No Thanks, Professor
And in the end
they crowned a king
because his friend
destroyed a ring.
But we need neither
king nor steeple:
return all power
to the people.
/ / /
9 February 2025
Charlottesville VA
Jason Crane Posts
A Hole Where A Heart Had Been
It can’t be stitched, patched or mended.
Time will not heal it.
You can see the sky through it.
And if you put your ear to it,
you can hear an ocean of tears.
/ / /
8 February 2025
Charlottesville VA
The title is a line from We Travel Econo,
a documentary about the band
The Minutemen.
Ambience
Music For Airports
fills the room like
incense smoke
as we take our pills,
perform our ablutions,
try to coax the cat into bed,
commiserate about the world,
then let sleep take us.
/ / /
7 February 2025
Charlottesville VA
All My Dreams Are Of Escape, Part 2
Every day I fight the urge
to get in my car and drive
until I max out my credit cards
buying gas and roadside food,
leaving behind me a question
shaped like emptiness.
/ / /
6 February 2025
Charlottesville VA
All My Dreams Are Of Escape
All I’ve ever wanted to be
is half of an elderly couple
at the grocery store,
puttering from aisle to aisle,
oohing over the sales,
tsking at the price of bread,
then making small talk with the cashier
while a high school kid packs the bags,
never imagining they’ll ever be old.
/ / /
5 February 2025
Charlottesville VA
I Am A 12-Foot Cheese!
Sovereign of fromage.
Monarch of Käse.
Regent of queso.
Fetch me a baguette!
Banish the lactose intolerant!
It is my destiny to rule!
/ / /
4 February 2025
Charlottesville VA
You’ve Got To Accentuate The Positive
Think of all the Amazon boxes
we can use to make fires
during the water wars.
/ / /
3 February 2025
Charlottesville VA
Listening To Live Rust On Sunday Morning
Voice like an angel
slowly drowning
in the shallow end.
Bright 12-string
shimmering
above the sing-along.
Canadians
are the best at being
Americans.
/ / /
2 February 2025
Charlottesville VA
Quaerens Domum
An inherently rootless person,
always in search of home.
That’s the narrative I’ve written
for much of the past fifty years.
I cling to the imagined home
of my childhood in Lenox,
a few years weighted all
out of proportion to their duration.
Upstate NY, the place
where I spent half my life?
Cast into the memory hole,
entombed, until recently, in disdain.
*
I pull open the heavy oak doors,
take a tentative step up the carpeted aisle.
I sink into a pew, feeling my shoulders lower.
In front of me, candles flicker.
/ / /
1 February 2025
Charlottesville VA
Capitalism Is The Greatest System
For Human Organization Ever Developed
And It Will Last Forever, Part 1
In this country
a kid can rack up
school lunch debt.
/ / /
31 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
Today’s poem is an erasure poem based on a paragraph from They Will Beat The Memory Out Of Us by Peter Gelderloos, available on Pluto Press. I’ve included the original text under the poem, with the words I cut out in grey.
Leave a CommentA Modern Hamlet
To build or to run.
That is the question.
Whether it’s better to stay,
to sink roots, to fight,
or to give in to the urge to escape,
and by running to arrive in a place
where every day isn’t a struggle to survive.
There’s the rub. No Eden exists,
but there are places with healthcare,
with social safety nets,
places where fascism is, if not absent,
slightly further from control.
/ / /
29 February 2025
Charlottesville VA
Love & Rage
This plane we’re on is crashing.
The masks have fallen from above.
I adjust my own then help the person beside me.
*
My heart is full of love and rage.
I float and shake.
I dream and plan.
*
As a kid I wanted to be
a paleontologist, to study beings
so much larger than myself.
*
The sound of the wind has now covered
even the whine of the engines.
Flames lick the wings.
*
Later I decided to be a priest.
I audited a seminary class,
still wanting to connect to the immense.
*
Soon many questions will be answered.
Or none at all.
I grip the armrests and wait.
/ / /
28 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
Countdown
The clock is ticking on the final days of empire.
Fires burn in the west, floods drown the east.
We can never kill enough or steal enough
or inflict enough pain to keep the walls from falling.
Everyone on Earth could have a home and food,
education and clothing and medical care,
but the empire is ravenous and cannot allow it.
The ticking of the clock grows louder.
In these days of lawlessness and greed,
in these times of savagery and decay,
the urge to lash out, to harm, to seek revenge,
is difficult to resist. It feels justified.
There is a place for anger. There is a place for justice.
There is even a place for violence.
But first we must build community.
We must build bonds they cannot break,
not with their tanks and their bombs
and their bombs and their guns.
Our unity must be such that even in Room 101,
even as the cage is lowered and we hear the rats,
we stay true to one another. There are more of us than them.
We cannot stop the clock, but we can decide
for whom the bell tolls.
/ / /
27 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
The second couplet is a paraphrase of a line from the movie Tombstone.
The ninth couplet is a paraphrase of lyrics from “Zombie” by The Cranberries.
While We’ve Still Got Borders
There shouldn’t be countries at all.
There are, though, so for now
one of those countries should be Palestine
and none of them should be Israel.
You can’t build your home
on the ruins of the homes you’ve stolen.
(I’m not immune to irony. I know where I live.)
In the end the borders will be washed away.
Probably literally.
It won’t be Pangaea.
It will just be what’s left.
A few of us, scattered across the landscape,
watching the vines reclaim our achievements.
For now, though, there should be Palestine.
/ / /
26 January 2025
Charlottesville VA