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.

What Address Is

Is there still life to be lived in six?

The problem in what goes back goes forth

As empty clubs lead us to lonely singers.

Italian would surely drift in at this point

If not earlier, if not the time of day

When the sun is slanting and the canals are aging

If not the weight of this life or its habits

Or the asymmetrical beneath all these symptoms.

It is the Great Uneven that brings me here

Again and again brings me to you

Leaving equations and details and derivative behind

Because before every road there was a path and before every path there was dust.

You have boots and I have boots, and we have the sun.

We’ll keep making sense just long enough. 

So Very Sonnet

A collection of birds

Keen on adventure

Imperfect mornings, clouds, considerations

Impossible motes in very real eyes

It’s something magnetic this Sunday

Peacetime artillery would require peace

But there is cake and ice cream this time

The sun’s daily retreat, no less fantastic

Carving patterns and byways and that which will be

Let more air in

Welcome restraint

Admit resting, admit error, admit joy

Skywriting my passwords over the crowded beaches of crowded seaside towns

While we huddle around the last fire on earth and make funny faces

Come Again, Please

When we circle the clouds and here we are, safe

Or open one eye after another onto a new day

The sky, a door, a season, a safe

And the intentional way we put our palms to the table

Next, participating and/or breaking bread and/or outright celebration

We’re cycling through all the times of day, here

We’re doing our best with what we’ve been dealt, here

We’re caring for the elderly around the clock, here

We’re making potatoes and making it, both

Don’t bother me with this static, it’s raining

I’m a up to my ears, but will it ever be enough?

What will we be left holding whenh the bell rings?

And so the calls for a little bit softer now

As the real begets the real-real at the end of all things

I Mean We Say Wow

At every turnstile of every subway

And all the points packed tight we call it educational

The Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, the Babylonians, and the first guy to build a fence

Various clergy, restaurants, and battlefields

If we could can this air

If we could bottle this coffee

If we could slide into the right boat on the right night with just the right drinks in our belly

The nights we dance, the nights we hold onto

We’ve forgotten enough interesting people to field an army

We’ve smashed idols and we’ve crushed dreams

Swollen moments, several sunsets, and you’ve got all manner of livestock

That’s how it began and that’s how it will continue

A pair of pants, some good shoes, and

You’ve got it from here

All the Abilities vs. All the Days

He tells us about Kid Chaos and the end of time

This is in Japan, Present Day, give or take

It’s a thing about breathing and marks and spaces

He wraps them around his finger

You’re keeping everyone company

And there is that way people spin tops in older movies

We’re Not Quite There

How big galaxies are and how they measure them

So much heat and dust

A house and all its corners

We, one, they, all another day

Another handful of abstractions

Another discovery under the same sun

Always learning to pour forth and pour and pour and pour some more

That’s the click of a TV from the time when TVs clicked

The wood finish of a fine wood cabinet

The decades-long marriage of tubes and sound

And there we go with warmth again

There we go with evenings and evening comforts

Before the notes we’ll never finish and all that darkness

They Built Fences

We built fences

Even while we looked for a way out

And and and and and

Another night with roman candles 

Or wrapped in lonelier smoke

Gather the world around you

Skirts, sea-level, trace elements

A bag that’s a tube that risks being another fence

Somewhere someone is painting a silo

And somewhere else a silo is refusing to be painted

This is a rainy day vs. a hearty stew

This is the space between vs. the space in all things

This is all things like livestock and repetition and forgotten rules

There is a braid that brings us together, those that’ll make it and those that won’t 

