The Day Love Wins
My song belies my tumult
Lonely
I grapple for understanding
In a chamber full of confidants
My world convulsing
Still in the liminal
I feel sorrow but also hope
Hands of saints pull me from the ashes
for his death has saved me
We are one body
But set ourselves adrift in the sea of judgment
It is not devotion but practice
Deep listening deep seeing
That allows us to cast aside our shields of difference
Leading with love
Scattering meliorism to the four directions
In December of 2024 the music director of our church asked if I would like to collaborate on a choral anthem to debut at Easter service. I nearly wept when he asked me. My friend Jarrod had wanted to put my poems to music. He was killed in a car crash a week after we graduated high school. This was an amazing opportunity, and I look forward to more collaborations in the future.
Boot Cotton Mills
On black and white New York Streets
I stood with Dean Moriarty
Snow fell on discarded vending machines
Arrayed along a sagging chain-link fence
I felt the rumble of the freight cars
As I dragged on my last cigarette
Watching the scroll unfurl
Enamored with the marvelous idea
Of traversing the country unbidden
Preserving the memories
I could not relive
Persuasion
The shadow dancers return
Questioning and dissecting
The minutiae of my life
I light another cigarette
Splash more rum into my glass
Remember the woman
Who hung herself behind the barn
Faith can no longer be my escape hatch
I whisper to the birds
I can still be a hope merchant
If I don’t run away from my footsteps in my shadow
Good Morning the Automaster
I’m waiting for new tires
A rusted roofing nail
The catalyst of this outing
I’ve passed the time
Reading the news
Reading poetry to counter act my despair of reading the news
Observing conversations
A salesman paces
There are not many cars to sell
I can’t think of anything worse than selling cars
There is a museum here
A cluttered hallway
Filled with kitschy oddities
In stark contrast to the sleek dealership
The complimentary coffee
Is hot but weak
The stage coaches are now leaving the building
I’m still waiting
Stretched out in an April sun beam
Smiling to myself
Because
Rutabaga sounds more like the name of an angry gnome
Than a root vegetable
Best Man in Absentia
It is harder to give a toast to a camera
Than an audience
My brother told me
I’ll try to call before I pop smoke
There was a calmness in his voice
I hung up
Wondering what it would feel like
To know I was going to war
Two days later
At 18:11 MST
He called to say he was on the plane
I love you
Have a great wedding
The toast is in the mail
Searching the Night
I was nearly back to where I began
A turned down page my only clue
Maybe you’re looking in the wrong direction
She said
I didn’t know what I was looking for
The neighbor
Normally in ragged clothes
Beer in hand; cigarette dangling from her lips
Walked out in white
Hair and makeup done
She looked happy
A glimmer of hope
Sprinklers arched water across the field
It was the sound of a thousand feet marching
A tourist in a pith helmet
Studied a map in the shade
Still I searched
There are no answers
In the middle of a town square
Under a hot sun
In a village from my past
Allegory
Maple Kahlua shots
With pure Vermont syrup
The actor Fred Thompson
Is the only one wearing a name tag
I’m shifting around the room
As if changing position
Is the answer
I am a stranger to myself
Drinking with forgotten college chums
I pass on the street
But do not acknowledge
A faceless poet
Bumming smokes
Longing for the craving
In a pub
With a doorway
Marked parable
Waiting on the Owl
The Great Blue Heron
Was disinclined to idle chatter
And took flight before I could say hello
I meandered into the field
Where three bat houses
Span two twenty-foot-tall poles
No more out of place
Than the humming solar array
Encased by an 8’ fence
Content in the late October sun
I hoped the resident owl would join me
I wanted to know their thoughts
On what we bipeds had done to Turtle Island
While I waited
I busied myself sketching a flower
That grew tall but also flopped upon the ground
Stretching out in all directions
The sun began to slip behind the trees
Resigned, I gathered my belongings
And sauntered home
Truth
Earth fading into sky
Sipping from a cup
With a plastic lid
Yellow beams of steel
Tangled between impetus and nature
The compass
An ever changing dichotomy
Bangkok Memento
The aroma of fried meat and diesel fumes
Drifts through muggy air
In the shade of the palace wall
A barefooted woman with a toothless smile
Peddles necklaces made of stone
Laden motorcycles
Flicker through chaotic traffic
Schooling crowds split for
Shuffling saffron robed monks
Traveling by river taxi
Garners a reprieve
Beneath the neon of the night market
A ballyhoo for
Local food, designer knock-offs, and sex
Ensues
Old men
With young companions on their arms
Maneuver through tourists
To the Starbucks on the corner
Twelve Years
As I reworked the poems
Of my father’s cancer and death
The rain came to a stop
The sky shifted to blue
Fog appeared above the pock-marked snow
I had Hawaiian music on the radio
And I missed my father
I thought of jumping up
Going rambling in the woods
No dour faces around the house
That’s what Dad had instructed us
When we understood
He was going to die
Rummaging for Nuances
As a drone in a cubicle
I would fantasize
That I was a writer & artist
And my work attire was dictated
By the medium of the day
In my file of scraps
There is a fish muffin pie
And a stuffed menagerie of lions
That was recovered from a UK burglar
I pocketed a lover’s quarrel
In the Biscayne Bay parking lot
“You are not allergic to shell fish
I know for a fact because
I am uncircumcised and that is not a problem.”
