can you be written as Byron?
To travel in time and revive his thoughts,
maybe you too are great like him,
oh Lord Byron,
your tempestuous and raging mind,
like a rose planted in the ravines,
thorny and unreachable.

Necessity is the mother of deception.
Confession is good for the prosecutor.
The squeaky wheel
is quietly replaced.

An empty wallet
keeps the doctor away.
A fool and his money
are the foundation
of our financial system.

The early bird
catches the worm,
and is welcome to it.

What goes around
usually comes back hungry.
All that glitters
has a nondisclosure agreement.

Hope springs eternal,
in the marketing department.

Mortgage-bruised pilgrims
linger along Silver Strand,
pop caps against plywood boarding,
edges furred with salt-rust flakes
from storms that chewed the pier.

Seabee retirees
swap tide updates on porch steps;
third-generation surfers
stitch wax into their palms
and still call this south jetty 'church'.

Here my son and I rinsed sand
from our ankles with a garden hose,
him shrieking, laughing, shivering
when cold bit his feet.

I once yelled at him, raging
for dropping keys into surf,
as if that mattered more
than a day of chasing, wrestling in the tide.
He doesn’t remember.
I can’t forget.

Now, he’s taller than me,
vanishing downshore.

I stand outside, voices rise
in the salt-hard wind.
Barbecue smoke drifts
from driveways, tailgates,
settles into dusk-lit lawn chairs.

Boarded bungalows peel to raw board,
splintering porch rails;
nails weep orange along the grain.

A bike frame, chainless,
reddens into memory beside dune grass
still gripping sand.

There is grace in forgetting:
a tide lowers its voice,
sand swallows what was said.

At lunch I bought a pear,
its shape: a quiet joke.
I cut it clean and slowly,
the blade, the slice, the poke.

It tasted like a breather,
not sweet, just real and right.
Like silence in the stairwell
or breezes late at night.

The afternoon unknotted,
each task a gentler climb.
I fed the cat. I folded shirts.
You’re not here. I’m fine.

I loved a star that never knew my name,
a silent flame,
fixed in the wreck of night.
Her stillness fooled me
into believing she sang.

She blinked once
in some long-dead century,
and I’ve lived ever since
by ghost light.

They say she's gone,
burned out or broken,
but I keep whispering psalms
to her afterglow,
drinking to the shape she made
in my sky.

I don't need the truth,
just the dream
of her burning.

Like something that waited for me,
not knowing I was too late
the moment I began.

You staggered through the double doors,
a trail of red on bleached-out floors.
The night was humming, wet and mean,
your busted life in Trauma Green.

I clamped your vein, soft as thread,
and dared the gods to count their dead.
You lay there broken, no ID,
just blood and ache and urgency.

Your heart fell quiet
inside my hand,
as if it paused to understand.
Then breath returned in stuttered moans.
your chest arched up to meet my own.

The wound was sealed.
Your sigh came slow.
You could have left.
You didn’t, though.
The sweat still clung.
Your gaze went slack.
You pulled the gown and turned your back.

I saw you later, checkout nine:
frozen dinners, boxed red wine.
You seemed like someone death forgot,
barely awake, missing the plot.

You looked right through. You didn’t know
the hands that pulled you from below.
You don’t remember. I can’t forget
how thin the stitch, how deep the debt.

The tractor coughed diesel,
choking on enlistment.
Pappaw watched,
relieved he won, without a fight.

I dug potatoes.
Hated gnats, the stooping,
dirt worked into my soul.
“We can’t eat what you don’t find.”

I carry his voice,
like gravel.

When I’ve had enough of soft things,
I take it out,
to hold my ground.