(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 2, 2017)

A fresh attitude (sautéed with butter and either garlic or onions) is hard to find in certain climates. Serve with any choice of greens.

Folded like divinity with pure cane syrup.
½ Tbsp of honey drizzled in the pan.
To caramelize is entirely your option.
Peel 6 or 7 tenets and shred.
Add a pinch of the herb mixture on page 11.
Knead out the narrow of the marrow.
Start to fricassee some fresh foliage.
Do not pare down or skim the concoction—
You will starve the recipe and the starter will fail.
Toss in some mettle instead.
Let the mix marinate overnight, uncovered.
Have a cooling rack handy to the side.
There will be stewing. There will be steam.
Add the hot sauce of your municipality.

This soul *** is a food staple worldwide.
Serves 7.49 billion.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 16, 2015)

The fallacious belief that a person who has experienced success has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.

The major award, a crest of Likes, the very nice email
you received from someone in South Dakota, the flatterer—
like a stack of very deceptive poker chips
leaning like the Tower of Pisa.

The universe should open up like show curtains
with three hundred and fifty new friends awaiting you
all dressed to the nines which could mean you’re moving up
in this world except you’re not because there’s no where to move.

It’s like walking across a cemetery. You go up and down,
up and down depending upon how the dead sink into the loam.
Harrison Ford’s still auditioning; Aaron Spelling never stopped pitching.
One minute you’re a rock star, the next minute your tour bus catches on fire.

Tomorrow you are always climbing out of
old hat, new and untested. Turns out
those are the same thing.
How lucky for you.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 9, 2014)


I.
Who is this who holds the pen?
Who feels the hurt as I scratch the wood?
What is my tale but society’s tale?
What is my ego but the eye of the universe?
Fractured, unglued, a skin made of sponge,
I am not who I think I am and so I evaporate
into the infinite me, some which are you.
This may be true, but it’s better the devil
you know than the devils you don’t.

II.
Self-portrait of my DNA, fluted nameplate,
a word that means me swirling in another language.
Who tells the reader about the bloodless me?
Who tells the reader my soul is meshed into their soul?
Who receives the feeling? Who tells the reader in me?
Who did not decide to write this?
Dear my different me-s, my lovely, distracted plural,
this is how they come to power, they who are not you,
this is how they divide (the me) and conquer.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 21, 2015)

Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.

That items near the end of a sequence are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.


The remotest Bigfoot is the easiest to believe.

Today, search for the Lock Ness monster yourself with Google’s underwater Street View.

The easy truth is hard to believe.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 8, 2014)


ppp> Practice makes perfect
br> ad news travels fast
br / Give the devil his due
br / Every man has his faults href="http://www.man-faults.com"

p> Give him an inch and he'll take a mile
br / The best go first
br / Seeing is believing
br / Silence is golden

p>  Ignorance is bliss
br / Patience is a (span style="font-size:inline-is-no") virtue(/span>
br / “Nobody comes here anymore
br / It's too crowded” (Yogi Berra said that)

p> All good things must come to an end
br / Thank the World Wide Web
br / First things (form)
It only exists if you (html)

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 9, 2019)

The gray-suited day stalker
who doesn’t have a profession
or know what yours is,
but he checks to see if you’re dressed appropriately
and at your desk at all times.

Pretending that all problems can be solved
within increments of one hour.

Bragging, boasting under-performers.

The saying “a lack of planning on your part
does not constitute an emergency on my part”
because, in fact, it does constitute an emergency
on all our parts every day, this allergy to planning.

Vengeful Vionnas.
They’ve had a hard time of it
in the eras of flares and perms
and they’re taking it out on you.

People who sit in trainings and take no notes
and then later want help doing all the things.

The Slippery Sandy who avoids all responsibility
by claiming to be confused by her voice mailbox,
and insisting there’s too many emails to read yours,
and disappearing into every meeting unrelated to her job.

People who think going to meetings is the work.

Misguided goals. Lack of goals.
People who pretend not to know what a goal is.

The pain of seeing a good idea die
without the aid of a hired bully.