“I’m sorry, but you are not an ocean creature.”
In a forgotten city
I recorded
An ornate sign on the manicured lawn
Of a funeral home
proclaiming
Spaces available
Walking the dog
I observed
A brown brittle leaf
Waltzing with a cottonwood ball
Across the sidewalk
For a time I lived in Florida
My grandmother would send letters
Asking when I was coming back to the United States
Beach Vacation
With a deep rumbling of brute force
The waves charge the shore
Frothing and walloping the sand
The air is heavy with heat
The clouds low and dark
But with no rain
We continue to lounge on the beach
Resigned to our winter paleness
Goggles
The way I see it
I used to not see at all
As if I were wearing goggles
That allowed only a narrow view straight ahead
Unwilling
To see what was behind me and learn from it
To see the commixture around me and embrace it
To see from a different perspective
How easy it is to go through life this way
And to slip back into it
Closing myself off to possibility
Renewal
I. COLD SPRING DAMP WORLD
I want to sequester myself
In a world of words
Alone but not lonely
My words
Others words
As I pick my way
Through new life and old
II. RETURN OF THE BIRDS
Last night
It was seventy degrees at nine o’clock
We sat on the screened porch
Listening to the Wood Cock’s strange call
This morning
I’ve come to listen by the old beaver dam
Its remnants smooth and gray with age
Resembling the bones of a giant creature
Ruby Crowned Kinglets
Carolina Wrens
Goldfinches
And half a dozen others
Sing their morning song
III. IT’S NOT YET BEACH SEASON
The daily temperatures
Are abnormally high
A young girl
With sun burned legs
Explores the water’s edge
A father and son skip stones
We did that with our boys
Now they’d rather be with their friends
Laughing and joking
Perched at the top the public playground
I sit listening to the lapping of the lake
Contemplating how much we have grown
IV. ANOTHER VIEW
In my search
For greater understanding
I’ve been wandering the woods
Looking for the homes
Of the Barred Owl
The Pileated Woodpecker
And the Oven Bird
V. FULL MOON RAMBLE
The cold settles onto my cheeks
Nips at the tips of my fingers
This is just what I needed
To be here
Breathing deeply
VI. THE FINAL PIECE OF THE ORCHESTRA
Each spring
I try to see the very moment
The leaves emerge
Joining the birds
With their panegyric rustling
Of new life
In Life & Art
In September I began sketching
The Babe Ruth baseball games
Some sketches looked like
Angry gorillas
With fish bowls on their heads
Or monkeys in a pickle
I’d berate myself for not reaching
My own unreachable standards
I was about to give up
When I learned
Perspective is the key
That opens all the locks
Imprisoning happiness
A Totem
I began to grow a mustache for mental health awareness
But gave up after two weeks
And got a tattoo instead
Not of a mustache
On the side of my finger
To hold over my lip
Which is a thing
It’s a semicolon on the top of my right wrist
A permanent reminder of temporary feelings
Representing the compound nature of life
A period ends
A semicolon joins
Allowing me to continue
On The Eve of a Poetry Reading
Feeling like a phony
I went for a drive
I started writing at seventeen
To help sort out the trauma of my actions
But I’d always wanted to be a writer anyway
For years I kept this secret
For years I wrote to be someone else
Tonight I’m going to be me
I Have Faith
I’ve tried to believe the Bible
Is the uncorrupted word of God
But I can’t
There are too many copies
Too many translations
I’ve heard of people not believing in dinosaurs
Because they are not in the Bible
I once thought quoting the Bible
Made me a better person
A better Christian
It is far simpler than that
Just don’t be an asshole
Who Comes up With These Names Anyway?
