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).