It’s so much older than
any familiar skin,
down to rot and roots,
the great temple of the ancestors,
peanuts not withstanding,
this iron this spark this offering,
first tellings and ritual
reboots, patterns placed
deep within our cells,
knots tied in thick sequences,
the plodding sense of destiny
worked thoroughly from flesh to
recipe, old spells
spoken close to the tethers
the bristle of...
Read More
It’s all too much
the rush of the calendar
the dust of the clock,
blue skies and bare limbs and
a house that can only grow
colder, a name that doesn’t stick
on someone that doesn’t matter,
an argument that begins and
ends in words. They always say
you got to go for it, they say
you do you, they say live it
like the...
Read More
Never mind the way
the wind will move, forget
how the light keeps
changing the frame, you’re not
a piece they need. The extra
parts aren’t a problem,
your little wishes are not the world
we live through like a movie,
hiding from monsters, hunting
loot and clout, the guy the girl
the roundabout, somebody forever
sentenced to just be themselves—
the long awaited alone...
Read More
It’s not what you know it’s what
you’ve learned through brick and
bone and the all alone when
the sky falls down and the heart
dies from the ungodly cacophony,
the way the world is only here
until something chases everything away.
Mostly we won’t let our limits
tell us our truths, the facts
helpless before the faith we go
all in on. It still...
Read More
It begins with me choking
on the bones of my last breath,
the other shoe, the old one two,
relics of rhetoric rising from the grave
as if a given, as I cough
until I see stars and sparkles,
the wheel of fortune somehow
always set to resurrect,
the compass of a past iteration,
the punchline another round of jokes.
It ends in the guts...
Read More
The shadow leans to the left a little, bald head sharp nose cheater specs horns, the light to the right just a smidge in my peripheral vision— shine and sight in that order. The street whispers and roars, donuts smoked in cul-de-sacs echoing in their screeching idiocy while the strays and packs prowl and make passes. Trial run feints to shake out the fight or...
Read More
A cluttered room, a lonely light. Fingerprints form a lattice on the tablet screen. The words don’t want any part of it, they’d rather follow the dogs around the yard or the cats through the trees. They’d rather do anything but this dusty old number. The pity party of a sick sad old man playing to the cheap seats, the vaudeville act of a busted...
Read More
You get to where you were always
headed, the outcome of every
fortune from the cut of
the deck to the folds of your fists,
scar flecked hands that hold
all your futility, this rhythm
beaten into your sorry heart,
this note clutched long after
its shelf life expired. Maybe
we are meant for smaller worlds
full of prison art detail and
the bardo at...
Read More
Without a doubt beauty will
leave, without a pause it may
all go away, snuffed out
in an instant, altered in
the angles, heaven heavy upon
every crown, broken branch and
bent bough, the burden
hurled up cradle and all,
the slow strike of scratched out
lightning across the lot of
all this sparkle and pitch.
The world waves goodbye to
the luckless and the...
Read More
There was a question
posed I suppose by
the words’ weight and
the way they stack the deck,
by the side of the phrasing,
something in the degree
the slope takes to mitigate
descent. Suppose it took
a sky that shade of blue,
the sweat and stick of
heat and shimmer,
the obliteration of the atmosphere
in these tragic captions.
There was something said
again...
Read More