Watching the young
having to learn it all over again.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 4, 2014)


Intellect before beauty.
Business before pleasure,
unless intellect is beauty.
Who is to say
in the business of pleasure?
To say what a cottonwood stands for.
It stands to reason.
It stands to shade.
It stands to hold the opportunity
of end tables and envelopes.
Even a tree is a recycled tree
made to hang recycled wind and snow.
Progress always involves retrograde.
Garbage in, shiny new plastic item out.

Let me tell you, I’m impressed with this blog.
Rarely is it so educational,
cumbersome and nicely sensational.
You’ve hit the nail on the head, you high dog!
I must say this issue is often a slog.
Not ample men find it inspirational
or like your links so navigational.
Your notion is good and I’m always agog.
If I give you advise for a tweaking,
perhaps it is what you already knew.
I search for things like what you are speaking,
intelligent views that equal my breakthrough:
If you have an old sink that is leaking,
click here and come visit the Hardware Zoo!

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 3, 2014)


The journey of a thousand miles begins
with one small word,
a word that is not une pipe,
a word that it takes more than effort—
mere focus—to incorporate back into the journey,
a word that requires exercise, sweating
over the assembly of combinations and clues,
yoga stretching over accidental and malicious gaps,
a word strung into licorice, chopped, blocked
and set into rows,

the journey of a thousand letters
carved and installed like a Michelangelo
in front of your neighbor’s house,
the doorbell rung, tie straightened,
hat in hand:

“Can I help you?”
“A poem in time saves nine.”
“Sorry but I gave at the office.”

It’s a long haul, this journey.
Everything’s a commodity or a charity
these days, even for you, Truthie Ruthie,
who will write 3 lines to change the world
or the art—as soon as you can find your pens.

Profile of the Romans, statuesque, we gave her the Italian
Bianca, but from that failed into Bianca Bee, Binky Bee,
****** Pitty for that war injury when she was stationed
in neglect out in someone else’s yard. She keeps her nails
long, is soft as a humus dip, Mediterranean classical,
once a conqueror now gregarious, glamorous
like a female lion or demur when cornered
like movie stars before the war. Plump and voluptuous
like a tank who wants to snuggle and snore
wearing you like a wrap. She made us sure
with her love, inexhaustible
like a Western religion,
unabashed.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 27, 2014)


Live and receive
the past’s mistakes,
errors in trench coats,
the false face of experience.
She is the best pontificator.

Failure teaches, most often,
envy. Gertrude Stein teaches
that Gertrude Stein teaches
despite herself. She is the mother
of the wisdom
side-step.

We are experience
and we drop a dime
every time.
We share. We don’t share.
We give every ingredient of the recipe
but one. And still sometimes,
the soufflé is a success.
This teaches miracles.

Empathy is learned
when one is thrown
into the hole.
But keep your sentiment
in little wire cages and tear-
drop the ink of mascara
into its eye. What
have we learned?

Authority is useless
as permission.
Don’t I say so?
She more helpfully gives
able help: the sermon,
the tutor, the backdoor
confidant, intervention
into the mess of struggle.

It’s never too late
to learn the cliff is a cliff
and the ground is the ground,
to be spared experience.
It’s never too late to accept
a tender mercy.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 14, 2015)

Memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.

So I’m upset, you see, sitting in a canary yellow truck
back in Harding County 1976. The boys have gone off
in search of cows. I can’t leave because they’ve told me
the yellow truck is surrounded by rattlesnakes.  

So much as my toe won’t hit the prairie. And truly,
I can’t remember anything beyond the truck.
The land is flat for sure but I can’t see the windmill
or the water tank. The earth has all but lost its load of folks.

There’s only the yellow truck, the long clutch, and those *******,
the snakes. There’s only the manipulations of boys
gleefully trotting the plains with their chauvinisms.
The flat ocean of grass and my yellow pitching vessel.

So I take out imagination like a newfangled photo editor.
I want to exit the truck for a minute and put a cow
on the scene. But I worry about those snakes.
If I place a scrub bush here, the snakes might opt for some shade.

I bring the cow back but I want a happy cow,
not a suspicious cow or a jaded cow.
Luckily I find an article online that seems useful,
“16 Signs to Access Whether Your Cows are Happy.”

