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.

To be published in the Winter, 2026 issue of The Fourth River Literary Journal

Amor Fati

I was drifting in a boat.
Then, in the middle of
this wide blue river,
the water asked me
an impertinent question --
it wanted to know
the scope of its banks,
the curve and reach,
the cut and alluvion,
the pace and gathering volume
that might lift the
bankfull to a place
where, even as guided by gravity,
it would not outlast time.
 
The middle of the river
wanted to know if the end
might be ahead,
if the next bend of this slow
and sinuous meandering
might turn to a murky delta
bleeding to the sea.
 
Water, as is its nature,
lets questions sink in.
It does not want answers --
the favor is in the asking.
 
But in this frail boat
I am too solid still.
I can’t circumvent answers.
So I tell the water
“from this oxbow
we’ll flow to the dark mother --
her arms holding us under.”
I am inundated with answers.
 
Uncertain hands cup
the rising waters in the bilge of the boat,
water not yet brackish,
and not yet from the sea.
I am thinking that bailing alone
could keep us afloat.
But better, perhaps, to learn
to love the sinking.

 

Finishing Line Press chapbook now available for preorder.  Hard copies published in May, 2026.

Published in Cathexis Northwest Press (again...the second time CNP has published me). Out in the March, 2026 issue.

From Mud Emerging 

rain comes early this fall
or so habit alleges
 
a November skyful
of sun has drawn
a white flowering
from the black dirt
in the nearby hills
 
there you walk to celebrate
the season’s edges
where mycelia have woken
to see you
 
their roots connect
the broken will
in the underground –
here there is no place
that does not make you
 
on these humdrum trails
you walk to root out ignorance
and take steps to stop
the myriad screens
that first cause
a fake you
 
here fungi, not the lotus,
remind you
 
*
off the trail
on a small track
to the steep cliff
where the raw light falls
to the darkness
at the bottom
of Baldwin Creek draw
           
picnics once here
or prayers
leave breadcrumbs the size
of chasms
 
the lie in your grasp
has trampled the grass
on this edge
of your wilder nature –
your hand grips
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 freefall
of dharmakaya –
 
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
 
in the end
the dark winks
to take contrivance
to the edge
and push it off

 To be published in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of Yanaguana magazine. 

A Chant of Choice

The brotherhood wakes to a bell tuned to middle C.
 
The habits are strong this morning –
those voices carried so long natter on
and slam familiar doors and deny the greater
strength of these trees and seasons
and the singing of the hours. Cosmogenesis and entropy
both clear their throats. The sound
of the universe self-creating does not kid around. 
 
So I raise a white flag
to the very crowns of the trees
that circle my home.
 
Perhaps in last night’s dream
I learned to surrender to habits,
and I received a transmission that helps:
the voices between my ears –
no longer close anything.  Every sound is a door.
What once was less is now more.
 
But let’s be honest, I got kicked out of the Brotherhood
and I say good morning to coffee and self-cherishing,
my addictions of choice.
 
I do not doubt
the power of capitulation
the value of setting matters on the soapstone counter,
marmalade and mortality aligned for one more time,
one last time as though there were time left.
 
It’s another morning of monkeys
left on my back, chipper in the cortex --
the chatter of the universe fixing its mistakes
off key and amused by the filters awarded us.
 
What I want to tell you is that loving these habits
opens doors.  Look at the world
that’s left through today’s threshold.
It is a green song stretching
glittering particles of union
across an inland sea.
A green song that yearns for
the very skin of black holes.
And it is also a shrug
on tired shelf-life shoulders.
 
Do a little stretching every morning.
Practice your scales.
Watch for falling branches.
 
This is the lesson learned every morning:
infinite darkness and eternal light
grow tall from one root,
flow from the same spring,
and both sing a song of no limits.
 
And, oh, the root is not theory.
My bones are a pitch pipe.
My throat, though passing,
whistles with what might have been possible.
Today begins.

 To be published in the November, 2025 issue of The 34th Parallel .

Our Peculiar Garden

You walk in the door
with half a pail
of yellow gall.
 
You’ve tended all
the mysterious places,
on our lands.
You grew a tree
where my face
once filled with parables.
I remember the day
your green hands braided
the rich earth and made
a scourge to purify
our sloppy lives.
 
So now I stop and suffer,
to consider both
the lilies of the field
and that darn unlucky
fig tree.
 
You walk in
with a familiar
tension.  But we
need not toil, nor will we spin,
apparently.
Every fear formed by your steps
is a path. A lesson
of how blood will loosen.
A lesson of opening eyes.
 
These seeds of fate
fall from a lazy grip
to redeem the fallow fields
on their own. It works
if you work it. And also if you don’t.
I agree with you, though.
Our garden’s fruit waits.
“Time to get your hands dirty,” you say.
 
Seize these hands then, too.
They want to be green
before it’s too late.

