poem

 Old Souls

Poets are all born old

Babies with old souls

Their best and deepest stuff

Slumbers unsaid, unwritten.

Everything that follows literacy 

Is second rate and derivative

Compared to the trove of desperate wails

They carry around from infancy. 

Some poets just get older and older

They run out of money and insurance benefits

Everyone they love dies. 

All they write are elegies 

Other poets age in reverse

The world increasingly becomes

More and more wondrous

Entire poems of only punctuation marks 

And then, finally, the magnum opus

Delivered just before birth—

A baby’s first laugh.

8/19/25

poem

 Don't Forget to Say Goodnight

You forgot to say goodnight.

I'm out in the streets in my pajamas

Looking everywhere for you.

I wanted to tell you that the poems

Of John Ashberry make a clattering 

Sound in my mind like someone 

Dropping a champagne flute 

On a stone floor during

A moment of silence recognizing

All the brave men and women who lost

Their lives during the siege 

On the citadel of final understanding.

So many good soldiers, lost.

Our heads were bowed

Only the birds outside made a sound 

Lips moved silently in prayer

And then it all shattered 

Which almost seemed deliberate 

As if God were warning everyone

We were starting to get too close

8/19/25

poem

 Imaginary Friend

When I was a boy I had an imaginary friend.

Mom was worried until someone told her

It meant I might be gifted.

His name was Nee Nee and of course

Everyone got a kick out of that.

Looking back I shouldn’t have told anyone his name

But I never meant to.

An adult overheard me whispering it out loud

While I was playing under the table. 

Who’s Nee Nee? She asked.  My friend, I said.

He was my very first friend, I guess,

And that one’s always real.

But other than his name I don’t remember anything else about him—

What we did, how we played, why I even liked him.

I sometimes wonder what became of him.

I’d try to track him down if I could

But I can’t for the life of me recall what he even looked like.

If he was a talking animal I suppose 

It was just his job, to go around from lonely boy to lonely boy

And he’s probably out there helping someone now.

If he was a mythical winged beast, albeit friendly and down to earth, 

Conjured from the ramparts of my inner sanctum

He’s probably dead by now, since I never fed him 

And everyone else would be afraid of him.

If he was a boy, like me, I imagine 

He went back to his life, grew up, got married,

Had a few kids and now sits around wondering

Whatever happened to his old pal

Jeff 

8/19/25

poem

 Bad Poetry

Never say a poem is bad

Just turn the page

No babies are ugly except

 for the ugly ones

Of whom we don’t speak.

We say they’re all a blessing.

Not every sky is a sunrise or sunset.

We spend our lives in the gray haze.

It’s bad luck to wish away

 your life

Skipping to the good parts.

Forgive me if I essay here a bit

On the incontrovertibility of even one bad line

Toward the end of an otherwise epoch defining epic

 that could have saved us all.

Short stories and vignettes are the sweet spot—

The busy surgeon who still finds time to write.

The single mother cranking out bangers while folding laundry.

Novels get all the glory and for good reason

How we adore effulgent celebrations

 of elegant failure.

Flawed, awkward, overbearing and unable to ever shut up.

You can call them ugly if you want.

They’re all grown up. 

8/10/25

poem

 The Suburban

When the money ran out daddy blamed the system. Mommy retreated to the kitchen and quilted together a last meal out of whichever edible scraps were left. G-ma and G-pa, as soon as they hear the news, are on a plane back from France. G-ma texts mommy— it’s time for you to make a choice. Daddy grabs the phone and replies— baguette, no butter. G-pa is bringing me another book about Omaha Beach. Daddy sees it and prepares a speech he’ll never actually deliver. I watch his shadow gesticulating against his bedroom wall. Daddy is always at his best when he thinks he’s all alone. If I clap, it ruins it. If I don’t, something else is ruined. 

8/10/25

poem

 A Drop of Blood

It never goes completely away

Hovering nearby like a wounded animal

Who barely made it to the edge of the woods 

While everyone pretends to not see it 

Every year is another drop of blood

In the rivers of your life 

A change so slow and subtle

All water begins to taste like wine

Easter is the most terrifying holiday

A bird transforms into a rabbit

Who lays kaleidoscopic eggs

That are never meant to hatch 

The laughter you hear is only a distraction—

Children gorging on bricks of chocolate 

While the adults all sleep in 

On the one day allotted for rest 

Sometimes it gets so loud

Silence is all you can hear 

Oh it’s just the wind, your lover whispers

But you know better 

It’s not a resurrection

If it’s never been dead

No labor pains, no birth

Until you cut off its head 

8/10/25

poem

 Missal

First, do no harm—

So many times, decisive action saved a life

But rarely, you can fuck someone up

The lord giveth and the lord taketh—

You’ve developed a god complex

You walk on the water your spirit drowned in 

Doctor, heal thyself—

Three quaffs of denial and a vial of self delusion

Dress your wounds but never say how you got them   

Sometimes the treatment is worse than the disease—

As penance, you have to eat without using your hands.

