To be published in the winter solstice 2026 issue of The Sun Thief.

Left Bank Loki

Loki sees the best minds of his generation
complain about the WiFi. From this link he learns
that in the cloud of unknowing improv works best.

But Loki can’t seem to make any routine work now, knowing
the oceans slosh plastic into fish hearts. A real buzzkill.
Bruises.  Bruises.
And these jeremiads are not a good fit
for us, thank you for letting us read them
and hope you place them elsewhere. A message without messenger.

At the Café de Flore, Loki tries more of this routine:
We live at the fault line. We live in principalities
of product placements of what a garden like Eden surely needs.  
We hide how they who ate the fruit 
of the knowledge of good and evil
have developed an online service for apples. Drone dropped.
Bottled water from Mímisbrunnr. Set up monthly delivery.
All gone.  Not a laugh in the crowd.

In Denver he knit a black turtleneck and soaked it with absinth.
(He smoked Gauloises, shredding his throat instantly. Out on Hiway
61 with the SF Beat boys. He left Oslo for Bodh Gaya, as though 
the zeitgeist, as its very self, could be hoodwinked.)
In Oaxaca he sang Songs of Innocence, accompanying himself
on a harmonium. You can’t laugh at his hunger to make the team. 

Loki was born to poke holes in convention and save souls.
Loki digs these very holes in the Big Sur sand dunes.
And while eternity is overrated, it’s Loki we’re talking about, huh?
Come on, simple gratitude gives him five stars.

He’s crying again in the wilderness, in the uber dry suffocation 
of an entangled samsara. His provision, though, is out of network.
He cries an illness into that desperate wind of clickbait and confession.

Therefore, Loki will end this life loving a list that never included him,
but Loki’s lived long enough to learn love outlasts the list.
Or so his practice™ suggests.

All gone.
But in that gap there is a god
with flying shoes. A singer who sings between the notes.
Music algorithms aren’t really that odd anymore, given
how we used to let autofill run the cars off into the quarry.
The domed observatory in the thin grey laptop counts the stars
as the purple round Packard roars down the hill
to drugs, and jazz nite, and to a pure hedonism
that was gone forever when USENET was birthed.

Loki has an idea. Let’s rip the red jacket off that
stoned boy with the hawk’s nose at Cardinal Lemoine Metro station.
Remember the sweet smell of Grove Press. Loki thinks
of a set up with Grove Press as the payoff.

He asks A.I.  There is infinite emptiness in the request.
Chain smoking in every decade of the last century, Loki
has a nasty cough in this one. He googles cause and effect.

In conclusion, the winner gets the paycheck.
Endorse the permanent silence with your signature
you did not make and cannot hear. Just wait, the silence is near.

You want Loki to hush? Exactly.

Loki and his bro Hermes and his cousin Kandinsky 
carry this noise of absent prayer to its logical end.
The noise left out of our songs. The noise that will be gone
before you know it.

There’s a silence from scarcity.
It differs from the silence of letting go.
The history that knows the difference 
and could save us has a gatekeeper.
I can’t remember the password, can you?

Loki’s lived his life trying to shut up.
Loki’s poems are meant to be the sound of him shutting up.
But he can’t make the beatniks, asleep in the ditch, hear
how courageous his hilarious attack on digital primacy is.

They are sleeping off another wild night
on the slick and soiled sheets in Hotel Rachou’s
room for business guests (printers, ketamine). A good WiFi.

 To be published in the December, 2026 issue of Does It Have Pockets 

Biographical

It’s kind of risky writing a memoir, when you are really part of a larger universe. – Questlove

my phlegmy intonation, my greyback assurance,
only distracts from what actually was.
 
in the random shipwreck we’ve become
isn’t it time to tell the truth?
both static surfaces and a surging tide
hide the facts and hold them hostage.
 
now is the time of our summation
now is a reckoning on the rafts loosed on the old currents
now is the merit of losing the way.
 
so let’s kidnap a presentation,
count the syllables in shadows and ransom the rimes,
ready the tools, use the apparatus of erased outlines
and blink twice if you need more time sailing south.
use all the utensils and containers that form you
and refuse the screens that stretch duct tape
on your ears, eyes, and mouth.
 