These flowers in my arms, this oxygen in my eyes

The gas we’ll save when we get there

What I Meant to Say

I’m sorry I didn’t call, I fell down the steps

Background radiation in the 50s

High definition photography, 4K even

The sunset as the sun sets later and later throughout Spring

A little hop off the last step as you’re on your way

Locking the front door when you’re closing up the bar

Remembering what you forgot 10 miles into a roadtrip 

An important message in a code that hasn’t been broken

Defense making the best offense after all these years

The quiet last days of a national hero

Building a fire and wondering if this is the last good cold day for a while

Ahead Fault

Out of others

Ahead of ouch

Hellacious in address

Comportment with hands

One over the other again waiting

Count up that you’ve always forgotten

Scales plus logs plus perfect rectangles or little dogs

Even even after all

Strangely solid

Strangely shaped

Sagging some

The way it carries itself

This day, this way, this

The way it ambles nightward

No more jars

No more fireflies

One more

Focus You’ll Mean It

You’re here

You’re gone

You’ve been and you’ve been again

The thing about quartz

The thing about long afternoons and long drinks

Piled up in strings and salvage

Corners were made for turning

Deserts were made and dunes were made

Beaches reconstructed, bridges stood up

We’re disarming now

We’re ready for it

When I Step Away and It’s Still

Two hands, two feet, two dogs

Prayers for the praying

What was once the pinnacle of engineering

British people and their athletes

When we talk about angles of ascent

Or throw-weight

When we talk about what’s next

When we submit to the speed of light

When we tell it like it is

Compression is what it is

And we have our whole lives to sort it out

Admit One Tasteful Shield

Buckle past done

Trenched, troweled, found

Forgotten, found the once more

Nice young man

Nice street, nice trees

This way lies the ground

Filled out before finished

Shine, shine, shown

Around the temporaries

Home of the home stretch

Measure miles if you can

I’ll watch

Who Do You Who For

Start with numbers

Start with action

Concentrate farming

Or morning-quiet streets

You just have to cut something

Then it’ll all be fine

As in it’s all Greek to me

As if this is your first life

As if circles don’t start somewhere

Prime numbers are only special in one direction

But you hold on to what you got

When ash starts falling from the clouds

Markets bottom out

And the ocean goes red

Stay home, stay home, stay home

Force begets force

Fire, flight, questing, camping

Kind

Search Token

Love lost

Cloud space

Master clutch

Formless friendship

Allowed landscape

Knotted mail

Handsome aspiration

Interrupted pledge

Like Most

Like most casualties

Strips of road by the water

Out of the way places

To Gain Elevation

Birdsong opens

Buoys announce

Rudders declare

We climb or rise or clamber

The day somethings, the sun somethings

There is weather and hunger and obligation

There are memories and thieves and also folks that are pulling for us

Then ambient awareness, orientation, activity

That which, that that, when if there

You can line up the stars just right

You’ve been here before; you’ll be here again

You’re the one who will make it matter

Oh / Your / Weep

Two to one

Tow onward

Dais honored

Next

Divided and cloth-draped

We approached dawn

Not violence, not violent, not new

Unknown

Next

Shoulder implied

You walk sullen? 

Sodden? 

Sounded?

You walk

Next

The realm of the realm

We gotta go back to the beginning

We should

We must

Next

Just a little bit

Just a little bit more

Hundreds of years

One One Two Nothing

It began with rain

A search for comfort

Untold extremes

Family resemblances

A row of cliffs stretch west

Westward layers  of ocean

Land rights

Lanky is lankier still

There’s room for everyone

Time Is Different

Time is different for the massless and you don’t want any of that

And how there are only cages for those who know it

Trees in forests

Days in phantom months

Lives in lost colonies

We headed north or west and brought our loaded prefixes

Not meals

Not means

But yes yes something old

Another old thing and another building the first fence in the English countryside