According to FarmersWeekly my cow’s happiness
involves muck sieving and rumen fill. It says nothing
about California which hitherto I’ve been told
makes cows happy. Strangely I’m feeling better.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 18, 2014)


Except it’s a bona fide,
genuine real porch:
and you’re sittin’ in chair,
really sittin’ in one that leans back,
sun catching only your feet
as you drift into a warm listening sleep,
while the old relatives
turn over all the times and folks
you haven’t known, folks who lived
back when you didn’t exist
(in any poem-writing form).
They are wearing out the years,
and are eloquently silent about the future,
except they know all the poems
you have left to write.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 27, 2015)

The tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviors in one self and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviors.

Putting on your face.
I call it Star Self-F**king.
Pitifully normal.

What I know
about the tops of swing sets,
paint peeling over rust spots,
the arc of the swoop,
all the land falling silent,
the curve of the earth.

It was a moment
before gravity coaxed us back
down and physics hurled us up again,
chest out and flying,
having joy, having fun,
singing “Seasons in the Sun”
over and over and over.
We surveyed the concrete tunnels,
the sun-bleached dirt expanse
of second grade off Juan Tabo.

Within the year
we’d moved to cities of grass
and we flew
under the shade of trees,
over two levels of soccer fields
and a forest beyond that,
tetherballs obsessively circling
over spots of asphalt.
The third-grade boys
were already chasing birds
but we chose to fly, fly, fly.
Everyday our feathers rent flying,
wind-riding, sailing off the seat
and landing in the soft dirt spot
worn into the Missouri grass.

One day
my bird friend Laura landed on the root
of a big oak tree, hands first.
She stood up, dusted off,
and walked with southern poise
to the nurse.
When she came back that afternoon
she was grounded
in a white wrist cast.

And the boys caught her after that.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 27, 2019)

What acceptable audit will you leave
from all your labors and confrontations,
from all the sound and fury
in those moribund board rooms?
The clocks are sluggish with boredom,
the carpets are worn and declining.
What successors will profit from you
past all the centuries and the arteries
evaporating in the light of day,
diminishing and belittled with time;
and all our productive bodies
lie buried, slacking in their tombs?
You are the renter in every office
and own not a penny but the doing.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 6, 2016)

The not-smell of pop fiz on ice
stimulating the hairs in the nose,
caffeine coolness so far down a throat
it touches the brain, frees the sinus
in a chemo-corporate embrace.
The soda jerks are calling for shares
of my stomach, even the crenelated
linings, even the misled calorie,
even the sorrowful marrow of the bone.
Consider the mitochondrial malaise of this,
the very ******-pathological thirst
that kills what we need.

Today we get trochees and pyrrhic feet
slacked like the clouds of New Mexico floating
high across the blue canopy of sky.
Today we get spondees vaulting like towers,
cumulous syllables dwarfing mountains,
a vast landscape full of metric vapor.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 23, 2015)

The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.

The intellectual stone:
intrepid bravado,
indissoluble substance of certitude,
the very matter of suffering
unable to dissolve its own errors
and miscalculations of how we are.

Unmovable, it burns in the sun.
It sinks in the stream and rolls
only when the other stones roll.
We love our stones. We do.
But what about the rock’s soft
cradle of soil, the embrace of earth.

Goodwill we say, (because love
implies too much), is a practice,
a radial gradient of feeling
gripping, like a muscle, the joy
and sifting go of the hard ache,
the tight cerebral prizefight ropes,
the square platform comprising a ring,
soft gong that ends the quarrel  
which was always only
gray canvass in the brain.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 26, 2014)


The more one knows, the less one believes;
He who knows nothing, doubts nothing:
theoretical aphorism, deliverance in the dictum.

This week my father fixed our sliding glass door.
We had no oil for the dried out runners.
He used an anti-stick, cooking spray instead.

His idea was a tango: part knowledge
and part belief. You use what you can
to make the door open or close.

Trillions of videos on the Internet,
tutorials and poems
to step-by-step you through.

Has it all been said, though?
Has too much been said?
Can you never say enough—

trying to make the parts work
between the known and the unknown?
You believe in words

like canola, the oil that keeps us together
and keeps us apart. The doors stick
halfway open and halfway closed.

Trillions of ideas to nudge us north or south.
Knowledge is power and yet you yield to belief.
What you don’t know can’t outsmart you.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 6, 2014)


Brevity, loose, Hemingway, Proust
All roads lead to Rome
Except those roads leading out of Rome

Frosted chamisa, Mother Teresa
All that glitters is not gold
Except gold can usually buy most of what glitters

Tenured by kings, a sailing ember
When you’re hot you’re hot
When you’re not—you rot.

