Daily Reader

Closing hours closed and late nights are yours.

Early mornings, yours and blued light through blinds.

Hoof-torn sideyards not sidearms.

Not please. Not excuse me.

Daily needs vs. wants hopes dreams.

As in what you need, before.

Like backseat, windows down.

Like the forest pressing in on the sound

And it’s all passing by.

Here’s where the air tastes like morning light well into the night.

The crickets you think you hear and more.

False starts, no matter.

False floors.

Like we’re waiting till nobody comes.

If You Can Say What

All the best unfinished meals in this life

Sleeping later, or at least not getting up so soon

That cats walking along fences used to be a thing

The phases of the moon tattooed just anywhere

A decade or more with this favorite tshirt, this belt with koi fish, this Helly

And before that other favorite t-shirts, the once-was power belt, the baseball hat I lost in Philly

How you feel about days that are both bright and cold

Carriage houses until I’ve lost count

Too many hours on the road from here to there

To More or Less

Piles, stacks, closets, curries

But typefaces

But suffering

But shadows?

Envy but envy

Selves and selves but selves as well

Books on a shelf like books on my mind

Yes endings, but ending

Folding paper in half and again and counting

Distances, too, like energy and its opposite

But too much of every good thing

But not enough

But so many sundries, a dream

Look to this tree: soil ans water, air and sunlight, sure

But so much more we don’t see

Everything a network, this life

What Can a Week

The days around us

The water, ounce after ounce

The temperature and the memories of the same temperature at different times and the memory of different temperatures at different times, too

How arbitrary hours are and paragraphs

Shifts in perspective from one moment to the next — our eyes can be extraordinary when they want to be

And things being born and other things dying

Clouds of midges cuz here comes Spring

This is the kind of shit I type into notes in the middle of the night because I’m well on my way to becoming a sappy old man.

It’s not if you fall, because you will.

It’s how you get back up, because you will.

Horizontal Hold, Broken

HMS HHMS HMSS I love you

Several again screwed in my brain somewhere somewhere screwed

But rep as reps as represents

That fancy fancy snake will shimmer in the sunlight soon as the sun’s a thing

And everything shakes its slumber someday

Sidewinding, side-stepping, side-on-side, shibboleth

Until it’s all shaking you, of course; it’s what’s obvious because it’s what’s real before and after

Everything again, every word again, again again, again

Here comes again, we hope again, again again, again

My eyes aren’t burning, your eyes are burning, again again, again

So let there be motes and let there be pinwheels

Be they starlings or staring, be they right on red or unsignaled U-turns

Shock shock intervals shock shock some more

A maze, a mezze, a middlespace, in retrospect a war

The Play We Blaze (Broken Sonnet)

The place

As in the sound and the color of it

The sight of it all vs. the names of things

The precious plenty battle and the Sun somethings on

Several stations cut from several cloths

So many pieces all around as many ways

As many sons and as many daughters

As days and nights

As seasons

As regrets

The nights are getting shorter but we still need so much more rest

We wrap the body

We name the night

We carry all of our things with us, every one sparkling

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.