I've tried for years to write a little something every day, with many other higher priorities. What follows are a selection of said efforts over three years. It is very brave and strong of me to share this, so let's acknowledge that first :P If you want to go further back, you'll need to give me a lot of money and sign an NDA. My favorites are Walk (April '25) and Patio (March '25).
If you have something constructive to say about any of the pieces here:
August 2025 — Fear of god
Pare an orange with the base
of a long blade. Consider your slippery
reward. Hold it like a life.
Somewhere, an entire mountain is bought
and sold with capital.
What is this thing with the envious heart
and skin covered in boils?
April 2025 — Alien thing
Thrum fades to buzz, to blare.
This angular world, all knotted stripes swinging
either in my face or out of my hands,
turning out my core like two
jacket pockets, pennies
scattering hopelessly.
Who is this stranger in my skull
pushing against the bounds
of my skin, my fingers, whatever grace
there is still to my name?
This alien thing in my throat,
this steeple in the trees degenerating like someone
sits on the remote, turning back
to pieces and black
with rot thrum fades to buzz
to blare this angular world
all knotted stripes swinging and
stinging and breaking
April 2025 — Walk
Power looks out over
a pile of skulls. This
means nothing to
these pear blossom
tufts, clogged with snow, heaving
for a faint, abandoner sun.
Discarded petals gather
like pinkynails in the dust, the little
peels of wrapper and can tabs,
even this made soft
and beautiful under the veil,
sculptor smoothing blight.
April 2025 — Self governance
The room of my self
is a theater, warmly lit and
carefully shaded as if by hand. I sit
alone in the seats, strung
between the arm rests, laced
and forming water pushing
for the baseboards.
April 2025 — Slog
A drop of leather conditioner
in the carpet, pinging and clean-smelling,
a laugh loud and sudden.
I spend a long five minutes
sticking my one hundred and
seventy five new pins in my
pin tomato.
We both react to the prices of
various things. I try to put
aside everything I should be doing
for just one second to do anything, like
clean a drop of leather conditioner out of the carpet,
stick one hundred and seventy five pins in a pin tomato,
or hold the pink sun of this intimacy with any kind
of reverence at all.
March 2025 — Play props
A locomotive cleaves
the marching hills, making
play props of them and a panic of all
the small things
the first mile down.
So many errands ahead but none
so compelling as this
smooth purr building
and stirring in the pit of me, loosing
me from all that holds me, tossing
me with each
crest
and gully
crest
gully
March 2025 — Patio
A young bird dives in the crook
of Spanish tiles under a bulbous
waxing moon, laughing voices wrapping
my home like paper and twine.
The sharp smell of the mop,
the sweet taste of cola, motors
on the wind so worried about everything.
I may not be impressive in this life, but I am
awake, molding my piece
of earth with effort over years,
undeluded to the way it all
already melts with each
breath echoing in the brambles.
March 2025 — Homogeny
Towers of stones picked
and fit and settled,
water siphoned and churned
and funneled
into faucets.
An instant,
a lifetime, skill
and apathy, what vanity
to wake in an able body bored.
March 2025 — Draft
Glance at her hands and turn
away and turn back and
take them in yours.
Trace the every river system
in a knuckle like
steam on a draft.
As this moment and that one die
in your arms,
an expanse of gleam
and shadow splits over the earth,
spilling and laughing, uncaring
what you take or what you leave.
March 2025 — Baseboards
Not the center, not
exactly, not
a problem, not
to say what I think,
or don't think, but
something else.
Not that, or that either,
but something better, gold
and whole, thoughtful
and edited. My body curls
and disturbs the smoke, this
wavering mass of heat.
Just guide me to what
you want from me, I'm asking,
please.
April 2024 — Are you coming home tonight?
She looks into me, eyes glazed
and mind gone somewhere
where the algae is thick
and the stalagmites melt like flesh.
My favorite water glass
which is really a vase
drops fat tears from its hips, its
intestinal shape changing right
there on the table.
October 2023 — See
Stories above the interstate,
a swell of migrating starlings
peels out in halves.
Are you a student of the morning sun
that lays the hills bare
before you and begs you to see?
You cannot hold the starling
but I will. I will.
Ownership in attention,
not memory. Care, not love.
