Do You Have a Favorite Vegetable

Do you have a favorite color?

Strike strike strike

Mysterious numbers across mysterious frequencies are eventually lawsuits and Chicago and architecture

Sunday dinner

Spoiled meat

Assorted feelings

Everything’s complicated and everything’s not, and I’m not falling for those traps this time

I’m not 

When balance is a thing and everyone loves the Golden Hour and

I’m not

Falling for failing for filing forever

I’m not

Counting it counts, upwards — starts are to spirals as something is to now

I’m not now, now now now, now n-now, now.

Ni le Jus de Cerises ni le Soda

Let it rain like kingdoms not restraints

Nor nor nor is light light light

Let it become like diamonds balanced on a pointy end

Gemstone or Plato or fresh from the shapes palette, whatever works

It’s everyone vying to pick up the tab before we’ve learned that right of way is a thing

It’s a relationship between a direction and the number 8 that only just came to us with a flash

Of skittering pixels

Of Westward Expansion

Of reckless leader-picking

Of meme dances and their dancers

I’m talking about balance, or I mean to be

We’re not even talking about the game

We’re talking about balance

Balance

But you see, Time’s thing is it keeps going

Keeps breaking things

I’m so sorry

Have Have Haven’t Been

Incredibly under text messages

Ever forward because the equations said so

Not saying so

Not still and/or not moving and/yet moving

Like the last scene done well.

+

And like a motion, an electric motion, wiperblades wiping, interlingual exchange, evangelism, hung juries leaving the courthouse, every lunar eclipse in a leap year, and another autumn around the corner.

+

All the layers of a Smith Island Cake

Personal preferences

Rain in April in every one of my 51 years in every place I’ve ever lived

And yet, and how, and when, and even.

+

Like hearing the rain there, over the phone, when it is raining here.

Ars Poetica, October 2024

All my worst poems saying I was here

All my best poems, We were here 

Somewhere in between, You were here

 

 

 

Swing, Batter. Swing!

Indistinct Overlapping Chatter

Language as Guilt-Free Operation and Pther Fantasy Literature

Connections Made and Documented

Seasons, Broadly

It’s funny how we’d go to the Keys in August — are thereabouts — year after year with the occasional break between.

And now we’re just back from time in Mount Desert Island and this very week last year were in our way to Nova Scotia.

We hadn’t been to Bar Harbor for like 12 years? And we’d gone what? Two or was it three other times?

Future Islands breakout hit, Seasons (Waiting on You) — the rhythm then the tune then the lyrics as I’ve heard them. 

Seasons change. Seasons change.

But I’ve been waiting on you.

And then the lyrics I’m looking up for the first time and damn there’s a whole lot more going on there even if I’ve heard that song a hundred times, maybe more.

I’m thinking of walking along the road and visiting Thunder Hole, even if it wasn’t the best thundering time and the time before that maybe 12 or 14 years before that that was a better thundering time and what of that I was carrying with me then and carrying with me now.

I’m thinking about how you refer to someone as him in a crowd of hims or her in a crowd of hers and what happens in that moment for those that hear you.

I’m thinking about how it has always felt a little sad to me when you color up at a poker table — and how this connects for me to everything I saw up close with dementia.

It’s Sunday morning in Baltimore.

I have coffee and I know who I am a little bit.

But I don’t know what I am to be, at least a little bit.

It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok.

A Sharp Stick

A sharpened stick and then
A honed edge and then
Too too much belief

I live in the woods, kinda

And I’m on vacation in different woods, kinda

And that’s one way we live in many worlds

Bad decisions create new directions all the time

While new decisions remember you well enough

And the ends of something aren’t the end of something else

What I mean is that I’ve never been strong with left from right

Or putting love and trust and admiration all in the same box

Mornings

I wanna spout some bullshit like,
The body is strange
But the mind is stranger,

Bullshit that sounds good but I don’t believe in.

I’ve been alive 50 years to see so many dangerous things,

I’ve been alive 50 years to see so many wondrous things,

I’ve made lots and lots and lots of decisions,

So many decisions that my favorite thing to do on vacation is not make any real decisions and just be.

But it doesn’t always work out that way and that’s okay.

I’ve gotten better and I’ve probably also gotten worse,

Like it’s funny the unexpected vanities that rise up.

Fuck them, but there they are saying fuck you right back.

As in lanterns, mirrors, cairns, talismans, temples.

Delicate boats built in bottles. And storms in old coffee mugs.

Distance Is

Onions have layers and find themselves in all kinds of metaphors.

I first learned to cook some Indian dishes and Italian red sauce and they always seemed very similar.

Something is always next to something else whether it matters or not and then it matters.

Waves are functions in some circles.

Directions seem arbitrary to me, but I don’t think about that too often.

I’ve been trying to be here more, but I don’t know what that means to all this —

To everything I was trying to be and become before.

I know all-or-nothing thinking is a trap, and I see it all around me.

The lobster boats start early, the sun goes down early, everything is wet.

Books on books on books on books.

What do you want? Where are you going?

They know their ice cream around here, they’re my people that way.

The little loops still bug me sometimes and I know that’s about me not the little loops.

Coins have two sides, that’s what so fucking boring about them.