*
a camara pivots on its tripod.
a candid exposure of journal entries. a composed lifeworld.
many boats are launched to examine these seaworthy ambitions. 
 
this sounds like what you think of when you think of survival. 
this looks like the disappointments in love you fear is your future. 
this is a chest-pounding performance that you hope finally ends the tyranny of your father.
this is the crippling declension that limns your mother’s subtle
and permanent disappointments in you.
a star map of constellations all in the shape of
those silvered wild horses your mother never rode.
(but never doubt the power of show ponies in moonlight).
 
parade-ready ostentation is shaped by our elisions,
and he who shapes us saddles us with vintage abstractions
and leaves us with this rust-encrusted astrolabe --
he ransoms our punishment,
did I say ransom? I meant rations.
 
*
don’t listen to the famous friends who recommend revolts,
but do heed the sharper edges of the common era
and its stories, which cut us, winnow us, with scalpels so unknown,
so mellifluous, so rabbinical, so sharp in their edges
that no blood will run from these, our broken ships.
 
leftover patterns chop up our attention spans,
salad days scuttled across the floor of short chapters,
sirens warn of jagged days caught on the rocks,
the deep amputations, life’s bit pieces, still strut on the quarterdeck.
as walk-on roles, monologs and diatribes are woven into ropes
flung into the heavens as nets
to capture the birds of prey which
bore us here.
natal trophies kept safely, pressed in the pages
of the ragged story of our hours, like flowers found flattened
in the pages of gravity, the weight of our lunacy zipped up
in body bags, our lockstep habits fly out under this canvas cover
to the forgiving waves, to the celestial lost and found.
 
*
claw on your regrets –
the chart your hands now hold is made from triangulated stars.
the release you expected comes too late
and the ear sliced off to confirm your fate
flies in the slovenly winds of your wild DNA
and your habits are buried in the brine in cracked jars.
 
the voyage ends as it begins,
you were never going to tell the truth
because you have not made it yet.
 

 To be published in Half and One Literary Magazine in Fall, 2026.

The Angel at the Garden Gate

Are we leaving then?
Do co-emergent particles also have hands to hold?
Unlikely, but let’s at least make an attempt
to share the flow, to rise in a common wind.
I’ll be your character witness.  I’ll testify the snake
made you and made you do it, then made up our leaving.
 
But you’re staying, aren’t you…
You’ll FaceTime by the tree, by the river,
by the fields of nightshade, never left out
in the bioluminescent light, the light’s light,
and long green rows of ease. Your hollowed healing.
Which is not mine.  Never was, although I abused it for flight.
 
I asked for rescue.  You showed pics of garden flowers.
I mined the singularity.  You showed pics of garden flowers.
I wore the skins of black holes. You showed pics of garden flowers.
I scoffed at the falconer’s call. You didn’t even bother.
So by the sacred law of the inventor of the firmaments
it made sense to me that you stay and I withdraw.
 
Is my road map then a restraining order? A handful of dust
thrown at the raddled Ganges, the conjuring roots
of the Amazon, the Nile with its baskets of prophets.
The fluvial credit card with its enshitified rituals
wanting to buy your love.  No, buying love for you,
I know how this works.  I ate the apple long before you.
 
There, something circles the pearl-white sky above
our garden home, our blue dot reminder of infinite emptiness.
O but so many snakes in Plato’s hip hop cavities of stone.
In that darkness, your darkness I open the cages of love.
Out extemporize the owl, the falcon, an inefficient raven.
Two hawk-like alpha predators and a silly tramp, hungry and alone.
 
The unheld multitude of wings musses our hair. Not selfie-ready at all.
(Each tendril pulled to its form; green, brown, then grey streaks).
O raptors of this rupture, you present such soft solutions, possible ends. 
Your collection of shining black wings and bloody beaks opens
each wound oozing roses in the fucking garden of self-consciousness.
It wasn’t denial, our sin of record. It was intentional perception.
 
Now the scriptures are also click-bait. Like the baffling “co-emergent”
reference used earlier.  This whole poem uses us.  From here
there is no science nor art that does not claim to see us.
The time away from time.  The pretense. What does not baffle?
The artifice of claims, the proud strut of knowing good and evil.
As though abetting a god we made in our heads makes
 
a speck of difference. Who forgives specks?
 
I hate this part the most. Saying good bye to you who stays.
It’s time to duck under the flaming sword of Manjushri.
(I must admit I’d thought it’d be you. But all creation myths
have twists.) It cuts down the weeds at these last doors of deception.
Mustard flowers fall to fire and their seeds dry in my long sleep.
The sword and flames find four directions and warn there is a fifth.
 
