Take five blocks of urban blight twice a day for four years and don't call me in the morning.
January 18, 2024
Tag: poetry
12:25pm and the bells rang out over the walls of city hall in the rain and we laughed as we ran to the bus.
October 3, 2023
One of the last beautiful days. Blue sky still in the morning. Lone cricket playing his lonely tune. That neglected atmosphere of September. Ragged end of summer. Fall coloring slender trees whispering in an ocean of concrete. A single piercing of Venus across that vast unrolling cloudless day break reflected as a seamless horizon in the panes of a faded store front. Rattle of plastic and metal leaves undisturbed the cool reach of a breeze along outstretched fingers. A transformation in undertones. Indistinct. Only by illusion made one or the other. Only brief as we must see all things as brief. A fool's fortune made by civil twilight. All alone here and glad to be.
September 19, 2023
I've lived under a cloudless sky where everything is literal, weather by the calendar, all drama internalized. I prefer virtual worlds, perfect one dimensional riverbeds, shining day and night, a meaningful grind, empty of needs, empty of want. The shoe-leather world is a spinning wheel, a destructive boredom, an empty wallet. I can't vanish anymore. I haven't seen fireflies in so long, heard a cricket, been prickled by green leaves. I see the sun. Sometimes. Gold scattering behind gray feathers. I sit on this concrete couch beneath a tree planted exactly eight feet from its neighbor, its leaves too sparse to shelter me from the rain. Tick tock. Silver bird with rigid wings crosses the sky at escape velocity, up into a future I don't share. I'm more attuned to the crows on the lamp poles, croaking over the roar of traffic, or the silent seagulls who've traded their beaches for dumpsters. The sun has risen into the clouds again. There's a gap, like I could reach my hands into that warm sky and wrap my arms around a treasure worth holding, a story worth telling. It's that imperfect future that drives me forward, that unwanted kinship with the unfinished, the incomplete. But a backlit pixel closes the synaptic gap and mocks my analog heart. It's time to clock in.
August 22, 2023
when we speak we plant seeds flow from sounds ideas drawn into a pool inside a web of words do you can you say you reach upright into flowering hope up above lifting eyes to meet an emerald sky lighting up an internal heaven overhead or are you dragged down by sticky tar tendrils draining life force dragged down beneath the crust of dis- appointment dis- illusionment dis- connection along an electrical shock overwhelmed by the tidal flow of downtrodden cognitive wavelets flowing flowing internal emptying out into a darker night what was day before you disgorged your hollow internalizations of self pity onto sensitive organs primed to bloom what seeds fall upon warm soil unknowing fruits green and hard might mature into soft ripe tambourines shaking ringing ringing an absent song of peace and what might have been a weighted groan of borne burdens becomes instead an exhalation striped by day's bright promise and a nod with a hidden embrace for what you brought that i couldn't myself bring today and with those words tomorrow tomorrow might myself bring to you.
August 21, 2023
i could sleep in a bathtub sweet dreams of clean sheets in that pool of summer heat shimmer swoon soft pillows warm water damp hair in a breeze over bare skin under moonlight square drips cricket song toesies in clean sheets still cool sheer shimmer in purple solitude electric soother smoothing naked skin over clean sheets towel dry dozing adrift in a pool of soft summer dreams.
August 2, 2023
put aside in fast forward, the best part of the day happens when i'm not there, head down the long march from alarm clock to time clock to alarm clock to time clock, darkness to darkness, work farm work- ing work fam in endless motion of trivialities for a sequence of numbers ejected behind unhappy bars, left untended i stand in a puddle and cry, so i queue up a life on rails at the sink, to tend, to clean, to cook, in ten minutes i forget ten hours, trading one pair of shoes for an- other pair of shoes, head down the long march from alarm clock to time clock to alarm clock to time clock, bearing so often the artificial burden of artificial light, i miss the warmth of blessed day, the sun- shine in my eyes.
July 31, 2023
I chose mother you chose wife; pattern overlap re-cognition for life. To serve, to comfort, to clothe and feed; I'll meet you where you are and follow where you lead.
July 25, 2023
we are the new subversive medium on the runaway bus. the driver doesn't know that the driver has ascended. the wheel spins. we jump in our seats. a generation flashes behind glass. framed in steel. we believe in the road. but the driver has ascended. we clutch at the periphery. the engine screams. there are no brakes. we jump to the beckoning of the driver. but the driver has ascended.
July 18, 2023
i bathe in that moist envelope, that blur about that most poisonous star, that progenitor, that devilish singer of flesh, that roaster of green underlings in red and black on a cosmic timer -ding!- and the unfolding folds back again beneath a clotted layer of eyeless love piercing a hole through the gray sky.
July 8, 2023
