*There was a susurrus upstairs…
It was the softest ghosts that drove me.
They carried me into town
so I could visit
the Funeral Home Gift Shop.
I weren’t bereaved,
They just have my favorite cokes and
a surprisingly liberal return policy.
The gentleman behind the counter never ends our interactions with, “see you again soon.”
Always just, “Bye… for now.”
It was an awkward ride home.
The softest ghosts still haunt me.
Jun 28, 2024
Jun 28, 2024 at 2:17 PM UTC
The earth moves around the sun at 67,000 mph.
Since you began reading this
we've travelled 36 miles
through the cold, black void of space
together.
Know then, fellow traveler
that this is why
I love you.
For the millions of miles gone and
the millions still to go
we were, are and will be bound
by this shared vessel.
The void holds tight to its secrets.
I will hold tight
to you.
Jul 22, 2019
Jul 22, 2019 at 12:45 PM UTC
She has never built sandcastles.
She has never toed the surf along the Gulf of Mexico.
She's only ever known these mountains;
these cold, granite monuments to impassibility
that reduce the sky to slits,
somehow managing to make the heavens smaller.
Half closed eyelids with their own trap-door gravity.
Short lives last eternities too
and there is beauty to be had
- even here -
It's just that everyone should get to build sandcastles sometimes.
May 22, 2018
May 22, 2018 at 10:10 PM UTC
People only ever want to ask me about
the poetry -
those verses about
busted up noses in outer space;
about the pros working
way down passed
the corner of Broad and Main;
about fistfights and hard, hard drinking.
But I built a flowerbed this weekend...
Twenty two tastefully irregular stone blocks
in a crescent moon shape,
filled with the blackest of soils.
The sweat of toil.
The digging.
The planting.
Exotic grasses. Asian maybe?
Purple and yellow flowers.
Zinnias or some **** thing.
All covered in a thick blanket of brown mulch.
It's a fine thing to have dirt on your hands
instead of blood.
No one ever asks me about flowerbeds.
May 14, 2018
May 14, 2018 at 10:12 PM UTC
Friday
as reminder
of how cruel the time.
(Invariability)
Of how intractable the wind and weather.
(Inevitability)
I cry the cry of the reformed mean spirited;
the once-unholy-then-unholy-again;
the backslid.
It's been so long since I've sinned,
come short of the glory,
come at all (costs)
It would feel good to make a fist again.
Please render me in subtle shades
when you paint me into your masterpiece;
barely discernable from the canvas.
A ghost in achromatic acrylics.
May 12, 2018
May 12, 2018 at 12:06 AM UTC
I'm terrified of not having at least one secret that only I know.
Saturn moves into capricorn
as conqueror
rather than lover.
I keep drawing the tower card.
Space has no boundary.
Down is relative.
We know, then,
that it is entirely possible to
just
keep
falling.
Indefinitely.
Devils roam free in the sixth house.
I've been drawing the tower card.
I keep drawing the tower card.
The snake I am is not the snake I was.
Tower card. Tower card.
"Mama, some pieces are missing from this puzzle."
"Only the piece with the eyes printed on it, baby."
Drawing from memory, now.
Come on and touch
this broken husk
before it crumbles
away to dust, and
something different
is left sitting
at the foot of your bed.
Inevitability.
Might be
that there is no Heaven,
but
there are certainly heavens.
Apr 29, 2018
Apr 29, 2018 at 4:58 PM UTC
I only ever wanted
to sleep
for a thousand years tonight -
To awaken bathed
in the cool, blue light of the future
with its promised obsolescence.
I will embrace this since
the warm, yellow light of the past
has done nothing
but tell me lies.
Tell me lies.
Apr 22, 2018
Apr 22, 2018 at 8:16 PM UTC
The setting of traps
has always seemed
like a tacit endorsement
of the mice.
Acknowledgement.
Validation.
Admission of failings as a homeowner –
(cracked baseboards or an unsealed gap in the door.)
We are usually responsible
for our own infestations, after all.
The relationship with the mice is codified
“you are vermin,
I am not.
I will ****
You will die.”
Thus the mice are transfigured,
Christ-like.
Frozen in fear,
frozen in time,
laid bare
on a sticky, chemical
altar of sacrifice.
Saviors
giving their lives
so that we may preserve
those unwanted crumbs
in the vacant space
between the couch and loveseat
where the vacuum won’t reach.
Mar 9, 2018
Mar 9, 2018 at 8:23 AM UTC
We rise
not like smoke from the flame
to demonstrate
the Law of Conservation of Energy
-matter shifting forms-
Violent change followed by
heavenward ascension.
We rise
not like the phoenix from the ashes.
No glorious re-emergence from
the ruined form
of what came before.
No rebirth as
the middle stage
of an endless cycle.
Instead
we rise
like an orchid, blooming,
up from the shitheap.
We reach for the sun
even while
our roots sink deep into the filth.
This chain was my home.
This chain is my home.
This chain
will not
always be my home.
I’ve seen a hundred things stranger than
a ship that steers itself.
Not all slaves
have a master
after all.
Jan 25, 2018
Jan 25, 2018 at 1:19 PM UTC
We can grind our teeth
down to weathered tombstones
together.
Bound by love and sadness,
here we are
the rearguard of the desperate and the anxious -
holding hands
before an ocean
made of all the brakelights in the world.
There's no one I'd rather ignore warnings with
than you.
Jan 17, 2018
Jan 17, 2018 at 10:27 AM UTC