POETIC PRACTICE

Draw a perfect circle 

freehand. 

Notice 

what has happened. 

POEM ABOUT LIFE

Like with your 

refrigerator,

only once it spoils 

do you notice 

what was in there. 

ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY NEAR-DEATH

I flinch from the memory

like a hand from a hot stove—

one big mad twisted engine, 

no headlights left—

as if to prove, 

via hand-eye coordination, 

that hunting was a sport,

and I was just a second-

stringer, excised from the team. 

Even in the silence 

of midnight blindness, 

I cannot bear to listen 

to the black box message

and so must cut it short. 

Biography isn't destiny—I know 

that's what it'd say. But history 

isn't nothing, either—at least 

not anymore. 

OUTSIDE CHANCE

You first wake 

to a morning both 

mild and gray.

it might not rain on your side 

of the burg, they say. Or

 
it might pour the cats

and dogs of your life

before the end of the day. 

Either way—better to grab 

the slicker of your wonder

before you sashay 

out the door on your way 

to life’s work.

It’s so uncomfortable 

to wear (stiflingly hot 

and a garish lemon yellow).

And you're probably not even

going to need it, 

you declare—but 

then again: you may.

ENLISTED MAN

You don't have to be 

an egomaniac 

or sign a lifetime contract.

What starts you on the warpath 

to writing every day 

is that any poem might 

be your best;

but what keeps you there

as a hapless conscript 

long after the romance has left

is this Howitzer 

aimed from the end 

of a halftrack: every poem 

might be your last. 

TWILIGHT OF THE IDLE

Fingers of rosy 

cirrus clouds 

relinquish the day-old sun 

to the heavenly gravity 

of what's to come 

in the world beyond the horizon. 

The sight used 

to please you; 

tonight, it only demonstrates 

how time 

used to accrue in your youth—

now, it just eliminates. 

L'ESPRIT DE L'ESCALIER

Oddly, 

there's exactly 

one ecstatic condition 

in which I become 

my best and truest self—

one state 

in which I become 

wise and disarmed enough 

to stop being charming 

and tell it like I think it is—

one beautiful circumstance, 

charged with significance 

and the metaphoric dynamism

of urgency 

coupled with its lack—and it's, 

you guessed it: 

only when I'm 

deplorably alone again 

after the goddamn fact.