
and only because
you lifted your head
did you see her damaged
crown of craggy snares --
a lightning strike many years ago
fired strange harm at her --
an arrow of flames
lopped off her top
and forged the odd defacements
that widened arms to welcome
you to her world
 
you congratulated yourself
for noticing, for lifting your head --
you take more credit than due you
and ponder how a poem
could tell this broken story
and doing so
could open
your own disproportions
even as you journey
to Canterbury, Santiago,
Bodh Gaya or your own mailbox
filled with bills
 
widows weeds
and screens
that scorch your wisdom
wait at home
after rain, this rain
and this road to her
 
*
the path of letting go
falls under the broken tree
and here the quiver of the nameless
tugs on your shoulder
and still you call
her Sophia, thinking
 
you were Adam
allowed
to name it all,
to make the sounds
and rhymes
to sing her song
 
she’s there downslope now
and you walk to her
in a high wind of hope
then hear a drought-dry madrone
crash and crack close by
 
there’s danger in these trees
 
a rumble of hard rain 
makes you stop --
you tire of toting
this bag of emptiness
 
you touch her three times
and, courageously, you ask her
to tell the thunder
to pull you
out of yourself
into the trees
and beyond --
you ache to go beyond
 
a few wet birds scurry and hop
at her feet where
they sing storm warnings
in the raining air
 
*
the quest narrows
without arrows
 
rainwater washes
your brow, your own salt
stings your eyes
yet you cannot turn
from her now
you sense
she senses you and gives you sense
 
you call her by her name
you believe it is her name
though it comes from the Bible,
movies, and the holy spirits
that aim your feet against the road
 
it’s like you’ve named each other
it’s like you toss atoms back
and forth to levy and load
time and space into your pack --
to make a possible
life with thick arms too --
arms spread wide
to hold all harm
as sacred proof
of how truth shatters
just enough to join the tree
and you, and whoever
hears a name uttered
in storms you cannot hide
 
it’s like you are ready
you are ready for what’s next
three touches on her rough wet skin
and you tell her
 
“let me say your name
and change my life”

From Mud Emerging

an early rain
and dazed skyful
of November sun
draws a white cover
from the black dirt
in the nearby hills
 
you walk there and celebrate
the seasons’ edges
where mycelia have woken
to see you
 
their roots connect
the unbroken will
in the underground –
here there is no place
that does not want to wake you
 
on these humdrum trails
you walk to root out your chicanery
and take steps to stop
the myriad screens
that make you -
that first cause
multiple versions of you,
the fake you of your daily mechanisms
and quibbling algorithms
that clip you in
 
walking meditation
where fungi, not the lotus,
remind you
 
*
off the marked trail
on a small track
to the steep cliff
where the raw light falls
to the darkness
at the bottom
of Baldwin Creek draw
           
there where dark prayers
and old marches
leave breadcrumbs
the size of your fallen body
 
no one would find you here
the real you, the tangible ash
 
the lie in your grasp
tramples the grass
at the chasm, on this edge
of your wilder nature –
falling, falling
you grip
the local rock
 
the coastal mudstone
crumbles as the path
comes to a crag
 
*
these small trails
are mysteries
and dead ends
leading to a leap
in the frantic freefall
 
the main trails:
thoughts begin
small trails:
thoughts end
 
you pay attention to beginnings
more than cessation
it is embarrassment,
isn’t it? the very peril
of what you think
of what you are measured to be
 
in the end
the dark winks
to take contrivance
to the edge
and push it off

Seeds

you’ve bushwacked now
up to a sawtooth ridge
near Bear Creek Spire
 
in a crevasse
in this crag of granite
two old junipers cling to the rock
 
they flatten their trunks
to join
in a small pocket of dirt
 
trunks like big barrels
have grown from a fissure
as wide as a wrist
 
ragged branches
hold dark green fans
up to the Sierra sun
 
*
 
a trunk will narrow
as much as it needs to live --
no limit is the answer to the question you did not ask
 
your body does not differ
and clings to rock as well --
from bone your fruits form
 
two trees reach out from your spine
from these old seeds in a small dark fracture --
you are shown how to survive in high places
 
the narrow seeds from shifting stars
implant in bones every day
to make a way from slender clay
 
to a sun of limits, known and unknown
though you have not loved others as yourself
you have not shifted with your whole heart
 
no matter, forgiven and forged by this granite bone
in this blinding blue mountain’s day
you confront the face of weathered stone
 
where the spine’s marrow seeds join
for a brief green breath, a true breath
that in this light reveals how narrow life can turn
                                                                                
seeds will not waste your dirt or sky --
they find cracks in your façade
wide enough to grow your narrow little life
 
that widens with the mercy
of juniper and rock
found in hidden heights

 

 A prose poem published by Stone of Madness Press, Issue 29. April, 2025.