 To be published in the Fall 2025 edition of the journal The Bridge

I Broke a Leg Where Pilgrim Feet Once Trod

Scene: the mountains in fall. Anthony sits cross-legged at a campfire. He’s ready for action.

Anthony: I feel no feeling. It’s from this habitual numbness I punch down. The culture made of memory and edited history both numbs me and stirs up my just Cause.  Then it ambulates away from the Effects. Scot free and cheating at taxes, this is what will make me walk like a rich man, right? Walking on borrowed time with no shame.  So I reach out from screen and page and ask you to join me in a landscape of silent valleys. Let’s shatter these earthen jars full of dissembling parchment, let’s let go of the fragments. With the icy fists of poetic license let’s punch a thesaurus, a genealogy, a hierophant’s foot. I complain to the manager that no starting point was scripted, no basecamp imagined for this set piece. The I/thou dialogue in this box of words gets tangled up, pushed into dry paragraphs, and trips over its own workshopped feet. This is the last pilgrimage of autumn, of papyrus and symbols unknown, and it is not the dance you wanted. Twist the bones before the plot, then backspace. The low angles of light allow erasures and mistakes. The fog comes on club feet, and we stumble, parched, toward an ancient reliquary, the Rule gone wild.

(Director’s cut): Wipe dissolve to a wilderness site. Step by step to the foot of the mountain where he set up camp, sidetracked and firewalled by the washes and arroyos, the dried aspens, high desert juniper, all ready for the deluge to come.  Future destinations spread like cottonwood seeds climbing in air. Where? The head holds the map. The head conspires to smuggle messages to the feet.  The feet are ready for any hubbub, though they prefer he not know there is no feeling.  Neuropathic insolence. The heavy demand of awareness weighs on his extremities and abbreviates timespans. Ah, but the gig is, in fact, up.  The film noir’s credits rolled at the beginning. Now he knows that art just obfuscates, assumes what is unwarranted success. It’s all entertainment to disguise death and old age.  I (footnote: this is the director’s voice) don’t think, though, his place in a cave is cinematic enough. Let’s put him on a path open to the elements.

Anthony: Here at the foot of a majestic cedar I stop to collect the debt accruing in your hands too. I pull the map from your cerebral cortex.  The games will start now, the character development and conflict. You think this is easy? Do you prefer nursery rhymes?  I pull you through the screen into my body, and with this alchemy we can transform the numbness into song. Ok, maybe not song, but spoken language. Ok, maybe not language, but a website.

Review from Cahiers du Cinéma: Appendages convey letters, single file sentences.  Lines enjambed to wither the smidgen of your patience left.  The point (both sharp and dulled) is to find a trail to new breath, new lungs, interconnected neurons with name tags for the icebreaker … oh yes, the body reimagining itself with precious mistakes.  The fine print at the bottom of it. No feeling, where there once was feeling.  Words where there was once a canyon of silence. 

Anthony: Oh sweet lord, dry my feet with your hair. These conundrums are toes.  This little piggy went to market.  The desert fathers are bereft of new ideas. Just find me one true trail to get all the way home, is that too much to ask? What, was that my job?  I hear the French circumlocution here in the Eastern Sierras.  It says, “Tony, heads up!” I play the old soundtrack, a disintegrated loop. Mistakes prove that impermanence is the only way forward.

The Review (cont.): The final frame also has limits and unforeseen expectations. We walk, hobbled and humbled, out of the theater, with this wild hunger, with this borrowed body, one painful step at a time. It surprises no one that the rain has begun.

Anthony: Pilgrim, there is no camino. The absence of maps cuts right to the bone. The loss of the old world is a lamp to my feet.

Published in the Fall 2025 edition of Accidental Magazine.  A cheery poem about dementia, loss, and the beauty of companionship.

Sundowning

When the day turns 
and bends away from us
I call you by name
though you do not hear me.

You close your doors; 
light is your brief foe.
Or so you tell me
as you ambush even yourself.

You draw shades
with lead. You swallow the poison
just to make sense.

“I arm myself against you
by drowning,” you offer.  
You salt our memory with this one-way truth.

How I yearn to navigate the book of your life!
I ask you to fetch facts
off the erased pages of your journal
and instead you mark canvas lifeboats 
on a wide and silent sea.
Entries float on each other.
Palimpsest distractions play on neurons,
vellum, and vanity. In place of speech
your hands catch fish. 
You mute confusion with aphasia and mudras.
You remember that in the nunnery
the sign of honey is to set your finger on your tongue.

“Look, dear one, my blood dries on a finger like ink.
Turn around, let me write the password
on your back, then rub away my mistakes,
and tell you storm lies,” I try to sound like rain.
You chuckle when I slap
the bee I pretend is there.
There is sweetness in this familiarity, 
though your laughter isn’t yours.
It comes from another day.

*
This page loses all the words
you scratched in me.

