poet, interviewer, musician, traveler
Food Not Bombs
There was no school for a few days
so families ran out of food.
Read that again.
Bombs to drop on Palestinians?
Here’s a blank check.
But five inches of snow
means our children go to sleep hungry.
This isn’t a poem, it’s a scream.
/ / /
11 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
It’s Probably A Metaphor For Something
Midway through the whistling solo
the dog knocked over something in the kitchen;
that was the best take,
so now the clatter has become
part of the song.
/ / /
10 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
Montreal
The year I turned 39
I traveled North America
by Greyhound bus,
sleeping on the couches
of strangers,
reading my poems,
interviewing musicians.
The day I turned 39
I decided to treat myself.
I was in Montreal,
so I bought a ticket
for a boat ride
on the St. Lawrence River.
The night I turned 39
I found my way
to a singer’s apartment.
She brought out a little cake.
Somehow she’d learned
it was my birthday.
I left the next day.
/ / /
9 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
My tour diary from the day described in this poem.
Leave a CommentLeft On The Side Of The Road,
Within Sight Of The GE Plant
The lesson was learned young:
You have no inherent value,
and love can be taken away.
What child has the strength to resist?
Half a century of therapy and meds,
meditation and distance,
and still each morning brings
a renewal of doubt.
The winter sun is indifferent.
It shines on the worth and the lost alike.
/ / /
8 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
Plot Twist
Twenty minutes into a Bergman film,
the projector went dark.
I heard a faint buzzing, like a distant bee
describing a flower to friends.
No loud pop, no smell of smoke.
Just darkness. And silence.
This was going to be a serious poem,
but as I was writing that last line
the kitten fell onto my head
from the bookshelf above me.
Science is wrong:
They don’t always land on their feet.
/ / /
7 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
The Ice Storm Of ‘91
Morning meditation to the soft tapping of sleet.
Snowfall in the night birthed a new world.
My partner is asleep. A wet-footed kitten
stalks the living room, leaving tracks.
I’m carried back to March 1991:
stepping onto the porch in a crystalline world,
the gunshots of snapping branches
echoing through the woods.
The electricity was out all over upstate New York.
We heated with wood, but no power meant
no water from our well. Dad was away,
so Mom and Gretchen and I
piled into the Escort to fill up water jugs
at the tiny volunteer fire department.
The hilly drive was a nightmare
of slipping and skidding and sliding.
For decades after the scars of the storm
were visible in the area;
whole swathes of felled trees,
the clearings where they once stood.
And for several days, everything stopped:
industry, education, commerce,
all subservient to ice.
/ / /
6 January 2025
Charlottesville VA
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