Letters to Women from a Deceased Gay Man

Climbing the ruins at Monte Alban in the rain. Ducking in a cave where we met a random child hawking a fake clay horse and you point out, well, the clay, our source and end, is not fake. Standing together outside the Queen of Missions after a family wedding looking out through the pepper tree branches to the wide bay, tides rising on a south swell. Your agreeable opening, dry and friendly, to take me inside you. “Good ball” you say afterwards and I am astonished you think this lie is any kind of shelter, but it is your kindness that wraps me. Lying on the beach in August willing and cautious to answer your questions as you point to other women walking past and ask if they are or are not as heavy as you. Your eulogy at my funeral after you died too soon.  In the sculpture garden after the Grammatology seminar the severed saints asking for your telephone number. Seeing the harrowing beauty of your grandchildren; seeing your beauty rise, brightening all the corners and screens as your love for them unfolds and surprises. Living in your sadness as you died before having a grandchild. Holding each other on a broken cot while Mahler’s 3^rd  perfused the beach shack under the jacaranda and tar.

Your bailing me out of jail.

Your making sure I didn’t get fired.

Camping in a field in the Rhône valley after hitchhiking to a medieval farm when we were picked up by an old man in a rusted Citroën who was annoyed at our partial French. Letting our dogs run wild with each other. Your dog jumping on the table to eat rhubarb pie. Our dog’s favorite chew toy you left her, and then left us shortly after. Forever shortly after. Your not coming home because you slept with a doctor.  Your telling me. My hearing it. My playing Death and the Flower endlessly, subversively. Your mother calling my mother asking for the watch back.  My ignoring time.  My giving you a rabbit’s foot for Christmas and declaring eternal fealty and the rabbit just dead, perhaps not eternal at all. We agreeing to a time out. Riding horseback through piñon pines to DH Lawrence’s grave as my horse farted like mountain thunder and my heart was held up and back in your rose-strewn panteón.  Your singing Every Grain of Sand at my funeral because you are still alive. Listening about your surrender to a Hollywood producer in front of his fireplace on Mullholland and he never called you back even as your gold necklace shimmered in perfected light. Meeting your husband, meeting your husband, hearing about your husband shot in his Porsche in Sequoia National Park trying to buy kilos, then meeting your husband, meeting your husband, attending your husband’s funeral after a lifetime of civic service and professional status. Hiding in your guest room after my eviction. You never had a husband. You owned Alhambra. You never needed a husband to buy a town. You never needed a husband to own a company.  You never needed a husband until you did and then he died taking a nap on your perfect sofa. My outliving you and just as cause gives birth to effect so my funeral quickly disposes of my solitary remains while love is eternal and that’s not good news. You walking across a bar band’s sunset set by the inevitable beach as you danced your cancer away on one leg, glistening against death to its own relief – you scared it away. My holding your purse as you moved on to the stuffy ballroom on the second floor of the sobaco on Whittier Blvd.  Your standing in front of the crazed movie star at my mother’s funeral; your stance the strength that kept her from touching and kept me alive long enough to write this love letter. Your stories of tennis and Bobby Short at the Carlyle and the deep fall into racism that life’s pace and a poem’s clutter crowds out with too little of too much memory. Love outlasting us. Juan Gabriel singing Se me olvidó otra vez as I watched you dance with him, with him, with him, while we put “no expiration” on another love we shared and shared and shared and outlasted. Your taking me to visit your son in rehab.  Your visiting me in rehab. More than once. No, I mean more than one rehab.  My hubris at being 5150’d, also in Alhambra. My hubris wrapped in your love, like bubble paper, like pastry, like a sarcophagus. Your keeping track of my beloved husband after my death but you died too soon. My love immolating all it touches, and in such a fire our bodies join as one Pristine Cause and the fire takes us away from memory, away from the Dark Powers eating our lives, and revives the New Age of our youth when we traveled and danced and did not worry about what we were doing wrong. Death is a dance. Death is a dance. Dead Can Dance. Kiss me on the bus. It piques my interest. Oh how you held me. Oh how we danced.  And none of you will live long enough to walk with my husband to the top of Rocky Ridge to toss my ashes off into Pacific tides that dance before us and after us and frame the infinite collapse of love in all its forms, all its days, all its words seeking equanimity in a world that only falls, only falls, only falls in love.

