The Many Decline

On deck or overboard it gets dark early this time of year

Develop, develop, develop, develop

The wasteful won’t inherit jack in this gothic romance

And a silhouette and a promontory and weather.

Retire to the fire and think about a better future

Like train travel and a green economy

We can share.

Forever-ever

Like so many things before me, take this bread, December 12th

Forgetting today, forging next generation alloys, and nothing ever done but with allies 

Like various symmetries or a wheel spinning or all the piece lining up on the metaphorical board

Like cake, like cookies, like the last days of your last years

Two houses jammed together to make a bigger house

As porch is to galley is to deck is to roof deck

So back is to back is to back is to back

Like a truck or a train, but so very far in the future

But I’ve gotta say, I know your friends. I’ve met your friends. I’m cool with your friends.

I still have so many pets and so many snacks and a roof over my head.

I don’t know where we’re taking this thing we call life.

Let’s keep breathing though, and let’s keep our eyes to the sky.

In Baltimore there’s a radio picking up a faint signal

Signaling which why is gonna matter most this year.

Just Keep On Digging

It Comes Before the Question

Is there really a finest goldsmith in any age?

We find ourselves smack in the middle of the Season of the Word of the Year and so many of its brethren,

And while we’re ok on split wood for a while, there’s not enough to last the Winter.

Tomorrow I’ll be back to work.

Meanwhile you’re focused on stretches and taking care of things.

You’re love of architecture is infectious,

And you have so many things to share.

These are the last moments we’ll spend together and we both know it.

Once upon a time all gulfs were uncrossable.

Nobody had a taste for looking back and the plants just kept on growing.

Someone invented the word ford and someone else made great boats and some other someone still was good at bridges.

This is the time that just keeps going.

When I hold up my hand, how many fingers do you see?

Write it down and remember me.

Oh What (Interrupted Sonnet)

Early December in the midst of borrowed conventions

Some would say focus, others would motion to an equidistance 

Forget everything you

Don’t Go

Peel it away

I mean the sounds in the night

Prancing need not be ladylike

Heavy fanning and cold days coming

This is what I remember

Racing across a casino floor with every care in every world

You count what you’ll count and I’ll stand by

This whistle, that siren, that four on that floor

Where’ve you gone? Where’re you now?

How will we get our mouth around it? When will we put all the good back in?

This is about dirt and dust

This is about trajectories and everything after

This is a myth and this is the telling of a myth

When becoming is done, this is what we are

Potatoes Are Back

It’s a simple spell were you never second in line,

And so much of wrestling is retraining your reflexes.

Habit is to habitat as Barbara is to barbiturates?

That ain’t right.

How’s’about forgetful Sundays and sunbeams shuttled with care?

Fending off fright with complicated confection?

Drumming up support for collective action to counter a century of bad ideas?

Better us than them, as we shuffle into the shadows.

But that which was and will be will be that and that and that again.

But the sky is above you and beside you and below you because the world is round and we’ve known that a long time.

But we’re all tied up with exceptions upon exceptions.

But most tables and chairs, but fingers, but the seasons, but surely more.

There were so many and we make it fewer so you can deal with it.

Will there be ease? Will there be whipping?

All the Threes

Sometimes, sometimes.

I’m still not processing the still loss.

The breakdown of things broken down,

Forgetfulness in the face of horrible times,

Leave behind, leave behind, leave behind.

There’s the one that won’t go on.

There’s the interruption of what we should’ve done.

There’s hindsight owning your ass.

We spot it up again and again.

Sometimes it’s a drain and other times there’s a garbage disposal.

Here’s what you were aiming for, only flayed, thank you very much.

Drift is real.

A hole in the ground is real.

What I mean to say, is I miss you.

What Have

Frequent floating session IPAs seize opportunity

So many how many like ten but no like six more like

Why isn’t there a White Sox Nation?

After the whole spectrum is liberated and every last field stormed and you get a season and you get a season and you get a season

We all look under our seats

Reflexes are a stemmed thing and we’ve remained trainable

All the pandas were sent back to China

And there’s a card with your name on it.

Amazing

Even while so many other things are a choice and so many choices are being made right now

Tear is a choice

Lead is a choice

Cleave is a different choice

Which brings us back unexpectedly to seize and we’re down for travel

Put it up, put it up

Kit, kindling, now you’ll have them, kinder, kinder, kinder still.

Different vs. Differently

There’s fruit and there’s conflict

Their mess doesn’t need to be your mess

They’re different, they’re better, they’re off to market

Initially, togetherness, publicly before communally

This circle made of dots, that circle made of string

And then the Great Uncertainty and the even greater dissolution

But what was lost when we smashed so many myths?

The sun rose and we continued with a little less but hearts full of hope

We’d had clean water before and we had clean water now

We were all here, well, almost all

And we found the New Beginning just as quiet as heat loss

We found lightness to be frightening and some wanted to run and some ran

But we found just how easy it was for everything to get heavy again and quickly

A better heavy this time, but surely not the last

Sanders Again

It’s jobs all the way down I mean it’s a job the sanding

Ranks come in all sizes and learning how to spell “Wednesday” does a thing to your brain that’s an important thing

We spin and we make do, yes. We catalog joys and harms. We see things repeatedly sometimes to the point of unseeing them.

I mean, governments come and go, as do their styles, their pressures, their presence.

What you pry from what, paying attention to both, the start of something.

Another year and gravity’s still with us, it’s ok, you can exhale.

Another year, another year, another.

What they say about siblings. What they say about heat death. What they say about well water.

