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