Monday, August 18, 2025

DOMINION

A long time ago, 
we used to be 
suspicious, 

but now 
we stand in awe 
of abject predictability; 

instead of living 
in ecstatic terror 
of god's everlasting arms, 

we now worship 
their compliance 
and fantastic portability.

In fact, if he 
were still 
alive today, 

he'd mostly 
be shocked
and hurt by the way 

in which knowledge is 
crushed-up to pave 
the roads to power—

by the way our GPS 
now briskly 
redirects us 

around temple wrecks 
and flaming 
sword blockages, 

all while keeping us
abreast of our most 
current ETA—

but mostly, 
by the way in which
a single earthly moment 

is no longer suffered 
by its bearer 
or endured—

or even simply 
received 
or sustained—

but rather, is abjectly 
captured, 
then explained. 


Sunday, August 17, 2025

SO THERE

Even the almighty 
river doesn't know 

how it is I manage 
to piss standing up. 


Saturday, August 16, 2025

LATE AUGUST

A parched wind 
limps by—
stiff and cautious, 

yet unsteady 
as our exhaled breaths.
How did we

get here? None 
can guess;
the weeks have passed 

so fast—still
each day feels
like twenty years. 

Friday, August 15, 2025

NEVERTHELESS

Every day, once a day,
I get the urge 
to do the impossible:

to save what must leave,
to give weight to words

(though I make no claim
to understand
what they name)

and a hope-like shape
to tumultuous thought.

Is it reckless? Is it vein?
I ought to say 
I don’t care.

But if you think about it,
the very fact
that this poem appears here,

lying patient as a snare
in the middle of this page
(or this screen, or wherever)—

and eager to catch
that which must pass away

already betrays
that I do anyway.
deny it as I might,

the urge to write—
the compulsion
to tell someone

has somehow caught me
unaware that I’m sure

there's no such thing
as an art
of despair.


Thursday, August 14, 2025

MORTALITY

A cheap store-bought wind chime
(though no less
hungry for the breeze);

its many small lapping tongues
of bell bronze
or bell brass—

or hell, I 
don’t know, of prefab
fiberglass, perhaps—

making me forget 
as I pass underneath
what silence sounds like—

then remember (however 
temporarily)
what it means.

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

DAWN SKETCH

Out from the shadows,
a new morning is growing

in the window—like the shores 
of another, alien world 

unfurled for the first time 
at the calm of low tide,

salved by the balm
of a prophecy unheralded

and washed in colors
never seen before by anyone—

except perhaps by the first eye
to get squeezed shut 

at night beneath some 
primordial lid.

Does a word exist for this 
new twist on existence?

The other side of night
is daylight, sure, 

but the other side
of darkness in its essence—

would that be called clearness?
Invisibility? In any case,

it must be a color 
worth savoring, because it's 

a color we haven’t 
got a name for.

Tuesday, August 12, 2025

THE ENCOUNTER

I swear, when I wrote this
I didn't know
who would be reading—

but then again, 
I must have known roughly
how it would go, since

I could picture you singing
the tune in your head—
line after line, 

never rushing, never stumbling,
not stopping until 
you got to the end—

as if you knew which word 
should come next 
by heart,

because you and I 
were the same.
Not entirely, of course,
 
but close enough
to look the part.
It was as if our two souls 

shared a shadow; as if, 
for half a minute there,
we were so busy

that we wouldn't have
remembered, if asked, 
what our names were.

And I realized
when I'd finished that
that was what I wanted;

the words didn't matter.
It wasn’t quite art—but it was 
a good start.