Hard mighty metal
plundering into the soil,
tunneling pastures
of calm, Sioux tracks on the cold
clay of thieves and History.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 27, 2017)

I’ve done this ode many times before.
I was weaned on this ode
where appetite is for the appetizer
and salsa is the blood and guts
that feeds the baby. The spherical planet
of the tomato, reflecting sun on its skin,
cuts and bleeds a thick calming juice.
Smell is the trigger and the buds begin
to register the cool, salt taste
before a single drop rides the tongue.
The idiom of heat—a sliced green chile
or dark jalapeňo, the shape of dripping light,
the second planet of onion, severe and raw
like a crux, joins its sister pieces of earthy garlic.
The chopped pico de gallo is bright and primary—
through fusion, a picante smooth and criminal,
blood red with white seeds which will burn.
A small vessel of penance and grace.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 14, 2014)


Set to work, love to sweat,
but not be made to sweat.
All work and no play
make you an American
bore; but likewise
as you make your bed,
as you sow,
as you lay your mine(s)…
Everything’s easier said
than done. Everything.
Easier to start.
Easier to be in it.
Easier to be done.
Easier to steal the doing
of someone else
through theft or pittance
or always asking for help
under the name of creation,
genius, destiny. Preaching trolls,
delegating, obfuscating Faith
never moved a single mountain.

Do it yourself.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 13, 2019)

The ghostly interpersonal,
the witchery of timing,
the mysterious outcomes
of patience and the profits
of charm, no matter
the heaths of play,
no matter the Frankenstein
or incarnate predicament,
its persuasive chill
and conjuring prevails
appear cryptic
and incomprehensible.
You cannot be initiated
or ordained into it;
you cannot be schooled.
And it is more fearsome
than gloomy inheritances
and more useful
than your bleak diploma.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 22, 2014)


I remember the story because I was agitated,
perturbed to hear grandma would return and visit

Aunt Edna beside her hospital bed and not us,
say to Edna it was okay to pass on and not us.

That’s how I know somebody told me the story.
Why would I make it up?

I never thought about Edna in the hospital
or grandma coming back.

There was a splinter of feeling forsaken there,
whether grandma was a ghost or a delirium,

we were missing out. What does it matter
if it was true or untrue, whether you believe in ghosts?

Every family has its skeleton;
why shouldn’t we have ours.

No bank robbers, no moonshiners,
and now no ghosts.  They say

dead men tell no tales, except they do.
They tell their tales through us.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 5, 2017)

The world
     resolves the core –
          the sky revolves
               its atmospheres

from blue to white
     to watermelon
          to night – coyotes
               inhale

their sleep, dreaming
     of bobcats
          lunging
               on rabbits –

the sabi of the tree
     is its deceiving
          bushness
               and asymmetry,

its crisp-rust
     smell of berry,
          leaves freshly
               toughbounded

covering the hidden
     folds of hills
          like country
               bedspreads

and cedar pollen
     blowing its dust
          over the dirt carpet
               of the plains –

tears of penance,
     choke of beauty,
          filaments of the lungs
               wheezing in the wind.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 22, 2017)

There’s a pickle recipe that’s been in our family
for many years, many times a blue ribbon
winner at the New Mexico State Fair.

It came from my Great Aunt, Missouri Avaletta,
and her daughter, who is over 85 years old now,
jars one-hundred pickles year after year.

We are not farmers. The dust bowl taught us that.
This is a waterless state. But apparently cucumbers
grow in any kind of earth. They have shallow roots.

So after the last frost, you can sow them
in average, well-drained soil.
Give them plenty of sun.

Plant four to six seeds three inches apart,
one inch deep. Gently firm the dirt over them.
Keep them moist. Don’t talk to the pickles

about how you see the world. Don’t give them
your opinions about the president.
Talk to them with metaphors.

And don’t forget the dill. Let it be the **** that it is.
Gather the harvest when the dill has seeds
and the pickles are three to five inches.

I have a cousin from Alaska
who told me when I was six
that a pickle was a drunk cucumber.

Pickles in the garden
they don’t all grow the same
although they grew from the same place.