And what you hear is wind, not calls to return. Time to make a path
and pretend it is poetry. Caminantes on a pilgrimage to simple loneliness.
Cerberus’s barking does not say flee, it pleads “come to me.”
Everything depends on life chickening out in paradise lost.
What we so desperately listen for is desire, and so miss the birdsong.
Purifying birdsong, celestial and healing, isn’t a lie. The birds smell us.
 
O Majushri, in your wisdom, slice off the cancers in our world of ideas.
Harvest what is left of us, take the best of the Garden, the seeds
that survive false Giants, an egg or two, for the floods of remission.
I offered my body in that last paradise and was found wanting,
I dreamed the truth, or I saw the truth when I dreamed, I dreamed.
I slept away the obstructions and still the shadows let me sin.
 
We are of the same substance as the trees. I pocket the sacred plants
and am pulled out of your arms; you left behind with roots and rivers
and the fallen bodies, broken and leveraged to assist the living
end, in a time of names, an overanalysis, an accounting
of the myriad forms of both good and evil. I know, I know.
I cannot return to the tree. Why possibly would I want to? You.
 
The way ahead shines. It shines enough.
Birds, birds… the morning again. A fucking dove.  Are you kidding?
Another chance at reinvention, a profile and a screen,
a new shot at storytelling with sunlight plot twists, with bird offal
falling on the dust outside the gate; determine their portent
to praise this song of suspense for a god who is not an accountant.
 
We are pissed the garden shrinks us,
we are humbly pissed and we are truly sorry.
We made things die
on our watch.  The god that expels us was
what we made up after school. On the playground, online.
The sacred sounds of a sword ending us. Exile is our freedom.
 
The birds, the bloody birds,
will not stop forgiving us.

 To be published in Glassellland Lit Mag in Fall, 2026.

Just Another Hollywoodland Pilgrim’s Progress

When I was a boy the hills
told me things, set limits
and promised mysteries that surely
must exist on the other sides.
Two rows of hills shepherding
the Arroyo Seco to a distant sea.
The San Gabriels holding the smog
like a mother holding a child. Elysian Park
protecting Frog Town life from the Dodgers
and Clifton’s Cafeteria, with its tropical holy land.
 
But I want to tell you about my father
who attended UCLA when it was on Vermont
and then Westwood, who drove the only
long way from Hermon’s small valley to
the expanse of beanfields and Spanish colonial
suburbs that puffed up around Royce Hall.
Later, when Dad had a family, he drove me
periodically over that hill, the huge ice cream cone
announcing we were leaving childhood,
over the hill into the city of traffic,
of  The Akron with records of Jewish folksongs
and teak patio geegaws from no place ever heard of,
past the Vermont campus and Pilgrimage Theater,
through the movie palaces where Dad and I saw Ben Hur
and El Cid, past Westwood, to the other hills --
the Palisades before the coast. There Dad stopped. There
were no more hills, only the ocean. But I knew then and now
he wanted to keep driving. Out of the coat and tie
popping a Doublemint in his mouth to thoughtfully chew,
and the white t-shirt making a farmer’s tan on
his strong left arm. His car, capable of climbing hills
and starting pilgrimages, changed him. And
changed me.

 My fourth short story published.  The Practice of Stopping Practice in Wordgathering: A journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, Summer 2026, published by Syracuse University. 

They had warned him.  When Sam died folks told him it was important to stay active, to stay engaged in activities outside the house, to make sure he didn’t “isolate.”   He appreciated this advice, but it felt to him as observations made from outside his life.  And from the inside he observed that no one invited him to any activity with them.  They were Sam’s friends, and so the connections with them died with Sam.  The last time he would see most of these friends was at the memorial service.  A service of Buddhist prayers for arrival in the Pure Land for Sam, a lapsed and crusty Methodist. 

 

(cont.)

 Three poems to be published in the September, 2026 issue of The Chiron Review Literary Journal

Desperados in Eden

You said I wanted a muse,

then declined the opportunity.

So I write this poem without you.

Then I asked you to climb a tree with me.

You still demurred, in a piqued and impish way.

No worries, I said, I am more snake than tree.

“Surrender your leaves!”, you said ahead of kindness.

You did not see my snakeskin shadow.

And as for apples? We both picked fruit up off our ground. 

So I made leaves in one damn hurry

and handed them to you in buckets of rain.

You illuminated the mortgage and took the wheel again.

“Document your shadow, fess up to your creation!”

Oh I am a constant autumn, I confessed,

and you will run from the winter mess ahead, ahead.

A sly miracle then happened, and you burned the wet leaves 

for our warmth. You said, “this happens to me all the time”,

and suddenly I saw we were naked.  At last. 