 A prose poem to be published Spring, 2025 in  KINPAURAK: Creative Institute for the Study of the Esoteric, Absurd, and Sublime

The Archaic Torso of Rilke

How can a god do it? Maybe he can’t. Though I’d like to know which god. We do know the cause of beauty isn’t as humble as justice, it doesn’t hide. Its shape needs light. It requires donors, even tourists. Its verse needs to come up for air. Its price is high. And these mysteries won’t stay whole for long as each marble arch loses limbs. Mystery curates the shards of what we intended.

But this is not a poem saluting divine antiquities. This is a lament of inaccessible lives. A reckoning posing as what the elite sees on holiday. Even if this poem, too, has original intents severed at the elbows in its hubristic claim of remaking art, it acknowledges (I acknowledge) that only the broken can know the broken in ways to repair the earth. Tikkun food stamps, not Apollo.   

Tonight in the museum of oligarchs and algorithms, the role of god is played by the poet who thinks he versifies where creation flares. His skin drags meter and line length to blocks of angry words. He thinks he reports like a mirror, but the dark center has its own podcast now.  Underneath the clever simulations he’s a cat.  His wild claws rip ribbons in the luminous stony skin of brawny verisimilitude. Truth nestles on these pedestals. Or rather squats.

Real words may lose power in this late hour of our experiment, our prison of pixels and co-emergent affliction; (though surely too, Rainer Maria, the man, not the icon, thought his own body translucent enough with what the sacred power left buried in caves not castles, in row crops and factory lines, in credit card service charges). The parking lot is full at the SUV church of nothing left.  The tide is rising, predicted by both physics and evenhandedness.

It's too late to study prosody, so he studies the notes of Miles Davis and notebooks of Darwin and doesn’t mind the gaps in the logic. He wanes and will never scale the heights of Duino or DNA. He is still in prime movement; in brine he adapts. The solar gusts in gods and all the other hidden places catch the drift of natural selection. Or better yet, when Stephen Jay Gould, the great biologist of evolution was asked what was so special about Einstein’s brain, what evolutionary need caused reality’s metanoia, said, “I care less about the size of Einstein’s brain than knowing there have been thousands of Einsteins living and dying in cotton fields and sweatshops” and prisons, both bricks and pricks and locks, the gulags of cybercurrency and the dark stain that grows larger than history.  This poem is the tombstone on the wall behind the object of our regard, it explains nothing before or after art and its smooth musculature. Neither a YouTube documentary on La Pasionaria or cutting massive blocks at Carrera or quantum entanglement, nothing will save this shitshow.  This poem slithers from the sea to see who still lives.

The darkness completes us (he says, I say). Either way we burn the lyre for light - sendero luminoso for the second god that stumbles. That god’s body made of moons puts up a sail to  catch what’s left. That god can figure it out. From now on there is no god you cannot change.

 Three prose poems published in the Spring, 2025 issue of Everscribe

Alchemy

But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth. II Timothy 2:20.

The ingredients for happiness change in time, but all the elements you need are already at hand -it’s habit that weeds out what you think you can’t use. Myriad vials will fill with what you miss. In the first half of the 21^st century elixirs are running out.  Don’t waste them, don’t flip coins. When can you cook gold like this again?

Soon the intelligence we made will make our native intelligence fade. Soon the habitual moon will deny us love. Yet even true love loves cosplay. So go in fancy dress for couples’ therapy, in a shaman’s get up of Bantu cloth, eagle feathers, vipers’ skin, and Dzi beads.  Nothing is off the table. Orpheus holds the fire extinguisher in the lab late at night promising he’ll be open to how he’s hurt you.  (So much is learned in our 50 minutes.)