Now that we’ve reached Generation Z
Where do we go from here
We can’t very well go to A
That would swell heads from the start
And the generation after that would have a B-team complex
Q should be out of the question
Given the QAnon political movement
Our boys are not graded by letters anymore
But C D and F
Don’t seem like good options
I think O should be next
That way those of us from generation X
The first lettered generation
Can say O’my gosh
We’re getting old
One Should Never Apologize for Being Glum
I wanted Fig Newtons for dessert
But found none in the pantry
I settled for dried apricots
It snowed a foot yesterday
But the storm slowed in the night
Allowing the plows to catch up
The boys are chagrined there will be school
I long for the snow to recede
And the birds to return
There Are No Pearly Gates
When death was abstract
I would look for angles and Care Bears
Above the clouds
When death became concrete
I took refuge in
The faith I’d see loved ones again
In the understanding that
Until then
Those who have moved on
Are not waiting behind a gate
They are in the morning song of the robin
The dreams we dream
The laugh of children
The hum of traffic
The crack of a bat
The cheering crowd
The silent wood
Chess
The sanitation worker
Tosses the bags into the hopper
The truck pulls away
Clipping the bins
Knocking them into the snow
Checkmate
No Need
I’ve been running errands
Huffing at the people
I deem too slow
I’m writing this in the checkout line
Observing the frazzled mother
Ahead of me
My mother is 82
My boys are becoming more independent
There is no need
To be in such a hurry
Moldy Hot Chocolate
When I am old
I will wear
Black dress socks
With pleated shorts
I will smell of
Moldy hot chocolate
In kindergarten
An ancient nun smelling of cookies
Read to us
Smelling of cookies
Is better than smelling of moldy cocoa
But I’m no baker
And cookies and black socks
Don’t seem to fit together
A Rainy Night in Winter
I’d decided to stop being a hermit
I pulled my heavy coat from the
Battered wardrobe trunk
Browley’s window on 13th
Displayed typewriter keys with a croquet set
Next to a payphone covered in graffiti
Bedouin traders conducted business
A sailor passed with a pretty girl on his arm
His chest pushed out an extra three inches
Under a bus stop light
A man with a caterpillar mustache
Read a dime store novel
In the Denny’s
Hot cup of coffee between my hands
I watched a burly wino
Kicking a rusted can down Madison Avenue
He turned to look at me
Raised his bag clad bottle
And shouted through the glass
Don’t go looking for a new god
Find connection and commonality
I Was Eighteen
It was a warm May night
When my friend died
Since then death and I
Have had a strange relationship
For it has kept me alive
Searching for a Dream About a Poem
Last night
I was locally famous
Trying to tuck in a tent sized dress shirt
Before an interview
A priest and a clown
Were tapping a keg in the corner
I drank three beers
Said I no longer drank
And left
At sunrise
I was glad for a cup of tea
A bird song
A small book of poems
Saturday Morning
A beautiful morning
The boys are delighting in their passions
Basketball for one
Trail building the other
The dog and I are enjoying the sun on the front porch
My wife and I are at odds
I don’t know how to fix it
Perhaps
A hug will do the trick
I’ll give it a try
Day-break in a 48-hour Town
Stillness
A dense fog covers the field
A Cooper’s Hawk and the American Crow call out
The coffee drips passively through the filter
Camper vans
Travel trailers
Tents on roofs
Tents on the ground
Shapes without detail
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Quietly Making Noise 