poem

 Sunflower

We attended the charity event for cancer

One weekend on a sweltering day in July

A live band was belting out industrial covers

From the 80’s— Pat Benatar, Poison, Motley Crue

The trees put their faces in the breezes

Like dogs hanging their heads out car windows.

As we were coming in an older couple my wife knew was leaving

It was 19 years ago, to the day,

That they had lost their son to cancer.

We’re going someplace so he can eat and soak up the alcohol, she said.

But I didn't think he looked all that drunk— just sun drenched and sad.

He gave me whatever drink tokens he had left.

7/13/25

poem

 Roundabout

The town transitioned from its inefficient grid

Of four way stops and timed traffic lights

To a flowing amalgam of roundabouts 

Consultant engineers had determined

To be the secret to continuous motion—

Blunt the points, soften the edges, blur the margins

To preserve an earned momentum

But if you can’t stop

Maybe you never even started

And it’s always been like this

On and on, a series of glancing blows

That take us in new directions

Avoiding head on collisions 

We can survive tangential contacts

And passive diversions 

Curved like commas linking clauses

In a winding sentence that goes on forever

The way curlicued shavings on the floor

Are more interesting than the hollow totem

We’ve carved to honor the god

Who tells us when to stop.

7/13/25

poem

 Priceless

I’ve always been overly protective of any knowledge

I’ve acquired, regardless of effort involved

I’m a hoarder of facts, solutions and hermetically sealed arguments. 

They fill my closets my attics and basements

Each one gets a number and assigned space

In the catbird seats of my patchwork personality.

Like all hoarders I’ve reached the point of believing

My hidden cache is all I really have 

And so I guard it with my life.

It represents my entire net worth.

Even to question it undermines my own profitability.

To doubt would be like hiring my own burglar

And who am I to question the methods that grant

Me the ability to afford this comfortable lifestyle.

My wife and children would starve 

I’d have to leave, shamefacedly, in the pre-dawn morning,

Travel across multiple time zones

To the land of my own ignorance

Seeking to borrow someone else’s wisdom

Which never comes for free

7/13/25

poem

 Reading in the Dark

The light reveals itself in objects

Not the other way around

The way you appear to others

Depends on the light you’ve found

Your particular shape teaches

The light how it must bend

All matter is a moon 

Shining after the sun has set

Heaven is the light you see

When you learn to read in the dark

I go to a place devoid of light

When I get like this

You aren’t there 

But my hands are here

Even though I can’t see them

They always find each other in the darkness 

Every existence is a gravity

A fold in the fabric  

First felt as loneliness 

Which soon becomes a heaviness

Spiraling closer and closer

Until our fingers entwine

It isn't necessary to see 

To be surprised by what you find

7/13/25

poem

 Solitary Confinement

I keep them under wraps.

It’s a surveillance state in here

Of long windowless hallways,

Heavy locked doors and keycards

Dangling from lanyards 

Slung around thick necks. 

Get out of line and you

Get a cold arthritic fist

Wrapped around your throat.

Don’t worry, no one dies. 

I always release my grip

And let it breathe—

Anger, joy, jealousy,

  even the melancholy—

For another day longer,

As per the terms of its sentencing.

But then it’s straight to the hole—

Solitary confinement for 30 days

Which hardly seems like sufficient punishment.

You see, I’m not like other people

Buffeted by a stream of feelings 

Free to come and go as they please 

Without the elaborate trappings.

Mine are doing hard time

Just trying to survive

7/13/25

poem

 Analogy

Chuck a rock into a pond

And the moment 

It strikes the surface, it’s gone

For a few minutes waves ripple 

From the point of disappearance

But it never lasts 

Before long the water

Smooths and stills and silences 

Alternatively, you can skip a stone

Across a river, land it safely

In the mud of the opposite bank.

It’s cool to watch

But you’ll never get to that side yourself 

This tortured analogy is brought to you

By an idiot sinking rapidly

In the depths of his own fetid lake

When I get to the bottom

The water clouds with a sediment 

That never quite settles 

You’ll never see me again

7/13/25

poem

 Survival Mode

First, identify someone to hate—

Your lousy dad,

The one who broke your heart,

The one who got away,

The one you convinced to stay

And hate them with all

That’s left of your flayed atrophic heart.

Then sit down on the back patio

And sip your gin and watch the bats

In the backyard tracing blind patterns 

In the low gray insoluble sky.

You start to hear a low hum

That locates you above the fray.