Stand on one leg. Stop your own heart.

Lord, forgive me my sins—

8/10/25

poem

 Yellowstone

And just like that, the end of vacation

If you wander around a geyser basin

Beyond the boardwalk you risk breaking through

A surface crust thinned like April ice.

Burn your foot to the bone.  All that winter planning wasted.

In the clouds atop Mt Washburn

The calderic view takes your breath away

But my son fears that might be a sign of altitude sickness.

Summer too is rationing its oxygen

As back to school sales are announced 

Ten folders for a dollar or vice versa I cant remember 

Bullet proof backpacks, two for one, BOGO or FOGO. 

Special pens, nifty erasers. A lunchbox that bends. 

Before you know it, it’s fall, then winter,

Then spring bearing baskets of transient abundance. 

Seasons now are processional

Like funerals and my name is a flag

On a car following everyone

To the cemetery. 

Everything ends up passing, then circling back

While we maintain strict unidirectional vectors

Just waiting for the day when the ground gives way

And we fall into whatever dissolves us.

Spring summer fall winter

Winter spring summer fall

The rude cycling of ageless seasons 

Oblivious to the years and decades adding up

For everyone else

A lifetime runs away, finds someplace to hide

Amidst a herd of bison meandering across 

The Grand Loop Rd backing up traffic for miles 

And everyone honks as I get way too close

I’ve grown tired of running, of everything changing 

Here, I’ll make my final stand. 

Take a picture of me taking a picture

Of the Yellowstone River 

Winding through the Hayden Valley

And put it in a family album

Grandkids will flip through, absent-

Mindedly killing time 

Before Thanksgiving dinner.

You’ll never need to see me again. 

But you can if you want to. 

By then it will always be raining

Or never raining 

The leaves will have stopped changing 

Or it’s the year they fell and never grew back—

The insolent trees

Bare and stark and black

8/10/25

poem

 Opposites

The world of opposites hangs

Together in mutual reciprocity

One thing owing its existence

To the thing it’s not.

A tenuous foundation, to be sure,

For up and down are ultimately 

Contingent manifestations of gravity

And the difference between black and white

Hinges on the intensity of available light

But there’s a larger world

Of things lacking opposites

Abandoned nouns floating

Aimlessly, lacking reifying polarity 

Other than existence and non-existence 

Which isn’t as clarifying as yes and no or now and later 

Your dog is just your dog

And ice cream melts 

Mad has no opposite other than not mad 

And love laughs when you try to insist 

It would vanish if not for hate. 

Then you have this strange dichotomy

Between me and everything else.

Without the world I never exist

But when I’m gone the world remains.

How can this be? Where is your elegant symmetry?

Whatever happened to the comforting

Duality of semantic codependency? 

The truth is, I'm just sad.

The world, apparently, doesn’t need me and never has.

I’m all the radiant colors of a coral reef

Bleached white by an unexpected acidity 

I’m not the missing piece, the chiral molecule

Reflection the world sees

When it decides to gaze

At its face in the mirror.

I’m not the devastating loss that makes 

Its ultimate victory taste so sweet.

I suppose this is why I feel so alone

And remain a stranger even to myself.

There is no opposite to me,

No black to my white

Locking in a solid identity.

All I can do is make a substance of absence

Leave behind a big enough impression 

In the mold of the world

For someone to pour a sadness into.

I’m just here, a black pupil

Arrayed against the white 

Of the eye of the universe 

Letting in as much light as I can.

But once I’m gone, whatever’s left 

Goes back to being the darkness

That never knew how brightly

Its light once shined 

For a boy on the roof

Of a sad, broken home 

In a dying small town 

So long as I’m gone 

Not notice the stars

How much they shine

A darkness within 

A light never known 

So long as we shine

Like stars over homes 

For a boy all alone

A light in the dark

A night between days

A boy on a roof 

In a small dying town 

Not knowing it’s there

So long

   I’m 

Gone

8/10/25