This picture was taken on a parking lot at the city hall where I work. I stood on a border, some kind of state line, where my car idles on one side and a tiny forest on the other. The entrance was almost imperceptible, but it’s the first thing I noticed. A narrow triangle of…
White orchids don’t have Instagram accounts, much less fake ones posed in a pitcher for my cats to chew on. Still, I wondered yesterday if they long to be noticed and find it insufferable to go days at a time without a single soul snapping their picture. If you really think about it, it’s not…
I ended the evening with my daughter in the living room. No phones, no television, no music. Just the soft static and sighs of a house settling in for the night with its people. I held the moment with her as long as I could. Laughing like twelve year old girls. Where purity and presence…
“…sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on the brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely…”
Saturday with three cats looks like a lot of belly up to the ceiling fan, frequent trips to the feed trough and an irresponsible amount of coffee. The rather large queen in my featured image is my totem for the weekend and certainly day 39. But I’ve been clean long enough now to see the…
First night in bed with Cara. My new laptop. Antiope, Diana and Stevie made the short list of names on the drive home from Best Buy, but Cara felt right. I didn’t want her to remind me of anyone else. I needed a new relationship. Even if a computer. Cara means friend. And Anam Cara,…
Merwin said on the last day of the world he would plant a tree Not for the fruit bearer but for the one that stands in the earth for the first time What for Wisdom’s genesis Innocence. Wonder. Remembrance. That the first and ever ancient spirits are ants and spiders And the land is…
You fancy me mad? DARK H e a v y Popping open one pale eye into trashed bed sheets Gray, ghastly eye with film over it Not seeing but feeling wine stains and plastic bottles soiling the carpet Not hearing but feeling the muffled pulse of my own Tell-Tale Heart ushering me into that hideous…
There she is. I wondered how she’d look tonight when earlier today I swept free the cobwebs from the legs of a patio chair. Irritable and stately, perhaps half a cloud sliding from one nude shoulder. Radiant and hungry, no doubt searching for the approval she knows she deserves. Wide eyed and watchful 99.7 percent…
What if all our little deaths are as beautiful as fall? That somehow to someone even the savage that swallows us wears on its face our sweet aftertaste for others to see. Who’s to say a leaf whirling casually to its end doesn’t feel in its dry vein the same absurdity as cancer or overdose…
Sobriety Poet 