Bad news:
things add up.
Try to separate them,
subtract the numbers—
can’t be done. You can’t undo
what you do,
what you’ve done,
what’s been done to you.
Your first kiss. Double digit
birthday. Your second third
fourth kiss, quickly. Your
first drink, which
is your last drink, swear.
Your father’s first death. Your second drink,
which is not your last drink.
Your first **** your
second third fourth **** quickly.
Your father’s second third
fourth death,
your first love’s
pity, your teachers’ pity, your
best friends’ pity,
your father’s final death,
and a variable
in the equation, always
needing solving: your hunger.
But, hey.
Good news, too:
things add up.
It all amounts to something
useful, usable, you—
doesn’t it?
Doesn’t it?
Aug 8, 2025
Aug 8, 2025 at 7:56 PM UTC
We like chopping our love into pieces.
We like labeled jars, tiny portions;
we ration bits to our mothers, our friends,
our courtly lovers, clinging and clutching,
no crumbs for the people we don't know.
The truth is, there is one, enormous love.
One fire in the hearth, one warmth,
one cornucopia resplendent on the table.
There is one home in your heart
for all of it.
Jun 15, 2020
Jun 15, 2020 at 8:23 PM UTC
Detective in the parlor room
asks who killed mr. body?
Corpse cools,
questions asked,
tense stares,
fingers pointed,
clues counted,
truth found,
justice served,
just kidding.
It was the detective, out in the open, with his bare hands, and everybody saw him do it.
May 29, 2020
May 29, 2020 at 5:42 AM UTC
Suppose it starts
with wildfire;
lightning on
your driest trees
or once-loved campsites
left neglected, or kindling
that you'll never see--
it all burns just the same.
Suppose it starts
with wildfire;
flames beget
a blood orange sky
and magma pits
beside black trees,
and all your kindest woodland creatures
hurt and hide and crawl away--
but they burn all the same.
Suppose it starts
with wildfire;
see your landscape
on the hill, sickly scorched
with trees rail thin,
stark beside lush greenery,
almost lovely in how clear
the story of the suffering feels,
and burning's just the same.
So what if it starts
with wildfire?
There's no need
for water, seeds,
when warmth still crackles
in the wood and
you have pain and gasoline;
light the match and you will see--
it still burns just the same.
May 28, 2020
May 28, 2020 at 3:16 PM UTC
I am in love with Nobody
And Nobody loves me,
When I roll over in my bed
It’s Nobody I see;
Nobody cares enough to stay
And hold me when I weep,
And Nobody will dry my tears
To soothe me back to sleep;
Nobody is a friend to me
When I am feeling down,
And Nobody knows what to do
To get rid of my frown.
As I go through my average day
Nobody’s by my side,
Offering his company or
proffering his guide.
Nobody is my only friend
Sent from the gods above,
But now it seems that fate has tried
To meddle with our love.
Tomorrow night, my Nobody
Heads back to his old home;
He has a wife and child, he says,
Who know not where he roams;
Nobody has been travelling
For years from shore to shore,
Traversing through Ionia
After the Trojan War.
Oh, I will miss my Nobody
With all my giant heart,
I cannot bear to dwell on thoughts
Of us being apart.
Nobody holds my hand and says,
“Polyphemus, don’t cry,”
But I can’t stop the massive tears
From welling in my eye.
Dec 10, 2017
Dec 10, 2017 at 7:37 PM UTC
I don't know what he was to others—
fireworks, lemonade, ants crawling on a picnic blanket—
but I always knew him at his worst.
He was sleep cycles shaped like carnival pretzels,
days that bled together,
weeks that clumped like a rat king
under floorboards in the beach house.
He spoke in clouds
swollen with diluvian rain,
daggers of lightning
cracking the river in half,
the language of a muggy body in sticky room
staring out a window
at absolutely nothing.
The sort of stuff that makes me think
he didn't know his own strength,
most of the time.
As always, when he died this year
he died by degrees,
bedridden in the hospice of September.
I listened to his death rattle
of rustling yellow leaves
and watched the last of the fireflies
crawl from between his parted lips.
When he went cold for good
I built a pyre out of his firewood bones.
The ashes fell into the soil
like seeds in waiting, and I watched
the moon grow so large that it stretched
the nighttime like candy licorice
and made it longer than before.
My duty done, I turned to go.
The smoke rose up to embrace the sky,
and at the time, I could have sworn
that from the corner of my eye
I saw it curl around
and wave at me.
Sep 26, 2016
Sep 26, 2016 at 9:27 AM UTC
Thrown into existence, my words
writhe in the throes
of their own growing pains,
sinking like stones
somewhere in the midway
of catharsis and precision,
half-knowing they're alive
and scared half-to-death
of falling like a tree
with no one around,
of never making a sound
before crashing to
the forest floor
where toadstools eat
away their meat
and ivy clamors
at their bones,
blank tombstones for
an unmarked grave
where no one ever goes;
but that kind of silence
is just a bad dream,
they'll come to know,
for all breath is immortal
even if the growing's slow.