Essentially

Here a waterslide long after the Days of Waterslides

Here a bottomless pit with nary a heroine in sight

Here a scenic view

And here

And here

And here

Everything has a way of becoming everything

Look at the sky

It’ll tell your story

One Morning One Day

One morning Baltimore

Notes on as if

Sentences are for commuting

And load times the way to work

How far how far

That we question apple cores

Or squander science

Or silence Spring

How far how relative so far and nowhere

And then one evening, Amherst

We’re Up

Like limits

Precision difficulties

Occlusion vs. inclusion

The thing sheet of gold used to discover atoms or something like that

Informed consent

Fellowship in all surveys

Your favorite amphibian’s favorite meal

Cycle after cycle a new way to see

And Again

Boys on dirt-bikes

Men on dirt-bikes

Dirt on dirt-bikes less so

A nosebleed will happen

Or water with trace elements

You’ll lose a day here or there

Distance or time and bridges

Huge distances, inhuman time, more bridges

Online classes in American Sign Language

First, second, third

Is someone else’s eighty-four

Walk it all the way back

Pull the shades and get ready to go again

And the Rain

The kind of sadness that’s rounded with hope

Decomp is a process

There are recipes for everything online

This too is human nature

And then tomatoes or leftovers or a little nap

Another map, a good night’s sleep, a slow-to-rouse morning

Hard stops, healthy eating, forgiveness

More healthy eating, more forgiveness

Favor your left, quick wits, subsets

They’ll wrap you up in false binaries

They’ll wrap you up in artificial scarcity

They’ll wrap you up in constant crisis

This too is human nature

And it didn’t rain

How It’s Wanted

You can look up what time the sun’s gonna rise on any particular day in any particular place

At one point, this country split in two and each side fought and killed the other

Folks of different backgrounds and situations continue to fight for right daily in this country

You might look at a pin or the time on an alarm clock and wonder What is this worth? or What more could I do?

You might remember that everything leads to something else

And you might get lost in the math or tackle it head-on with teamwork that’d make earlier generations blush

Because there is snow falling, and woodlands burning, and COVID spreading, and discoveries being discovered, and it isn’t even lunchtime here yet

If you keep going, you may keep hoping for a conclusion

Ocean-going Alive

Aloft, seasoned, self-less

Centered over something

Question the horizon

Forgive every echo

Sometimes sugar’s hard to come by

First deep

Save the sunlight vs. savor whole numbers

Deeper still

Trade on trade after closing time 

Fourteen Dissolves

Have it at it

Hold on right

Look look it over

Lloyd, Levan, leftover

Ranks and remember

All the names

Way down

Now over and up

Now mirrored

Felted, flecked, forgotten

I Forgot What Day It Was

When I almost forgot what day it was

One waterway or another, we’ll get there

Always the sun, the tail end of things, forgiveness

Start again with fewer points

Start again, look up

Start again

Beef stock, live stock, all the rates and all the exchanges 

What will we do with you?

What will we do?

Check Check Check

There there is a place

A child so small you can hold it in your cupped hands

Everything wounded you’ve ever know

That which, that which will, that which has

Sometimes it’s just a cabin in the woods but what fun is there in that

Or a dog in the distance

Or a day in the distance

Or sunshine

What corner they ask as you wipe the date from your eye

Organic vegetables, keyless entry, climate justice

A pile of things begets another

Granted Saves

Right righted rentals ready-set go

Left lent poorly and your life to live

Center lowered clear skies found again

Center lifted with the better hat for a better day

Cycle cycle cycle till the day is done

Four Hundred

 Foot soldiers in the theater

Divide again and again

Like walls like air like there you have it

Feathers forever

Favoring your step

Disguise the gaps and call it a day

The lost

The leftover

The leveraged and the lent 

Wake up to it every day

Everyone breathing

What We’ve Seen Is Water

Clarity vs. heat, you know?

Clarity in the face of heat? Maybe that’s better

Shimmy a ladder just so

Cut a window here, make a sandwich there

Count days by hand, and the sun in the sky

“Where’s the safest door” is no way to live

And I’m not here to define everything

We can trace hang gliding back to Chinese kites

We can take the matter at-hand and turn it over and over

We can till soil, separate recyclables, and practice breathing

Wells vs. sinks vs. events vs. speed limits

None of it’s anyway to live

There are squirrels in the canopy, foxes in the hill

And we live on, anyway

The World Is Huge, and That’s Just One Part

Kevin shared Prince’s demo for “I Feel for You” on Twitter earlier this week and it blew my mind a little bit.

And I thought about Athena springing forth from Zeus’s forehead fully formed, too.

A thought that tunnels back to my twenties and a painting studio I rented in the basement of a building off the Downtown Mall. It wasn’t meant to be a painting studio, it didn’t have the ventilation for that. Previous tenets did sculpture mostly? Or weren’t using turpentine?

Gravity in all its forms in your head.

Layers, also in your head.

