Category: Uncategorized

In the boat of myself on this ancient river,
I paddle
then panic
as genteel swells turn to rapids.

The waves soar above my head
and block my vision, foam
surrounds and towers, I am blocked, 
I am enclosed and cut off

The stream bends and passes
through a city.
The crush subsides
beneath the monuments.

A fire polarizes the city.
The roofs disagree
and all burn the same way,
but not all catch.

Stone houses a hundred years old stand dark.
An old palace’s moat keeps it serene.
The cathedral has burned a dozen times and been rebuilt.
Ancestral ruins can burn no more.

I wear the city’s history like a cloak
and conjure a fog to put out every spark
before it can reach me. 
Battered by the waves I gasp, but do not sink 

and ride on toward time’s great ocean.

Americans prep for doomsday
by flexing self-reliance.
A suburban fluoride-free well,
a personal wheat silo.

I broke my leg as a kid
and while in traction
grasped that in a bunker
I would have died.

So when it looked like
the worst might happen,
I began begging in my city,
since it’s wiser to ask someone for help
and then ask them to be your friend
than the reverse.

You, you reading this poem,
are my hedge against catastrophe.
I will hunt and gather for you
if you will make me new glasses when mine break.

Kekule stayed up too late thinking
and dreamed of a snake who bit
his tail, rolled down a hill, 
and delivered him knowledge. 

There is a solution to this problem
if you will just search for the apple

accept the consequences

and take a bite.

Anything that can’t
go on forever
won’t.

It feels like a crisis
until you burn out
the part that worries.

When babies grow up,
old dreamcatchers, too full,
are buried,

and while their former owners sleep
grow into rainbow snails
whose shells spiral outward, not in.

Sweet black clouds blow in 
over the tall heads
of grain.

We seize the moment, you and I,
to gather berries, our fingers
stained and wet.

We wash in the river, and downstream
we see bears, napping now among the fish,
having eaten too many.

We stay up past the sun,
and by the light of cooling embers,
hold hands and wish

for nothing else.

Process can be boring. I pretend to hear my stomach growl 
and look for easy crumbs to keep the boredom at bay,

but in desperation, like sea turtles eating plastic bags,
I turn to distraction

snacking on short forms that fill
my head like packing peanuts.

I allow all my thoughts to evaporate,
drift away, and in their time, dissipate.

I sit in the sun, and let the crash of the waves
keep my head full of nothing.

I wait. And listen. To the waves, saying
shhhhh over and over.

I get bored. I’ve forgotten that I can get this bored.
I try to trust the process. (I do not.)

I let the boredom settle. It coats the bottom of my mind.
At length, it tempers my concentration. And when it does,

the clouds come back, my thoughts rain down
and I collect them in a silver basin,

which I can gaze into and see myself looking back.

A tree was cut to make the shaft.
A tree was tapped to make the rubber.
A tree’s grave was mined to make the graphite.

Creation is destruction, of the tree,
the paper, the paint.
Possibility must give way to presence.

Destruction is creation. I will create a world
where humans are only
treated like people.

Creation is destruction. Destruction is creation.
I grasp the great current and shape it.
I imagine a better world and even if it isn’t real

I create it
and if it spreads to your imagination 
then it becomes real. 

I imagine a world that is fair. 
I imagine a world without hunger.
I imagine a world of bizarre beauty.

I imagine a world 
I imagine
Imagine

Just because your roots have been
pulled from the ground
washed clean and rubbed smooth
doesn’t mean they aren’t still green.

Freedom’s just another
way of saying you made someone mad 

you’re the witch,
made to live in the forest’s edge,
out of sight but close enough to find
when they need your frightening knowledge.

Grow your hair, grow wings,
draw a pale map in the night
and follow it until you can’t
go a furlong farther

and there, in the air, create a space
where rainbows embrace
like snakes on a staff of restoration.

In these woods for half a year
I try to take my small flame to
every dark corner, to explore
the rot in every cave and stump. 

I need to prepare, I repeat. 
I need to see all the forkings ahead. 

After losing so many moons looking in the dirt
it becomes hard to see anything else. 
Everything looks like mud or danger. 
But doesn’t every leaf have two faces –

The rough one with countless mouths
and the green one seeking light? 

If you always seek the worst, you told me,
then by definition you discard everything else.
I grow more eyes to see
by darkness, by other light, predators, beauty.

Let’s curb optimism and fatalism, you repeat.
There has to be another way. 

These woods are vast and dark. I will find
a way out one day, to fields of corn and apples.
And for now, I will live here, I will survive
on rainwater and wild strawberries.

funerals are for coming together
and acknowledging a loss.

make sure you go. hug and cry.
something important has been taken from us

and it is worthwhile to see the corpse
to wash it

to dress it
until it kills all denial. 

there is no back, only forward.
but all wounds must seal and scab to heal.

once the loss scars 
we can pick up shovels

and hammers and go on the move.