poet, interviewer, musician, traveler
Weather Forecasting In Late-Stage Capitalism
Labi Siffre morphs into Marshall Mathers.
The kitten keeps watch from a high perch.
They say a storm is coming tonight.
We’re deciding if one egg will be enough.
My tea is already lukewarm.
Now Labi is singing a ballad.
He’s queer, so I feel like he’s singing to me.
Perhaps in the morning there’ll be snow.
A soft blanket on a hard world.
/ / /
5 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
Four Rooms
Each month I pay nearly half my income
to a rich person I’ve never met
for the privilege of four rooms:
a living room/kitchen, a bathroom,
a laundry closet, a bedroom.
We evolved in a garden.
We built a concrete box.
/ / /
4 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
Waiting To Write At Night
means pulling lines from a foggy brain
via weary eyeballs, tired fingers,
down to an indistinct page.
means scrawled handwriting,
a puzzle to figure out
in the indifferent light of morning.
means trading the hopeful muse of day
for the crafty, destructive
muse of darkness.
And now: to sleep,
hoping in the morning to connect
with a version of the writer
already lost to time.
/ / /
3 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
Devices
You’d probably never see me again,
left to my own devices.
Those being books and records
and movies and TV shows.
I’d brick up the door,
close the blinds,
put on my comfy pants,
snuggle the cat,
wait for the storm.
In the world as it is,
there are too many other people
to learn how to mix mortar.
In the world as it is,
I am a shield, a sword, a megaphone.
Those are my devices.
I am duty bound to use them.
/ / /
2 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
The Next Pretty Note
Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding”
plays on a loop in my head,
even as Stephanie and I
pause
to diagnose what the kitten
might have just knocked over
out in the living room.
Chet Baker, late in life,
approaching the fall
that would kill him,
plays the most incredible solo
on “Shipbuilding” – including,
at one point, a delay pedal
that makes him sound
like a choir of trumpets.
I used to know a guy
who played with Chet:
“Everybody always wondered
what he was thinking to play
as beautifully as he did.
He once told me: ‘I’m just looking
for the next pretty note.’”
Meanwhile, in the living room,
Something else falls.
/ / /
1 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
Indigestion
At the tail end of a stomach ache
that has lasted for hours,
like they did when I was young
and in pain more often than not.
Doctor after doctor told me
nothing was physically wrong
because nothing ever showed up
in their tests and pictures and probes.
Nobody could explain why I’d be
doubled over in pain almost daily.
As it turned out, they were looking
at the wrong part of my body.
The problem was in the attic
rather than the basement.
Abuse leaves its marks, inside and out.
The blow to the face, to the heart —
they both follow a path to the gut.
Anyway tonight was just too much dairy.
The family I’ve chosen is better
than the one I was given.
/ / /
15 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
Belfast Kid
Role-playing games in the basement
next to the log cabin’s barrel stove,
the one that seemed like a good idea
but would make the house a sauna,
so it sat there unused and cold.
What must Stephen have thought,
thousands of miles from his colonized home,
in a house in a town named after the colonized?
Maybe that never crossed his mind.
We sure never thought about it.
All we could offer was a couple month’s respite
from the sound of bombs exploding
and the fear of the sound of bombs exploding.
A day trip to Niagara Falls.
A weekend in D.C.
Then it was pack your bags and go home.
I don’t think we ever heard from him again.
Eventually the violence ended, in its way.
Eventually it ended.
/ / /
8 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
across eight hundred years
a master speaks
cold seeps in at my door
/ / /
7 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
a “real” cat
a plastic spring
outside the moon is quiet
/ / /
5 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
I added new poems to the site today, but I set their publishing dates to their dates of composition. So to make them easier to find, here’s a list:
POEM: In The Hall Of The Mountain King
Leave a Commentshowed the kitten
a painting of a spring flower
he tried to eat the frame
/ / /
4 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
In The Hall Of The Mountain King
In the hall of the mountain king
the radio plays Bing Crosby on a loop.
The king sits in his La-Z-Boy,
breathing in slowly so he can watch
the bowl of his pipe rekindle.
He buys his tobacco down in the valley
from a kid too young to understand
the wooden statue of the Indian outside the store.
The king goes to get it himself;
you can’t trust a lackey with your special blend.
As the smoke curls toward the distant ceiling,
the king knows all is right in his kingdom.
Bing sings: “Where the blue of the night /
meets the gold of the day / someone waits for me.”
/ / /
3 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
In The Shadow Of Cold Mountain
The cat chases a spring
across the carpet.
What have I done
that’s any better?
/ / /
2 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
View From The Base Of A Pine Tree
Walking through a pine forest,
I came across a lone tree
in a clearing,
bathed in morning sun.
I sat at its base,
thinking of the Buddha,
who turned stillness
into a universe.
At the center of my body
there is a lens
through which my heart sees.
I put it away in the winter,
not needing it anymore.
Now the winter comes again.
Perhaps I was premature.
/ / /
1 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
Interpretation
The removal of “I” from “love you.”
The replacement of “you” with “ya.”
The careful distancing of ourselves
from our emotions, as if we were
observing things being felt by others.
As if we had dropped a coin in the slot
so we could watch from behind
the mirrored glass as two perfect
representations of (I and you)
acted out the truths we dare not say.
To use language as a disguise.
To wear the familiar as a mask.
To sit in the confessional,
no priest but simply the other,
the one to whom it is possible
to speak only in code, in tongues,
in glancing blows, in part.
/ / /
30 November 2024
Charlottesville VA