Jason Crane Posts

That’s It For Tonight

I couldn’t face leaving the house again
so I had groceries delivered
which meant they were twice as expensive
as if I’d just gone shopping
and then when the delivery person
dropped them off and I
stepped outside to get them
the kitten escaped and ran off
into the neighborhood
and it took two separate rounds
of chasing him with a flashlight
over the course of nearly two hours
until he was finally back in the house
and just as I got settled down
to write this poem describing it all
the neighbor knocked on the door
to let me know the kitten got out
but I told him the kitten was back
and that’s it for tonight.

/ / /

10 February 2025
Charlottesville VA

Leave a Comment

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

Leave a Comment

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

Leave a Comment

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

Leave a Comment

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

Leave a Comment

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

Leave a Comment

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 Comment

A 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

Leave a Comment

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

One Comment

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.

Leave a Comment