Some Art makes me want to quit.  Poetry gives me a choice  of sooner or later. I believe  sooner to be better if for no  other reason than I forget  stuff like that one time  I plum forgot to sleep— O man was it great. So fucking great. Separation of Powers Change may be constant  but I believe some things should stay the same like the separation of church                           and state. Scripture says                            God watches over us for  signs

Atlas  Stop telling me of my strength  Instead  Say  That sometimes the world will offer scraps  And glass pieces  And dimly lit bulbs  Tell me that life is tricky  And God’s will imperfect  And brokenness abounding  Tell me that we are all made up of fragments, residual memories and glimpses of agape  Stop telling me of my power  Instead  Say  That things fall apart and unravel  Tell me that my world can stop with a daunting cruelty that sets other worlds in motion  Tell me

We wouldn’t be able to undo it if we kissed. That is lust to me -  Something to covet. Even if : You never told anyone I would know, we would know. A decoy To command inclination Sharing breath like ancients. Methanobrevibacter oralis, that old microbe The place where you form words  Close it in language impotency.   Where you eat Where you vomit Where you tell me you don’t love me It would mean something.  Bird Ugly He came home today with Bird Ugly One eye big One eye small

Half Past a Monkey’s Ass Well it’s half-past a monkey’s ass (or a quarter- past a nightmare) and my skull is a glass jar full of fireflies and all the clouds in the next county over are aflame and the wind is stirring things up a little and there’s a wolf with a wounded bird in its mouth and a dead tree on a hill with nothing but phantom limbs and the frogs are tapping out some kind of Morse Code to each other and there’s an old beer bottle sitting on a fence- post (for who k

Our Possible Lives Born into what we are, with no recourse or recompense. Who could have imagined such a time and  such a place? Everything so sad and hollow,   nebulous hours, skies full of ash. A mess of things behind, a mess of things ahead. Our possible lives drift about like  bits of conversations overheard on a bus, the dead blooming like weeds in overgrown fields. An indifferent wind blows each moment through the days and the years and we never did  end up doing  much

Cold I used to be a tree leaves of ambition now I cannot find  myself in sudden  snow. Yes, I would  melt in your hands a gray towel to soak up. What washed away washed me ashore, cold sand scratching  skin. My body yearns  in dry winter air. E & K 4EVA It’s the running office joke.                                                     And maybe it’s cool. It’s high school. Both of you laugh silently  at the mouth of the hallway.                               I never would have

October I enter with my season in candlelight  Three burgundy kisses , westward  From a splintered jar  Seeping into oceans  Goodnight is cried , Damp lights assume prophets , Recoiling in the flustered breath of desperate inquiry  Those who have lingered with soft oath  And shape with delicate rebellion  Taste temptation in tragedy , For only with eyes and lips daring  Does laughter dissolve trespassed , A poured world into the mouths of mystery  Dawn is pale  Your lips will

Cleanliness Sensitivity in good care always orderly and neat all these are next to godliness   Contentment A handful, used like a bountiful little or abundance, no difference anything possessed is enough Discipline Squeezing the body’s comfort adding lime to its sweet candy to achieve a profitable goal Author’s note: A Senryu is a three-line unrhymed Japanese poetic form structurally similar to haiku but treating human nature, usually in a satiric or ironic vein. Whereas haik

Her Soviet Her Soviet looked, with the disdain of flowers, askance at all and sundry. A Collective,superior beauty but in constant need of a carer. Peripatetic petals all. Her Soviet composed of packets of meat offcuts imprudently piled. Bodies formed from the memory foam of misguided marital beds. They only consumed food that contained the potential to be formed in to a mound. She- topped with watermelon and bottomed unironically in the hue of the recently departed. Her Sovi

Another exhausted day yawns, a winter chill painting my knuckles white as I sink into my pillow and replay January. A plane ride ago, the herd of us spilled out of Worthing Square, bellies half-full with cold beef patties and pockets empty as we flooded the sidewalk to go who-knows-where—the boardwalk, Quayside, any corner we could claim. The streets were ours and they were just driving in it, the gaze of grizzled men on my bare waist, their Mazdas throbbing with bass and spi

The Breakup I leave this with you— a few lines, hastily scratched on a page gone limp with the perspiration of sorrow. The paper retains, I believe, the faint chill of my grief, and my grief—what else?—bears the stale imprint of your desire. Bravo. You’ve always had a talent for undoing. The Destroyer: yes, that name will do. I bequeath it to you without malice. Do not search for me. I shall be elsewhere, in some God-forgotten hamlet the mapmakers have mercifully missed,  liv

"Tell me about the proposal." I promise it’s important every Saturday morning,  we walked the neighborhood park. I forgot the names of trees he pointed out because of nature’s  eagerness to make me behold him.  Like in summer, the foliage   (emerald, celadon, jade)  rhymed with his eyes.  The thrumming of cicadas,  brown noise for his clarion tenor to pierce. In fall, he stretched and plucked leaves of grenadine  or ochre, unveiling his height, the span of solid shoulders. Ev

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