When you get a feel for it you’ll risk forgetting something important the rest of your life.

I don’t make the rules.

Somewhat Fixed Broken Sonnet

What spill(s)

Whether which willing 

Vapor, vanishing(s); and ever more villainy

There was a Duchess made King

There was a Shepherd made kinder

Smoke from fire(s) as fire(s) from kindling

This is how we proceeded

How we survived the change(s)

Cities still stand and men still fall

We can talk the while

We can remember the way

Reject the closing door’s closing

We are here, we are here, we are here, we are here

Jay-Z once said, “We might half get kicked out the buildin,” or something like that.

This Is Quiet

Punch In

Punch it in it up up above your weight punching punching down

Third year options and asks and wants and needs

Like hopes needs dreams

Like hype and  hype man man oh man

This would be summer

Bass from beds and trunks

Sunscreen but usually not

Strings braided ‘round wrists

Rather drinks rather french fries rather much

The sun keeps going down later and later

Trying

Try try try try try

Teee-rye try try tee try try

Trying I’m try try when tee

Tetherest whether weather weatherest try

Try no try not try try try

Day try try tee tee tee tee tee tee

Teeeeeeeeee try tee try trying I’m

Wednesday try try almost what which try

Terrible trying

Terraform trying

Triad trying, a second language trying, second skin trying, second after minute after hour trying

Epochs trying as myriad moments try

They try they try they try

Every size, everywhere trying

Together with Celery

Yeah, darkness would be sexier

Dress it all up in black

The end of the world would at least offer some tension

You think

And then you’re living through this

Climate disasters daily paired with

Mass shootings daily paired with

Lurching toward government and societal and cultural shitshow upon shitshow

And I’m just skimming off the top of the roiling stew of injustice, unfairness, absent kindness, bureaucratic inhumanity and human inhumanity

With all these convections cycling violence, closing minds, and bring the horizon way way way down low.

I hang onto stories of little kindnesses and little triumphs but at some point I feel the ratios all around me — but maybe I’m not gonna pretend I should trust one of my brains anymore than the other.

Today I feel like a big aging chassis with a little wounded woodland creature piloting it all from the inside.

That’s a little trick I play on myself to pretend this me-scaled me is somehow able to protect anything.

I do like the rain.

I do like turning leftovers from the week into a pile of breakfast tacos.

I do like coffee.

The thing about the path to enlightenment is that it sucks.

That’s another trick I play on myself. Damn it.

Thinking about the universe is some comfort.

Thinking about life after all of us. That’s some comfort. And probably just one of those ways I let myself approach life after me.

Dinosaurs became birds. People will become something strange and interesting, maybe something to do with all these robots.

Don’t forget you have a drum machine at the center of your being and that that drum machine has a soul.

Don’t forget we all depend on each other all the time, even when it doesn’t seem like it.

Don’t forget to feed your pets and be kind.

You Can Dance 2

Roman vs. Arabic all the way down, but it’s the 80s and we’re so young

The space between numbers and/or ranges that are inclusive

I don’t like to think about the limits of intuition

I like to think about spiders

I like to think about the relationship of mass and time

I don’t like to think of the plight of light

I like to think like spreadsheets

I like to think about relationships of people and numbers and things and sounds

I don’t like to think about everything’s local, but everything is still local

What is red? What is green? What is indigo and how did it gets its place at the table?

I know and you know.

Open

Sometimes a song’s just gonna let you down

And the sun will keep doing its thing

Some guy walking along thinking

Seriously no lightning and crashes?

And other times untold repetitions will pave a path from nothing to wow

Folding napkins, snapping your fingers, eating breakfast

Because life’s gonna do what life’s gonna do

So everything else moves outside.

But one foot in front of the other takes me forward

And/or it can take me up

And it can still be tromping and trampling

These are the times you just have to believe in something anything.

That’s how breathing air happened, too.

That’s how we’re going to get to the end.

Where to Begin vs. Where We Begin

If you have this guy and he’s brandishing a folded metal chair

If you have time despite the World’s worst intentions

If the sun is rising like it always does, but this time you catch it sitting on top of the neighbor’s fenceline 

If you’re still expecting that phonecall and still hoping it never comes

Or you have the votes but lost the will

Reproach, resonance, recapitulation, reticular

That is that is that is that which

Walking the side of the road on the side of a forgotten town and wondering

Then every force will be met with its opposite

Then the wheel will do its best to keep turning

Then heat will arise and cast down all suffering

Then time will be on your side, but also everyone else’s

Zero has been a number since it was created and not one day longer

Like white horses or arrows bent on targets and a couple other things I won’t have time to share

What Means

In this story

You know where you are going

Or how fast your are getting there

But never both

Because these are greedy times

And we weren’t built to make it

Tell me about those days

Tell me about all the colors and the sunsets

The flashbulbs, the lazy rivers 

Tell me about coats on layaway

And the price of cigarettes at the PX

Where I’m from

By what means

And how I’m letting us all down again 

What You Do

 I mean I when I say these things

Granted we are in this together

A collection of useless thoughts

Another distraction

This neurosis, that news event

We carry on

What Words

 What words

Travel you

Travel time

What distances

Curve

Slope and rise 

Selvedge spearate

Tear whatever

Lead whatever

Read whatever

Picture points picture on

The second leftover

Signals the apocalypse

The candy-coated afterthought of our barreling age

The one you wanted and what they wanted

And just enough fuzzy logic for everyone to win this time

Listen for the laugh track

Every Scientist Somewhere