I make a topic sentence to hold
your cold synapses. Then a sonnet of denials.
All to ease the swelling.

I bend this sentence to fit in your hands
just as eventide folds my fear 
into rabbit’s ears of rain.
I beg you to recall
when we ducked for shelter
under eaves whose music  
was the rattle of small birds 
then we slow-danced
in redemptive syncopation.
Your blind contentment was relentless.
How I loved being your mute safe harbor.

But now time has swapped our senses 
and dried the details of your touch,
the scent of your closeness,
the music of your breath,
the wild beauty of your conclusions.
Now your body arms itself
with high tide and low expectation.

This sentence refuses to surface
from the gathering murk, the stumbles.
Its three words are cartoon fingers.
I promised honey from rock 
but I failed you.
As if to prove I am a dupe, I confirm
my wild addiction to the folly 
of our hasty bodies, and how now
dusk’s torch song
forms a foreign tongue in our ears. 
I see tonight that the kaleidoscope 
of your eyes will never
friend my skin again. 
I don’t know our end,
but three words sink, waiting.

*
At dinner I tie a bib on these words.
The words that would fill the air 
with the world 
should you hear them.

But it’s too late, my comrade.
We’ve already picked the pocket of time.
The silver pole holding up the universe
falls with the sun.
In this hour before skunks
the shimmer and glare
of cause and effect decline.
The machine freezes and steals our life.

Evensong sharpens its edge
to cut the pattern of our dwindling. 

*
                 Error, error, fatal error.
We’ve forgotten this operating system
came from stars
even if it will not last another night.

Supper’s ready and we grimace 
and bare teeth. We eat eternity.
We fooled the facial recognition test --
the surrender to hypervigilance
misses what’s true.

It stings, this bitter grace.
Your face cuts into me
with a voice that calls my name.
The luminous emptiness
reveals it wasn’t you 
who had turned from light, but I.
It was I who did not hear your call.
It was your voice naming me.

Now a silence curates our 
long loneliness.
A loneliness that holds us together
more tightly than ever.

 Published in September, 2025 in Liebestraum Review

A Reckoning

Old Sisyphus sets the table slowly. Guests are a big deal now.
The Librarian is coming for supper.
She’ll bring the history of ideas.
 
It is late in the year and the long reach of the afternoon
so sunlight streams in acute angles through this room --
slow autumn light shines on dust motes rising like tired little angels.
 
Old S is tired too. The only stones he pushes now are in his kidney.
He stays inside for days and follows the shifting light
to see it change the room in endless afternoons; to see time fall.
 
Tonight, though, he’ll meet her to settle effects and their causes.
He will admit to her he can’t keep up at all.
Speed no longer feeds him and these hills are too steep.
 
At the head of this trestle table he’ll place human error.
That’ll be his chair where they’ll negotiate the death they share
and then map how the mortal mind always misses the point.
 
She’ll come at sunset, her arms loaded with scrolls –
long lists of appeals, old stipulations,
a faulty memory, and lives of purpose scribed on parchments.
 
He knows what she’ll ask of him when she comes.
She’ll ask him to free them all from his needy heart’s ache. 
 
*
There in the corner of the dining room wait
papers he’ll show her. The bloodwork from the lab,
under a cucurbit of dried mushrooms and madrone twigs.
 
And the overdue book on Plotinus he promised
to return to her. She’ll forgive him.
She always does. It is her act. A dance of withered figs.
 
Now he hears her hooves scratch at the door.
His best and last offer will be to open it. He takes a breath
to prepare himself for the curse of silence they’ll explore.
 
His wobble shames him. His unbalance bores her. 
Oh his wrinkled cherished hand smooths his hair
then opens the polished door to see her there.
 
*
 
He could ask her to dance,
but he won’t.
 
He could offer drinks from the river of consolation,
but he won’t.
 
So they will hold each other
until they don’t.
 
There is work to do. Even ancient trees live to produce fruit.
They exhaust the light on this longest of nights.
 
Every idea waits for them, patient as blood.
Then she wraps a spell around the philosopher’s stone.
 
She points to where he sits and says, “if this makes you feel special,
dismiss it. Not even your mistakes are real.”
 
He thinks she sounds like his mother, the punishment and calcination.
His origin is in her and what’s left of fire passes from one life
 
to another.  At last they scratch at their saddle of human aspiration
and lie to each other like husband and wife.
 
But it is an accounting, not love, she came for. The books are closed.
The parchments rolled out nothing but dust and mold.
 
This poem, this skin of utterance, is an impermanent fool,
and all fools die, turn to stone, and roll down
 
the mountain. On the peak’s lee side epithets huddle
to pay and purify his delinquent fees. S agrees to these cold terms.
 
So done and signed, she rings the bells.  Work is over.
Now she is his dream to wake from,
 
with a red coal on his tongue.
The new ash will make an earth in his sleep.
And the season of sleep is finally here.

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

Prose poems to 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).