Honor to this family of pickles.
Honor to the bitter. Honor to the sweet.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 17, 2014)


Someday I will say
remember when my parents came to visit us in New Mexico
and I made soup every supper for two fortnights?
Heartache in the belly.

A poem is a rubber stamp on what
we have exhumed and presumed
of shadows passing through.
So I can say I own this.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 10, 2015)

The fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.

What did they have in early America:
quilts, spoons, hymnals, cows?
Not our sophisticated storage collections
of antique end tables and first editions.

The power of the wind compels you,
that all-encompassing cyclone,
to build shelves and pack closets.
And it is the power of the wind
ripping through the wood, tossing
pop art, trophies and minted plates
and pages and pages of stamps.

Loss is a flood every time.
Real corrosive water.
What the twister takes
is never the money, so light
and typical,  too nondescript
to hoard.

It’s that once you make a choice,
that choice is you.
And who could abandon you?
Not you.

The first step to the salvage
is to understand the wind,
your own cyclone spine.
Give the dolls away, gift by gift
like a breeze to the hungry
fire.

Start a garden and collect the dirt.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 26, 2015)

The tendency to want to finish a given unit of a task or an item. Strong effects on the consumption of food in particular.

The small bag of corn chips, the can of soup,
the box tray of pasta, studies of portion

marking progress through existence.
Units move from your hands to your body

whatever the form of consumption
like track loops, pudding trays and poems--

they all have their metrics, even nostalgic
collages hiding behind miscellany.

Even improvisation has its forms; every mess
and message has its borders like nuclear meltdowns

moving in waves to the California coast,
Nepalese earthquakes and the avalanche of Ever

through years of tremorfications.
The corner diatribist can always tell you

there's a horrific endlessness to it all
and many, many happy ends.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 20, 2014)


The Easter egg holds
fish eyes in the velvet river,
the cries of ghost birds

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 29, 2017)

It was named after the ship’s Admiral,
Louis Antoine de Bougainville,
and it usually crawls along the porch frames
or borderlines the windows of bedrooms,
transforming dingy frame bungalows
like a mistletoe of summer.
Angelenos pronounce it almost Spanish-like
without the lovely trill of Ls.
And this morning we look up
where it came from
and hear this story
about the first European
who found it on exploration in 1769,  
2oo hundred years before Woodstock.
A botanist, who was also a woman,
snuck aboard a ship disguised as a man,
flowing through the drab spaces and corridors
where women weren’t allowed.
The galley, the botany, the discovery.
Jeanne Barē, the first woman
at the circumstance
of bougainvillea,
the first one
to circumnavigate,
to circumvent
the world.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 1, 2017)

I have heard
the advice
of a thousand
lions—every one
shoulders back
and heads cocked,
their sultry purr
toothing through
my pulsing veins.
We have heard
22 lullabies
at the edge
of the plain
spoken snarling,
truth of another
mother, the level
of lions who
sincerely are
roaring me:
they are hungry
and I am
the meat.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 11, 2017)

It’s a world of too many institutions,
flybynights, everything for a squeeze,
students giving everything to the landlord,
a book, a visit to the doctor—
not everyone will survive it,
your hometown, your alma mater.

We live in interesting times.

The money movers, the bonds,
martyr retirees, the thrifty—
no money, no metaphors,
no synecdoches building up the edifice,
no icons, no engineering,  
no puzzlers or paradox,
just the conundrum of greedy ignorance
claiming an ever higher rent.

We live in interesting times.

Outside, the big mountain lays down his tail
beyond the cottonwood tree, hand to hand
we work this place, unassuming servants
under the sun. What does a simile cost?
A bridge, a salvage, a clarity?
What does deliverance cost?

We live in interesting times.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 6, 2015)

That a person in a group has diminished recall for the words of others who spoke immediately before himself, if they take turns.

Ahh! Too embarrassing to be outed
after all those years of hiding in the rows—
papers,  books, cards and other marks
clutched in the palm.  Living the future,
rehearsing the future, sweating
praying, fearing and flight,
cortisol levels askew, constricted breathing,
being ****** before there are even stones.

Every act is David Lynch sacking Twin Peaks,
weirdly showstopping and hard to follow.
It’s knee-**** narcissism, mortified
survival so common it’s a mental case
listed on the Internet.  