Play with the world, steal its gifts, for a last supper. Raise a clay cup suitable for rain, hemlock, ayahuasca, wine or vinegar. (Though among these occult magic tricks a sponge soaked with vinegar works wonders too.) Pursue new wounds to break open the sounds of your purple heart. I guess the old ceremonies fail to ease the ache of underused awareness.  So your swollen feet make the pilgrim’s journey. The phonemes confess it. Make up a chant; who will know? Perhaps it makes the perfect lotus grow from mud. A bloom is exactly  the golden art you need and seek, the secrets hidden in caves for future emergencies.

Because, rest assured, the red lights are blinking.

Listen.  It’s real. You thought you could answer and did not need to steal. All bets are off. The prophecy’s not wrong nor dated. The common cup matters because it’s empty. Might as well fill it with gold, a singing emptiness extracting essence from a suffering that is horribly overrated.

Gravity

At evening we made a fire at the edge of a blue lake high in the mountains near the border. We made the camp to heed the songs of robins and night herons  -- you would not admit you were cold.  The stratocumulus sunset stayed until dark, and then a black sky of chilled stars fell down upon our world.  A rat rustled in the reeds near us, but that night nothing could scare us.

The dust of a windy day covered us. We looked up at the black dome of emptiness. I said, “maybe wonder will solve us.”  You scoffed, the white puff of cloudy air, the denial inside you, fell into the fire. You would not admit you worried about your death. Instead, you pulled me to it breathing with the fading birdsong and letting a mysterious force draw us together, then to the ground. We lifted arms, heavy as stones, and knew gravity would not leave us alone. Pulled to each other for warmth, our brave fear made us complete and lovely, and we lived by the unspoken trust in what heaves us home.  After another wave of gravity you snored like a duck in your down bag.   I stayed up as the night got colder and the stars rushed away, pulled apart in all directions, their causes and effects chiming with the chemistry unleashed at the moment time began.  From here there was no place that did not pull us to it. 

Tomorrow we climb the ridge in front of us and cross into a new country.  Our weight will hold us on the path until we’re there. But now I raise my hand to the constellations above. My finger traces Orion’s belt. My hand is heavy. Though your hand pulls it to you.

Luxembourg

Before puberty I brought piles of atlases home from the cold marble library, before the screens tunneled me away from the world with the fear of missing out. Historical atlases -- page after page of mysterious oblong shapes unheard of: Savoy, Wallachia, Zimbabas, Xiongnu – delicately colored geometries of Golden Hordes, Knights Templar, Caliphates. The calm seas surrounding the ever-melting forms, joining, then disappearing page after page. Luxembourg, a shape without history, tiny and blocked in a low land, inspired my imaginations.  So I carved out new countries – counties, states, duchies, electorates rearranged in orders invented by alternate history and my pencils.

Why not? I was born in the generation that would see history itself die.

On real graph paper I made up populations, flags, mottos. My childhood hand taught by polity to make uniforms, not yet poems. I sketched broad-shouldered soldiers with epaulets to escape our forever wars. My mind muddled by mutations made shadow states in impossible time. Drawings of nothing real, yet as real as Indo-Turkic sultanates now erased. Ah, those secret histories and cherished inventions formed from the same emptiness that will swallow my falling body. Atlases, screens, blue graph paper lose their proud biases in no substance. To manifest history is no error but does not last. Quiet seas bring no lines and mark coasts I’ve never seen, will never see. So I still limn the lands in their myriad shapes born and dying in time. Small Luxembourg’s mind locked in itself, without the distant blue eternity of pliable oceans where history dissolves in the brine.

 Two poems to be published in ANTAE: a journal of creative writing in Spring, 2025.

The Elders

… smile insouciantly,
though they sweeten the day
when you walk by and mostly
ignore their slow movements.
You catch their eyes briefly
and you both nod as though
some recognition were possible.
 
They’ve tricked you.
You think their smile is a form of ignorance.
But behind your back they gather
to laugh at your own end,
at the destruction of ego
to come in the fire they fuel
quietly.
 
They move slowly
so you will not notice
this rebellion
in their disappearing bodies.
 