October 2023 — My mother and I
together, one heart dissatisfied.
One smile, one penmanship, one thumb
guiding one blade under the appleskin.
Two waterbeads on the glass,
one ring on the table.
I scream at her back, my hands tied,
feeling the dimension of her belief like a limb
on my own animal.
October 2023 — Home from your place
Some twenty chickadees wash in a swell of air,
the earth below just
barely submitting to the dry chill. The light
is clean and strained here, seeping into the land
like the balm of your touch on my skin. The dust tightens
to hold its shape through
the dark season the way my body
does not easily release your ghost.
October 2023 — As the pitch rises
Tell me what you think
about whatever you think
to tell me. Soft and easy you
take my hips in your hands,
water rising to my throat.
Me and my spirit bound to the truth.
You and yours a new
baltic amber every time I see you,
leaning closer imperceptibly
as the pitch rises.
October 2023 — All this
The lilt in your voice reduces me to nothing,
tears fresh in disjointed dream loop.
I want to be yours, I do,
abalone shell in cauterized palm,
purple light breaking over me
absently
with the slack drums.
Use the word lucky again like you
want something I cannot feel for in the dark.
September 2023 — U.S. 287
Columns of evergreen guide me for home, or what
wears its clothes. Nothing sounds good, this
small world of my own suddenly grating
and tight. The invisible man
holds me as I quiet, carves me
a place deep in my own chest
and leaves me there. How brutally
I find myself alone, aching for myself
from the pitted heat of myself.
September 2023 — The car parts
the eddying dust and melts
to the intent reverence of your working shoulders
in the turning light. My tingling skin, my
aching feet, the water cleaning
handfuls and handfuls of stones.
The same thing is true, year after
year here: you miss the handhold
with your mind first.
September 2023 — Cove
The blue water pushes gently on my shoulders,
soft clay working itself between my toes.
I live in the bite of your voice
and the softening limestone that
is gradually nothing. I dream
that I have long hair again.
August 2023 — Strawberry seeds
A great tiger reclines
between us, strange mercy
on its every jagged breath.
Give me what you carry
and I'll bear it. Leave me
in the daze of your relief
and I'll bear that too.
August 2023 — We find ourselves
a road paved red and narrow,
a leaving in quiet that breathes.
Move the earth gravelstone
by gravelstone
until only salt
and flesh remain.
August 2023 — Back from the grocery
Look at all her happiness
at his happiess, this
feat of endurance, this holy war,
the bobsled
clicking exactly
every downbeat
on its trackseams,
the silver hardware of the same door
bursting open after itself
in the mirror forever.
There are no favorable returns,
no plea to fall back the coal fire.
Here there is only a woman's patience,
the only piece of driftwood
in what is otherwise
a loose amalgam of smoke.
August 2023 — Pieced light
The garage door folds
and unfolds the light for me,
thumbing absently the cool green
of the garden. I collapse
in the day's arms
like this pieced light, warmth
unspun from the air to pool
at my feet.
July 2023 — Silver shoots
In the aquatic stillness of late afternoon,
voices ribbon softly on the wind.
I set myself deeply in my chest,
silver shoots blooming over the earth
before my feet.
January 2023 — Milosz
From nothing a seabird screams for the water,
sending fissures through the settled fog.
Without language, he says plainly:
Not everything is permitted to man.
December 2022 — Rupture
In sleep I sit naked
in the belly of the earth,
my skin coated with salt.
Miles above my head,
morning sweats the cliff-face,
heavy slate bled to feed the sea.
For a moment you meet my eyes in the mirror,
steam billowing in the saccharine heat.
It's not about letting go--not really.
It will go when it pleases.
And it's gone.
November 2022 — Thaw
The truth trembles impossibly in the breast
of a fat, cleaned bird.
A granite snow slides
off the roof and then
the feeding sow's back
and later
is boiled for tea.
Ego leaves only on the smoke,
flattening into the lax
and glassy pinks of an early dusk.
June 2022 — Warm
A woodpecker keeps time poorly,
just hidden from sight.
The coarse, uncut grass
lacerates my skin like the
budding tree limbs a sky
gazing endlessly back at me.
April 2022 — Sunk-cost
A life is given to drought,
the land riven with grief.
Duty is god or else nothing is,
but these things
bear so much resemblance.