The Throttle in Your Hands

Wings are poetic, don’t you think?

Flight and air and a sustained survival

do appeal to all.

But here’s a story of my sinking.

You see, the plane of desire broke 

the glass to cause the fire.

Since what was wanted was the dramatic end.

The rickety plane collected the trash 

and alphabet and then turned off its engines.

The sky-written smoke soon became flames.

The book in the pocket blamed solar flares

(but I knew Prometheus was just looking for a hook up.)

A miracle, I say.  The Sage of smoke held up the secret

lyric we all sing and pulled on the throttle. He navigated my neuroses

to a safe landing. The wings and plane still standing,

by standing still.  Don’t you think

neurosis is a tired shame? Viennese couches

and ashtrays filled with butts.

But who am I to dispute the man

who saved me from my fatal descent -

given all the weather reports raging in my nutty heart.

I promise I’ll stutter vowels and consonants no longer.

Permit me voyage love, wherever patterns never land.

Emergencies, in friendly hands, are how our lives restart.

Antichrist on the Playa

From Midwest farms to crosstabs 

on the weedy table of Love

he brings an urgent torrent of speech.

Each phoneme takes its place

inside me. Perhaps not as I intended.

After all, the sermon was his to mount.

Perhaps more than he pretended,

he planted the sweetest doubts.

Though his intentions were to scale, 

a cult of desperation still grew. 

I wonder if I can hold his size.

I wonder if desire has my vision blurred.

Blessed are the chronologists. Who knew?

The chakra I had expected to burn deferred

to the chakra that holds my feisty surrender.

Then the Fallen Angel butt-dialed the Antichrist.

So I am ready for what’s next.

I want this prize. To scoff at the off-brand Logos.

Post-evangelism clean up in the cemetery.

The Word’s own budding influencer

preaches outside St. Peter’s

to tell me to remember to say please.

But a rich man can’t go through the eye of the needle

unless he is on his knees.

 To be published in the Spring, 2026 issue of Lit Magazine

Comparing My Inside to Your Outside at the Water’s Edge

We watch a rising tide together. We avoid the salty foam chugging up to our knees. But we welcome ebbing, with its slick metaphors and clickbait embarrassments. We entangle at the breakwater sitting cheek by jowl on top of the riprap, on these rocks quarried from the channel islands, Anacapa and Santa Cruz.  I look at you, my oldest friend, and see a brotherhood of strangers. I admire your handsome profile and my guts ask for the blessings of impermanence.

You point to the angry undertow swirling outside the marina, you point to the wind rocking the boats, ringing their lines against masts. I say, the flow that can be seen is not the real flow. I look at your frown lines and I think you seem annoyed with me, with my declaiming and lack of precision.  You read my mind and say, “I don’t think this is a question of metaphysics, of proposing strategies -- it’s better to watch thought bubbles float by in the wind of this one and precious human life” “Better than what?”, I ask

I turn away from you, outwards, to a southwest swell, one continuous rumble of big waves falling on the introduced rock -- the wide ocean wants all its shore back, wants what’s protected inside this seawall. We sit looking across the marina, at the hills inland -- but I know this is the wrong view, the wrong view forever obscuring the right view out to what we loosely call “horizon.”  A sloop slides to the end of the world. We want to be that boat. We call this pose our Truth in the messy shallowness of our dry and mundane social media profiles, our performative pictures floating by in the regatta of self-doubt… only in some better universe does anyone know that our crafted and artful images are like the blinking of a kidnap victim – in the press conferences of algorithmic ack ack we telegraph a fear deeper than history.  Help me, help me. Each drop of torture asks for a relief from how much better you look like a happy human than I do. 

The waves hit the breakwater again, making my pretentions fall off the edge of the world while you seem to breathe a ransom into being.  Sitting beside me you sigh and I make a guess it’s a melodrama of exclusion, an homage to the syntax errors we wrap in plastic for all this wet beauty.  How can I resist your truth, your beauty? I shudder with the sun and turn away from the green flash. I reach inside me, to the storehouse of loathing, and I curate a darkness.  Your elite satisfactions lift the marina into my obituary: he was afraid of every drop of life, every rustle of the oak trees on these same hills. He bought a round of drinks for strangers.  He lied ceaselessly. His feet were a lamp to the world.  The world never knew.

We take a selfie for posterity. It evaporates immediately. We walk on the beach beside the marina. Your tide is pulling out. Kelp is left on the sand.  It will dry by morning.