POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
Aging Punks

Every so often, they add a tattoo
in honor of some long-forgotten love.

appetites

you quit wearing pants
loaf around your yard
in hole-nipped panties

3:17 AM as Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

Part of being a good sad person
is always painting the shadows
in the right direction and knowing
what sorrow to art with.

On the Night Row-Houses Across the Street Catch Fire

You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.

Finding My Fix

I slumped in front of a massive desk, a passive patient corroded with failure and dread.

An Endeavor of Being Now

We stop doing dishes while
a mile unwinds
from the tree outside.

You can’t make them love you, no matter how artfully you betray yourself

Try not to see your own predicament in every fucking thing.

love poem with dead leaves & color

I would always rather be happy than
dignified. Rather held than held
in awe.

Snow Falls from Branches

Should have found a job by now; should have slept in the night;
should have boiled old coffee before noon.

The State School 1984 His Given Name Was Wilbur  We Called Him Magpie

Mostly he ate what was put on his plate
snuck coffee grounds or dirt for a snack
Once a zipper Unzipped

Fallout Shelter

I imagined a cascade of slow death for all / that mattered…

i do not want to wait until it’s too late

the strands of your hair on the bathroom tiles aren’t sketching defeat. that’s you spitting disease in the face with another day you’ve woken up to.

woman at bar
After She Told Me You Pushed Her Down the Stairs

Empty vessels
make the most sound, I think,
as you rip the fairy lights off the handrail.

All In

I don’t
know why
I’m in the garden
kneeling on dirt

if detritus is all i’m made up of

my love is a glass shard, a knife made of madness and moonlight,
and there are already way too many fragments in this house

Getting Postcards From a Piano Showroom

The two of us toast to a man we both love, to whatever degree, clink our glasses and laugh…

Mom, in Her Dementia, Steals Oranges

and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place

Drowning in sky

I have observed, the theorist
I am