 

Before Winter

A registered letter arrives. He tosses it on the laptop.
It’s August, no need to open it yet, he reasons.
 
He wants to open the letter in time, with care.
He suspects seasons will fall out.
 
Spring, green and itchy.
Summer, sweaty and exhausting.
 
Fall, illuminating the body’s sadness.
Winter, the deep unknowing skin.
 
He knows he’s wrong about time --
now that the sunlight falls on its side.
 
He’ll never make it to winter solstice,
but he pretends the days lengthen.
 
He rolls seasons up like sleeves,
and marches up his made-up hill.
 
He thinks the lie we all will tell is hard work.
We say it’s a letter opener, but it’s a murder weapon.
 
Then the letter opens on its own
and the days he does not live spill out.

 Published Nov 26, 2024, in Festival for Poetry

Norwegian Wood

Are these not just excuses to not connect. Our differences are irrelevant. To only name the flaws. - Bjork

Perhaps it was wrong
to burn him in my bucket of ashes.
Perhaps raising fire
was only code for my incompetence.
He is a fine musician, he hears notes
better than words.  I hear
the keys and chords of an unknown man
and my hunger looks for answers 
in blue notes and echoes. 
Words dry up. They always have.
But words are kindling too.
*
Sandalwood oil cools on the tabernacle of your wrist.
No sandalwood grew in Oslo.
Yet our little love nest on the fjord was full of sweet scent
and strong hot tea.  I loved choosing furniture
for you. I loved dropping mint and sugar in your tea.
I loved singing a third above your melody.
You did not notice. You kept singing your lonely song.
*
How many tables did we construct? 
How much experience can be stretched on them 
now for examination?  And how many conclusions 
wow us then are moved like chess pieces?
The usual gambit
grabs your body from my memory
and I anele it with aloe and myrrh 
as scripture demands. Ashes to ashes, you know.
So I clinch the white ash and a checkmate
from plane crashes, canals,
and ransomed songs foreshortened by history.
But the wooden hut we cobbled together
outlasts us. It outlasts even inept love.

 To published by Lotus-Eater Literary Magazine, issue 20, 2025.

Morning

the ragged wolves return at dawn
collecting what they’re due
you don’t remember when
they went away --
you do remember 
you made the wolves
by seeing them 
and you remember the stories you told
sheltered them from slaughter --
those parables of salt
made a world 
they savored in your skin
then at night you promised them
the wounded moon 
perhaps you promised too much
and now the night passes
and the wolves in you
get seriously pissed off

*
before their numbers 
were great 
and hungry packs
chumbled on the hem
of your rough robe
folded on the shore
there you sat on ancient rocks 
by the blackened sea --
and wanted 
a whole night’s sleep --
wanted to be warmed
by a fire of dry grass 
sparking on red coals
you tired 
of making them prey
so you struck a deal --
blessed are those who sharpen teeth 
blessed are the raw 
blessed are the outnumbered
for they will seek shelter in the broken laws
you thought they were multitudes
but it was only you
then when 
you stopped thinking
the wolves stopped
and the night returned
to night

*
whatever beatitudes 
you sold them
must have left 
outstanding debts
you remember sitting
between the wolves’ darkness and teeth --
counting your habits
as the smoke
on an alien shore
rolled across the water
into you
you planned habitual escape --
the migration of wolves
out of your eyes

*
plans are lies
and lies harden your debts
perhaps the many wolves
were also born by the war in your head –
you hoodwinked them
and then promised relief
by silence
but they got history instead
and history would piss
anyone off
your shameless mendacity 
will not hold the pack -- 
wolves pour out of the cut
in your chest
shadows scratching 
at the cockcrow’s windows 
as day insists you open
your eyes --
night’s end framed
in willows and skin
you and they did love the moon --
but dawn stops
the tracks in you, in them
the morning wolves are cranky
they are wet with your blood
and howl at the luminous emptiness
there’s not enough coffee
for the pack
but you remember the story
of loaves and fishes
and how baskets filled
as long as the hungry
surrounded them
so you pay your debts
for free
and the tribes of wolves
lick your hands clean of blood
in a windy sunny morning
by the sea
by what you refuse
by what you forget 
in your body 
still wild enough 
to make good news