Jul 20, 2016
Jul 20, 2016 at 4:13 AM UTC
I was made to be milk glass—
Lately, I've been more of
a scattering of light,
a technicolor oil spill,
effervescent kerosene,
a phosphene
in a running eye,
fluorescent aerosol
going cumulonimbus
in a green sky;
a variegated skin rash
caused by shining neon bile
all festering and iridescent;
a tattered road map
on the wall of a food court,
bearing incandescent roads
twisting like snakes
eating their own tails;
a human being in the form of a
kaleidoscopic feedback loop
passed back and forth
between the mouth and the ear
and the mouth and the ear forevermore,
burning the tongue, the finger tips
and teetering on the edge
of glittering, glorious incendium—
After the smoke has cleared,
I can go back
to sleeping on the shelf.
Jul 11, 2016
Jul 11, 2016 at 3:27 AM UTC
I found religion at the bottom of a cereal box
and ended up saving it in my pocket for awhile, spending my sundays
beside spiritual cannibals speaking of the Supergalactic
and eating on the good word while waiting for the Hand of god
or so-called Miracles; only recently have I discovered
the sacrosanctity of the seed, the egg, the space between matryoshka dolls,
the amoeba before it splits or the amoeba afterwards, baby teeth
and graduates, letters stuffed in pen tips in hands of poets
kneeling with the armless, contrapposto women waiting
inside blocks of marble and boiling pots of Hellenic brass worshiping
in the house of the hesitant spring crawling from the earth’s core
on stolen time;
I say a heretic’s “Amen” to the parting of lips,
the movement of breath, all werewolves on the half-moon and
the moon before the harvest, bless the ant hills full of false gods
that band together in the symphony of the subatomic and glory be
to the Truth! the only truth, that just as all things die in the end, so too
are all things born at the beginning, a fact lost on all those preaching
sacred scriptures in the dead language
of the Impossibly Huge.
Jul 10, 2016
Jul 10, 2016 at 12:17 AM UTC
Within the four walls of this library
sit three walls packed into the corner;
shelves, stuffed full of books with dog-eared pages
and slip-disc’d spines and fraying edges,
and a big white sign, which dangles from the ceiling
like a megabat hung on a cave mouth, sleeping and dreaming,
the word “NONFICTION” is inscribed on its countenance,
adjacent to signs shouting “MYSTERY” and “SCIENCE
FICTION” and “FANTASY” and “ROMANCE”
and a thousand other sorts of words
for myth and fabrication. But in this corner
live the rest, the et ceteras, the miscellaneous,
the kingdom of protists; for instance, care for some ethics?
Marx’s manifesto is stacked lazily beside a heap of essays by Rand;
you can practically see the two of them, shaking hands
uneasily, the will to never understand already forming
in their brains, and others yet remain;
Capote and the Clutters share shelf space
with the Mansons, hiding helter skelter behind
gnostic gospels and silent springs and a thousand
dreams for Freud to interpret (translated
from German for your convenience); nearby,
Orwell sings war songs in Catalan, accompanied
by the universe’s most elegant superstrings,
and the caged birds, singing of freedom,
harmonizing a melodious cacophony with the song
of the executioner. Butler criticizes his performance,
and she probably would have anyway, but Friedan thinks
he has a certain sort of mystique and Dawkins offers his own critique,
going on about genes and memes, extinction and delusion, but
not hallucinations—Sacks makes the distinction; let us continue
to praise famous men, and their children after them,
these naked apes, with minds so ***** that
they’re riddled with the emperors of all maladies; oh, Morris
Kinsey and Mukherjee could tell you all about these things,
maybe over lunch with Schlosser or dinner with Pollan,
minglings with Machiavelli over affairs of the state,
or affairs of space and a brief history of time; but,
if you're feeling too full to eat, or to pray, or to love,
ask Frankl what to do, let him change your life
with words from decades yore as he keeps on
his search for meaning just like every man before, at least
that's the case when these boys’ lives weren’t preoccupied
by artful war or bright and shining lies. And here,
by the holy bookend, lies some old and antiquated glossary
which lost most of its “glossy” many years ago,
for one flip through the pages will catalogue the changes
between what we thought we knew about the stars
and our bodies and doomsday as recently
as your last birthday, and all the things that everyone says
we now know that we know; speak,
memory, remember all you can
about this endless, sundry cosmos, and
the microcosms that it boasts; bury my heart,
if not at Wounded Knee, then maybe at this
library, where comprehension and speculation
find themselves in coexistence, packed into a single
point resembling the genesis, and fear and hope
take dueling forms, those of fact and mystery;
and now all that’s left to do is read,
until the end of history.
Jun 20, 2016
Jun 20, 2016 at 1:26 AM UTC