Build

This is what you do.

Kit, build, a build, this build

Reincarnation vs. resurrection

Vs. barrel-strength that one.

Pulls your mouth, this one, like.

A tea towel is an everyday thing some days.

No snow, just reverse it?

Restraint, reset, restart, but first to the left and then to the left again, etc.

I used to search department stores for secret doors,

I was that kid, and so many clothing racks are just clothing racks.

So many sales, so many Septembers starting school.

So many Springs with days stretching longer.

It’s ok to be tired, just rest.

Rest up, and later I’ll make us a fire.

48.

Under the wire and through the woods.

Always a pine forest and forever it’s night.

What is barren is what is changing,

Fallow follows and kingdoms fall.

Stacking two days, one atop the other:

Meals, morning coffee, dog walks.

Everything wound right and nothing bleeding.

Keep it together another step and another.

I held a sphere of light in my hand to know when I was

And you had a dream for me that collapsed distances.

“I lost a friend,” you said, and another and another.

We’re stepping across the gap, another train, another meal.

The sun knows that endings are in the beginnings.

Another train, salutations, another star, another, another.

Half-Told Truths on Style in 2021

Words and things like pipes

The Internet and the arc of a deep three

All the cats I’ve lived with in 47 years

An Altoids tin full of mismatched buttons

Nobody has loose change anymore, it seems

Late nights at the Crown or Nam Kang with late night drinks

Split-second decisions and life-long learning

You Decide When It’s Done

Who decides when it’s done?

A chorus of mice comes close this December

And darkness ain’t falling anywhere.

Did Moderna give you weird dreams or just more memory?

Tomatoes are a fruit and potatoes, a root vegetable.

I still want to do well in this life to come back a drummer in the next.

Busy Earnin’ on my year-end mix for year-end drives to Western Mass and back.

Don’t break it; don’t buy it; don’t ship them; this isn’t 2015.

What do you want me to tell you?

Who’s story do you want me to tell?

There’ll be peaches and oranges, cherries, and fires.

Some keep count to make it through others to enjoy the ride.

The everyday miracle of time travel, my friends.

My friends, my friends, everyone’s alone sometime.

There is rage inside me

For Mary Shelley  

“There is rage inside me the likes of which should never escape.” Frankenstein

Canvas can be draped, and you’ll be my Grecian

Closures carefully stitched echo in twine below ground

Some rearrangements are more thoughtful than others, you see

Token, token, talisman, tether

A younger me haunts this ghost story

Looking at me looking over my shoulder, wondering if we’ll make it and always the amateurish attempts at taking things apart

Holding it so close I can’t see down any road

Time is orbiting all of us like we’ll care again

A candle that burns twice as fast costs just as much despite increased productivity and that’s the motherfucker

First came cloaks lined in fur, then came marriage

Houses into homes and cities and towns

There was a services sector

Everything placed between every other thing

Defenses were constructed

Mistakes were made with fences

And we all went on living.

What Could Be Done

Showers soon show something significant

How many miles north by west

Those three phases heard here

More the pressure, more the heat

Someone had to be the first windsurfer

It all comes out wrong except the sun

What makes it matter makes it count

The weight of it all as it collapses

More of the Same

How Many Pieces How Far

At some point the angles stop adding up

Torque meets time rather than try a little tenderness

And waves of whatever drown out the wonder

Graying figure and graying field

There’s no way home now

So we stick and move till we make new spaces

Thread threats to whose trouble now

But every matter leaves a mark

Sounded seams on covered ground 

Two of us and then three of us and then more

How does it end

What You See or Feel

Pressure nailed

Erased in column

Air and sea and certainly stone

Following faithful to heart

Fast-found the squandered castaways

Call it what you will

Deep breaths, calisthenics, cardio

Overhead and through it

River water again

And the first and second rails

Miles of perspective

What Says Who to 60

You are a measure of distance

You are a clearer day

I am a spinning full stop

I am a forgotten cache of grapes

They are amassed and stamping

They are suddenly and uncharacteristically clear-eyed

We are fields left fallow, carbon capture, renewable resources

We are going nowhere now

You are many in the face of despair. So many.

Captured Class

What a difference a definition can make

What a cake, what a day, what a beautiful bride

Picture don’t last forever and memories are always being refigured

And so the light falls on the walkway just so

And so falls an entire way of life on a particular day

Or maybe it’s a million airborne interlopers.

No room for parachutes here and no room for prayer.

Nothing for rent, nothing to borrow, and still, sea-levels rising everywhere.

What to order when one is facing down the end?

Not to fear, the world doesn’t end, they say,

But we certainly do.

And again the backup singers queuing for auditions.

And look at all of Nashville holding its breath.

If we can’t finally slip these strings, all is lost.

When the Weather Was

When the moon mists, let’s say

Or when you’re steering into the groove of a hard turn

And there are stiller truths waiting for you.

What is bad? What must rise?

I fall asleep before the visitors arrive

Again and again I’m myself all over again.

How would you have it? Whole-hearted but also quick

All the days in a pile, all the nights on a string.

It’s the sea that begets mist, begets fog, begets centuries-old sentinels.

And you, laughing in the face of any silence.

But you’re saving the best jokes for Permanence

Because all our lives are braided into the End of the World.

Every decision made as the plates shift beneath our feet

And spaces already impossibly far to cross are only getting farther.