Folks passing, in the world and memories of folks who have passed.

Spending time with them but not getting lost.

Feelings weren’t meant to be distinct, I think. We just cut away at them because we think it helps us share them, maybe.

I’m happy and sad for you and about you Chris. Todd. Catherine. Dad.

Most y’all don’t know the absolute joy of being a morning person.

Everything is quieter.

Everything can happen.

I Recorded the Orioles Opening Day Game Earlier Today and I Made Us Some Nice Drinks

Dinner is making its way to me, thanks Margaret

We’re lucky to be alive

We’re lucky that hydrogen and oxygen get along just so to make all these dreams possible

We’re lucky and luckier and I think we-all are gonna get our arms around this pandemic

The we-all that have made it this far

So much behind us made so much possible

Live like you believe or live like you believe it

Take your pick

Love and love and love and love

It’s Been

A pant started somewhere

Catalog spaces vs. a catalog of spaces

To make, to construct like a wheel

To remember playing in the snow

To catch as in fish or even a packet boat

To echo for a cliff

Or resonate for a wine glass filled with water

Middle C and lower and lower and still lower

Like Cs all the way down?

Mayhaps and maybe and May flowers sooner still

Catalog all the trails vs. honor all our hardship

I still dream of this land being our land

I still dream of larger and larger us-es and many us-es

Dynamic us-es, flexible us-es, shifting us-es shifting for reasons better than making new thems 

But it’s so much easier to write and read thems than us-es and this is just something we have to climb up and climb over until we are there

Trudge through?

We’re talking about practice

I Approach This Map

I approach this map like a sunset

I approach this map like a moon-pushed ocean

I approach this map like an outline, like shed skin, like rust

I approach this map like a newly formed memory

I approach this map shuffling sideways

I approach this map in bad faith, with bad form, on poor footing

I approach this map like deep breathing

I approach this map with my eyes shaded

I approach this map with best intentions

I approach this map having lost hope and pushed on

I approach this map

I approach this map

Why Is Wired

What eats what eats questions?

What is time this deep into “Winter”?

All the false things lined end to end

The predictability of sunsets and so many beautiful things

Take an egg and then laughter

Submarine crews then laughter

Clerical duties, drawing supplies, a collection of bobby pins

We’ve got descriptions if you want descriptions

Another sunset

Another lesser than

Back to laughter and again and again

And again and again and again

More Words

Swamps and dales

Seventh heavens

And setbacks

Curb appeal for days

And means to tell you

Tether me sick

Nature here and icefall

Crestfallen criminals

Lunar eclipse

Ocean upon ocean of solitude

Drowned dreams

Every guess’s second

Missed spells woven solid

Self upon self upon self

We’ll file it again 

Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag Is a Song that Might Mean Something to You

 I mean, who decided the north was the top half of the globe?

Massive agreements vs. truth, but who agreed and when and did you?

But also truth vs. reality and maybe that’s a story about convenience and/or everyone has to get by somehow?

Yeah yeah but far from everyone is getting by.

I can’t afford Where to begin? today, and that’s ok.

And maybe you can’t either, today, and maybe that’s ok, too.

A picture can help or pets.

A nice snowfall when you don’t have anywhere to be.

Deer tracks.

Fogged glass gifting every light you see with a burning corona even if you only have it for a quick second ahead of your world-weary-and-got-shit-to-do brain edits it back to a regular old street lamp or porchlight or whatever.

The world can tilt wildly vs. what world?

That the day is a string of decisions and you’ll decide which to make.

Altogether Different (from Now On)

When I step past half past five

When I step back soundly

When I savor something you wanted

When I stumble

Five fellows forgotten

Or golden days our golden ways

What you think of when

What that what which what holdings

Your forever bag

Your forgotten shadow

Your feelings felt to your toes

The snow again

There Is So Much

Location:Glen Allen Dr,Baltimore,United States

Wit What

Seated or attentive
The way days pass

That this life is an accumulation like most everything

This world built, this world temporary like so many spaces

What is large? What is small? What is a new year?

Change chance channel chafe

Then then the greatest thing

Location:Glen Allen Dr,Baltimore,United States