My brother and I agree
our father returned from
that frozen reservoir in Korea
with deities attached to him,
but not just any kind of deity.
What followed the lieutenant home
was the kind of deity that thrives on chaos,
on division and terror and bloodshed.
For lack of a better term for it…
What if I were to say
I did nothing more
last Christmas
than pick tinsel
from my teeth, dismissing
the customary Christmas poem
as nothing more than a pathogen
of dubious origin?
(Would you point out
the obvious, that
most good poems are,
whe…
They accuse us of weaponizing our tears,
yet when those tears are spent
and we have no choice but to
wave the white flag
and change the locks, the
best we can do in the endless cold war
we’re left with
is
file the necessary forms
in the bureaucracy they buil…
To know this the way I know
we can make music together
when separate,
to know this palpable presence
in the emptiness of silent rooms
& then embrace it for what it is,
and to know it isn’t just the singular you
but the plural when I consider
your survival …
I will eat these late-season berries
blue
as the sky on better days.
I will roast this squash
with oils pressed
from fruit of the the olive branch
the one the dove carried in her heart
through a s…
& so the question
comes down to
whether to
stay or go
after all.
although not even
the most prescient
among us thought to
ask the ceiling this:
what cost does any kind
of future come to?
is this the day
i grow the…
He was woke.
He'd been on a pilgrimage to Maté Latte.
His man bun was untidy and his five-day growth perfectly trimmed.
His mother sent him skinny jeans and quinoa facial scrub for Samhain each year,
and his lover wore it natural downtown.
It was the best of times, it was t…
In dreams
the winter is deep
and children are taught the nature of cycles
as carefully as we teach the cycles of nature.
In dreams
symbols dance among the sta…
From the time when only men wrote about road trips
I squeezed myself into the narrative,
these winding roads my only companion
on this journey where mountains meet sea,
home neither ahead nor behind me
because it is a thing I carry with me at all times
& that is something which…
skeletons of blackened trees erect a monument to themselves in this twisted landscape where corruption burns itself in effigy and settles for pennies on the dollar in which a spark of anything but Light (well past the point of redemption) can signal the first s…
Let us speak entirely in metaphor today
let us agree to believe
in a literal interpretation of this love only
as it passes between us in its journey
to places beyond the sun that remain unnamed
even in our wildest imaginings
(because the answers are never as important
…(or... Love for Love's Sake, Ego for God's Sake)
If this is love, give me another metaphor
for Sisyphus rolling that stone uphill
to the feet of Prometheus,
only to watch myself devoured by crows
while repeating never more
again and again
forever
bound to these roles
o…
as unlikely as it is
there would be a savior
whose birthday still confuses us
with respect to what gifts to bring
and as unlikely as it is
there would be a jolly man
whose pastime fills volumes
with images of el…
'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house,
a rogue he was creeping, watchful for a spouse.
No husband to stop him from creeping and lurching,
no one to surprise him or stop him from searching.
Just that old rogue, once again sni…
They sleep on bus station floors
wrapped in each other
on well-bought sleeping bags,
their guitar the perfect piece
of accent furniture
for shelving s…
at twenty I wrote a poem
that would be a song sung
by a woman in her twenties when I was sixty
at thirty I wrote a poem
that was a dream I had at twelve
of a woman who is eternal
at forty I found that place
between the biding time and fully awake
which activated at fifty
when …
This is what happens when royalty
which exists independent of the empire,
which springs from the loins of the tribe itself,
makes it past the checkpoints
& other measures meant to filter them out.
This is what happens when that …
This was the scent that marked the end of summer
and the inevitable waltz into autumn's
colorful dance of crisp air and sweaters:
Cousin Tommy's delivery of
his annual bushel of gravensteins
from the tree at the end of his drive.
This was an afternoon of peeling and slicing -
al…
“Fuck Atlas,” she sighed,
pouring another glass of wine
and adjusting her tiara.
“He doesn't interest me nearly as much
as that dude who wandered through the dark
looking for an honest corporation.”
I didn't have the heart to tell her
she had it wrong
or perhaps she didn't ha…
sunrise
this
painted lady
i cannot take my eyes off
& by noon i am drunk
on her perfume
clutching
this wild bouquet
between my teeth
stumbling up
the aisle of spring
as if this all wasn't new
not at all concerned
with
my
reputation
