And this right now sure no one told you or even made a joke how were you to know that it would crumble in your hand as you woke and made another attempt to gather supplies for the journey from reluctant and somewhat distant relatives who all day would sit by their fires and wait for her to arrive and read once more from the voluminous pamphlet that detailed the triumphs of an ever-increasing number whose names were lost
-
-
True False Starts
But maybe.
That book and the twist they rave about.
Grit in your shoes from the famous shoreline.
How to cook that dish we loved from the Thai place.
Onion chili cashew something with good pain.
Not in the dark windows at the mall or
medieval bling of those other windows.
But still.
Footsteps of others who.
One day long ago a.
Did I maybe.
Watch the birds stalk small fish as the sun sinks.
The revolving door of breath.
Even this headache.
What difference will one more restart
-
In Which the Lover Complains Bitterly While Crossing a Desert
How to get it flowing again? I tried to ask my neighbor but he was on his way to prison and couldn’t help. Later, no one showed up to the game despite a lack of bombardment. You start to feel like you can’t even rely on your own fingernails. And these scars don’t even get me a small discount.
As if you found a penguin on your balcony in the middle of summer but before you could open your mouth it’s swept away by a hawk. All the same, the vegetable patch managed to wither again this year, much like
When I can’t remember how to spell a word I make a small, approximate scribble and hope I’ll never have to go back. Anyway, by the time anyone checks we should be long gone.
-
Carefully
late in spring it creeps
in a spider has had a
thousand children in the corner
I discover one day looking
for a salve for this pain in
the twinge in the like you
want to hear about my
latest diagnosis anyway
they assured me that the sound
of splintering bone is normal
for this time of year but don’t
worry about it try this new game
-
Small Bones of the Feet
Turning the corner
but it was long ago
the pen feels funny
turning the corner at the
end of the parking lot
where the water
abruptly ends or
starts a marshy
spot long-growing
green a few small herons
waking maybe a dream
of clouds of silver fish
fading as they begin the long
stalk and the poem just sort of
ends there though I wanted
to talk about childhood homes
and the deep wound
of contentment we carry
on our hunts
if we’re lucky but
wait do you
hear that new
bird calling
-
the trick
is to let
your handwriting
grow
so small
that it is
mistaken
for the internal
monologues
of ants
-from Talking Too Fast
-
the little tragedies I take
so seriously
but look
a woodpecker
and my dog’s
ears
-
while the computer is updating I dare to go outside where I am immediately swarmed by a cloud of cicada who clumsily ram into me causing many small bruises and the neighborhood cats gather to investigate the mounds of insects at my feet who have collapsed from exhaustion and finding it all boring the cats wander off to practice their Latin which ensures that they will be in a terrible mood at least until dinner time
-
and again nothing to say says the head and the fingers forget that and run out on their own what good has this head done lately anyway and blossoms hang on the trees so briefly as birds sing courtship songs skyward in the weakening dark make ready this short but wide song for an empty page hungering for music
-from Talking Too Fast.
-
and gone as the pen comes out what word might have soothed this scrap of paper holding on to the last light of the week & summer almost over & our throats sore from shouting over the endless waves of strangers exploring the shading of the short video format in the pauses between what the deadline wants of you & again into the kitchen with tea made from scraps of memories of all those birthdays with the one whose name you won’t say
-
what then. this dark place. whirl of wings somewhere away. a web walked into. dust in what little light. following something. the sound of the mud. and for an ending this sweat this. a day or maybe more.
turn the other side of this coin gold and ribbons
-
Talking Too Fast
If anyone’s interested in some fresh new poetry, may I suggest my new book, Talking Too Fast?
A guaranteed cure for the summer blues! Or wait, is it a guaranteed cause… I can’t remember.
-
with the rain set in and flashes in the distance we all settle down to an old board game this is the one he always cheats at with that little smile on his face like he’s pulling one over on us and after a couple of drinks he’s the only one who really cares about it after all we’re just here for the conversation and these delightful appetizers reconstructed from an ancient Mesopotamian cookbook thought lost for at least a couple of millennia
but then the evening turns and we talk about the dark times when even finding a nickel on the sidewalk made your heart beat faster but of course we exaggerate all the old wounds for our audience even though they were all there and suffered as much or as little as we did you know you can’t really fool your friends like that then as fast as it came the storm passes though we had long ago stopped paying it any mind
-
which way to start to get what I want instead of fiddling with knobs and buttons lost in mush and the aftermath of failed experiments but then without the experiments the birds don’t sing and we all sink sometime over the rooftops a siren or ice cream truck bringing something extra into the long and humid evening in which you reconstruct the crime scene for your dinner guests who have long since stopped being amused but somehow it escapes your mind
the right way to say certain things and you turn to the left for the light switch instead of to the right where it is and brush off the whole thing as a symptom of not enough sleep or coffee and meanwhile the worms are digging under our feet and so many skeletons slowly breaking down before the archaeologists can dig them up and brush them off you know some might be quite important to someone in a very different line of work but we can talk about that tomorrow with tea and lemon squares if the other appointment falls through you’ll call right
-
If I talked to people
It’s not all about haiku, is it? is a question I imagine people might ask if I started talking to them. The answer is no, not at all. There are quite a few other pies with which I’m making my fingers sticky. Hmmm. I’m going to put a stop to that metaphor. Anyway, I recently put out a book of old doodles from an old blog that hopefully are still (or were ever) slightly amusing. If you’d like to check it out, here’s the link.
If you’re interested, they mostly started out as a scribble with a pen or brush and then I tried to find the face in the scribble and write up a little story about the person. I don’t know if that helps, but there it is.
-
a fateful glitch in the holographic president’s ancient code
other animals 