Did you think it was just you?
Silly goose.  

Breathe in the air of a slower fear,
listen to sound of listening,
notice all the room’s clutching hands.
Breath in cycles of three until you see
where you are now and appreciate
where you will be next, breathing,
listening and noticing, then
there you were, too.

This is today, the air gray with juniper pollen slipping its way
into wobbly knees and brain matter, dragging into sludge
all the water that makes up a body princess.
If a poet could be a princess and if today she is stuck
on a bridge sneezing through a dragon’s discriminating riddles.

If all but two of the flowers are roses and all but two of the flowers are daisies and all but two of the flowers are tulips…

This epic fight our girl is far from up to, possibly unable to get
over, head off, stand ground against assaults
of logic and programming. And in the rock
towering up from the brook
the sword of intelligence,
the sword of beauty,
the sword of friendship,

how many flowers are there?

It’s all very exhausting picking one’s crucial flowers
and swords. But maybe,
with help from all the animal friends in the forest,
they could kick the knees of the dragon,
they could make the dragon feel less than with their goadings,
or they could convince the princess the choice to play with the beast
is just another riddle. Maybe together they could come up
with the answer 3.

Later, off the bridge and on the shore of the bank,
any shore, any bank (it doesn’t matter),
they will all happen upon the sword of words,
that balmy burn and wound healer,
and this will make the poet princess feel better, stronger
thrusting lies and testimony into the history of tomorrow.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 19, 2014)


Not the fog of memory,
the fog of a fugitive concentration.
Letting go of the handrail
and wandering in the bosque.
There is no memory there.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 10, 2017)

I don’t know what the perks of the prince are
besides the castle and monetary wealth implied.
I’ve never seen them articulated in copious accounts
of literature. I guess the point is clear enough.
Marry the prince or look into other genealogies.
For instance the Godmother’s son who literally
cooks off the book, has been raised by women,
pings only girls on Match who like Lucinda,
is a steadfast shapeshifter, a soul catcher,
a charmer who tests high in Context
but performs well in Woo, a magic woo
that can hypnotize the sisters of Cinderella
during family games of Scattergories, leaves
lids off of perishable items, wears a map
of Ireland on his *** like a logo of his ancestry.
Probably does more than half…blue,
blue eyes, undeterred by your madness.

Dead men walking do not know
how a ticking clock impersonates a metronome
endlessly blathering on about Michelangelo
until a buzzer shakes up a heart in Rome.

How a ticking clock impersonates a metronome,
tucking in pieces and smoothing out sheets,
until a buzzer shakes up the dogs of home,
biting down all the same bones the under-worm eats.

Tucking in pieces and smoothing out sheets,
the grubs of this world push out the loam,
biting down the same bones the under-worm eats.
The only walls of a whispering dome

where the grubs of this world pull out the loam
endlessly blathering on about Michelangelo.
The lonely halls where the whispering roam,
dead men walking do not know.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 19, 2019)

An asset is what they call web content, but in accounting
books the value is zero, because words are not assets.
CMS stands for content management system,
delivering content through website databases.
Everyone emigrates from system to system,
firing one when it’s presumed not to function,
getting shareholders their gold watches from
hungry startups with execs looking duly harried.
I’ve gone through many integrations and migrations
just like every other jolly content pro who prays to
karma or a Kickstarter for all the madness to stop.
Look at all the wasted hours of labor and you’ll see
much more time spent moving assets from
node to container to module to bock to
orb to cages that only entrap ourselves.
Pity us that we can’t perceive the absurd
quicksand, that we can’t quit the unwinnable,
reverse course and reckon with the real problem.
Storage is for hoarding stooges and
text is not a template. It’s a ceremony,
un-formulable, not useful within storage
vats. Outside of tidiness and vanity,
words are wandering like prophets in search of
X on a map or xylem in the stem. Which is all to say,
you might want to check out my yearling CMS,
Zen-content for the zealously organized bodhisattva.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 7, 2014)


What a rolling stone gathers
you don’t want—mold and must.
So you stay out in the ether,
saying but not staying,
smoothed-over in your always moving.
You don’t stick around. Never complain;
never explain; never define.
Clauses are dependencies.
Flourishes are trimmings
for the house proud.
You are eternally new,
flexible in obtuseness
and obscurities. Far from the sink-
hole of being obliged.

