the endless rolling
of plastic
neighbor’s weed wacker
/ / /
10 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
Category: Charlottesville
How Can We Sleep
I’m sitting in a camp chair
on the concrete rectangle
I call my front porch.
The catbirds are squabbling
in the Adam’s needle;
the neighbor kids are shooting hoops.
I’m trying to read a book of poems
about the environmental crisis,
but my eyes are stinging from smoke
that has traveled all the way to Virginia
from wildifes in Quebec and Nova Scotia,
nearly a thousand miles away.
“The earth is not dying, it is being killed,
and those who are killing it
have names and addresses.”
Now one of the neighbor kids is crying.
Maybe she knows
our days are numbered.
/ / /
6 June 2023
Charlottesville VA
Meeting
How odd to sit silently
contemplating the infinite
or making a grocery list
or wondering how
everything that
happened happened,
waiting for the voice
of an unlikely god
or the soft clearing
of an elderly throat,
until a man across the room
asks if there are any
announcements, then says
it’s time to rise.
/ / /
9 April 2023
Charlottesville VA
last night in the van
where it’s not my choice
(podcasts in the dark)
/ / /
2 April 2023
Charlottesville VA
I Think I’ve Given Up On Scally Caps For Now
As I sit in the grocery store cafe listening
to Berlioz and glancing up at the ballgame,
I look at the guy across from me and realize
I’m not ready to go gentle into that good cap.
I recently buzzed the sides of my head but
left the top long, trying before the odometer
ticks over to the half-century mark to find
someone a little more interesting to look like.
Now the guy in the scally cap has taken out
a notepad and a pen and he’s writing and
come ON dude I’m trying to differentiate us
and you’re really not helping. Some people.
Anyway I’m a few days away from the end
of van life, although given my general aptitude
for long-term strategy and the fact that
my retirement plan is death, I bet I’ll be back
on the road one of these days, trying again
to outrun the inevitable and probably failing.
For now though I’ve got a one-year lease and
a two-week-old job and at some point I’ll buy
a bed and once I do I’ll finally be a real boy.
Seems like all the guys in this cafe know
one another except me and maybe the scally guy.
They’re eating chips and pizza slices and
drinking diet sodas and talking about their kids
or thumbing through bibles and the ballgame
is tied in the bottom of the seventh
and after this I’ll probably scroll through TikTok
because I’m so. damn. young. y’all.
/ / /
30 March 2023
Charlottesville VA