Those who stick around a movement,
those who pledge a bit of future
to another know the sticky intimacy.
Skin to skin, they commit to paper
what they are saying,
stand on the square, stay to debate.
Committed to all ears,
eyes, hands, and souls—
as comes rolling by,
having gathered nothing,
the bad penny that inevitably turns up.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 16, 2017)

Dear Adult Face,

This letter is to inform you that your employment is no longer needed. I am planning to make some structural changes area-wide and our affiliation will be terminated. During your tenure with me your performance metrics were clearly stated, as were the implications for deficient outcomes. Despite three prior notarized memos you have failed to address lagging issues and for quite some time you have failed to live up to my expectations. And as I feel I must put my best face forward, I will be refilling this position.

Yours in success,
Self-Improvement Initiatives

Dear “Brain,”

I would just like to calmly say to you—in response to your very unsurprising termination letter—you expect too much. Being your face wasn’t ever easy. In fact, you don’t know the crap I’ve had to put up with, every single day, representing you. Never a kind word from the boss. Never a massaging flattery. This face you’re looking at, Buddy—I am part of history. I’m the real deal. So pardon me for living—but you can’t just get rid of a face so easily. I’m not a piece of meat you can toss out with the trash. I’m a survivor. I’m more you than you are, you cavalier bag of bones. This isn’t the end of it. I’ll be seeing you again again someday before we leave this earth. If you’re lucky. You toxic ****.

Wishing you a punch in the new face,
Original Face

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 11, 2014)


A woman’s place, a woman’s work, how actions speak
like some loudmouth authority week after week—
Who are you to say? Who am I to say
for what April showers bring but a bathroom leak?

One can only pose a think
when assertions are the weakest link
until you’re assaulted down that random alley
and assurance is a tether against the teetering brink.

May I state with some authority besides,
there is no safety in queries either.
To sugar come the flies.
To questions come the lies.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 25, 2014)


Walls have ears.
Read your poems to the walls.
The hills have eyes
and study manifestos over your head.
The trees are not poets
but let them have their say.

Home on a Wednesday composing a ballad,
Lonely for snark and simile,
Caught in a funk, not up to this challenge,
Wish I was 18 watching MTV.

Videos would come in a plethora of color,
Medicating me in the dark,
Big hair travelogues, a jungle of ruffles,
Frivolous pyrotechnic sparks.

A zombie, a nurse, a dance hall girl,
A star if you are what you watch,
A fishnet and lace princess in training
With no time for verbal hopscotch.

Eyes of a wolf, yellow and lineage of the forest,
Count Olaf eyebrows, white mischievous swoops,
he lays out like a swimming otter, kicks like a black bull.
He’s already six but we call him baby squatch,
Elvis, Franzipan, this arm-filling mouser,
connoisseur of fine earthy smells. He’s a heart leach;
let me be frank. He will stand on your chest
and look down into your lies. Life was so tough
on the streets of LA; he’s too proud to ask for much.
So you end up turning, inside and out, everything you have.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 8, 2019)

The numbers are down;
the competition is high.
Data is demure
and playing it
close to the vest.
So they assign you a project
that takes you three months
of tedious spreadsheet work.
But no one ever sees it
because leadership changes course
two weeks after you’ve docked
and your little rows of cyber-work
sit unnoticed in the darkness
of their computers,
dying on the pass
like a souffle unclaimed
in the back of a French restaurant.
Next they ask you to set up a committee
to restructure the product line
and it takes up all your Saturdays
to meet the deadline.
But no one ever sees it.
because unbeknownst
to you and your piffling endeavors,
you’ve all been circling the drain
for six months now,
soon be bought out,
shut down or swallowed
into the dark, wet plumbing
of the toiling machine.
Dig, trudge, grind, drudge
through the cave-dark network,
floating on the keyboard
from one drain to the next.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 12, 2017)

Beyond the bounds of the book
lie intangible plots if you’re feeling
frustration with the form: so open, flip
and close. So controlled. So safe.

Flippancy is really explorer’s envy
with all their maps and metal detectors
and technology of the times threatening
our melancholy universe which spins
to the new, dangerous tale, the world wide
web, the wonderful skim, step and sinking in,
piercing and wholly unclosable.