When you close your eyes you know where you are—

The last place on earth

With just enough love

To keep you alive

7/12/25

poem

 Frame of Reference

Modern physics tells us that if you are in an enclosed area without any reference to the outside world, it is impossible to tell whether you are moving at a constant rate through space or standing still. These isolation bubbles are everywhere and nowhere. Shut the door. Draw the curtains. Change the channel. Close your eyes.

Now there are medicines you can take to simulate the feeling of motion— a surge of adrenalin, the dropping, tumbling feeling in your gut, the sense of momentary imbalance, the invisible ether rushing at your face. There’s another pill you can take to slow things down. You can toggle back and forth. You don't have to go anywhere. You don't have to do anything. It doesn’t matter anymore whether you’re actually moving or at rest. You simulate the feeling. Everything that happens is just inside your head. Which is no different than it was before the pharmacologic revolution. 

Most people use them inappropriately. Fully medicated, they jump off a cliff and there’s no sense of falling. It’s like waiting at an intersection for the light to turn green. A doctor's office for the nurse to call your name. I know a guy on high dose therapy who never leaves his bed. But in his mind is a whirling dervish of activity, a workaholic, a doting father and husband, a self made man who gives back to his community who never sits still for even a second.  

What are the references now? Where are the walls? Well, we destroyed them all. How are you doing, someone asks.  And I look at them the way I would stare at a stranger in a dream. How did you get here? I don’t recognize you. You aren’t real, yes, but seem entirely unique. I’ve never seen you before. How is that possible? Is this how the unconscious mind reckons with physical abandonment? The original creation myth. This person can’t hear what I’m saying. They seem to be getting closer and closer while I get farther and farther away. From my perspective this person is like a raindrop rapidly retreating back into a dark cloud high in the sky. From her perspective she is shouting as loud as she can directly in my ear. She is thunder but no one is scared. One of us is moving. One of us is at rest. The Moon revolves around the Earth which revolves around the Sun which revolves around the center of its galaxy which revolves. Somewhere is a still point around which the entire universe spins. At the still point there is a room without windows or doors. If someone is in there, the world doesn’t exist. If it’s empty, it does. 

7/12/25

poem

 Uniforms

They all wear the same uniform so we know which team they’re on

There are no names or numbers to remind us 

To treat them all the same

Every morning the soiled ones get washed

I retired my assigned jersey years ago

Now my white coat hangs in a hall of shame

When I come to work I just take

Whichever random one is hanging 

In the doctor’s room lounge

Today I’m Dr Zanzibar, eminent gerontologist

The coat hangs down to my ankles

And the sleeves hide my hands 

Now I’m on the wrong team

I adopt a weird posture so no one will know who I am

In the pockets are rings of keys and cookie crumbs 

Each key opens a different door in the hospital

I make my rounds, check that every door is locked

One of the keys opens the linen closet

Where all the laundered gowns are stored

They smell so warm and clean

I remove the white coat and put one on

Now I’m nobody

It fits just fine

A nurse ties me up in the back 

And escorts me back to my room

7/12/25

poem

 Dads

Come to think of it, my dad didn't have to give me back the stuffed animal just before sending us down the gangplank to get on the plane returning us to Ohio at the end of that summer. I’d given it to him for a very special reason that even today eludes me. He should have kept it. Not written my name in blocky all-caps on the white bottom and ambushed me with its offering. Yes, I started to cry and then my little sisters did too, seeing me crying, and the first 30 minutes on the plane were a mess. Three little kids in a row, all weeping, disconsolate, trying to soothe themselves. I remember scratching Jackie’s back, telling her everything was going to be ok. The poor flight attendants didn’t know what to do. It was just some dumb, friendly-faced dinosaur plush toy I’d won the week before at Circus Circus casino in Las Vegas tossing coins on glass plates or maybe it was the game where you have to pop little balloons on a wall with darts. Two out of three wins a prize. It was my favorite one. I slept with it on the top bunk I shared with a half-brother I didn't consider a real brother which got me into trouble with Grandma because she had half siblings too and she considered them real and full and anyway I wasn’t used to winning prizes and Dad seemed proud of me, I guess. At the gate something came over me which I didn’t know how to manage other than to give him this dumb thing I cherished. Our six weeks of summer in Arizona had gone by so fast and we had to go back to mom and school was starting and I wouldn’t see him again until he maybe came back the day after Thanksgiving. I think I was 10. Anyway, he shouldn't have given it back, made it all about him. As if he were the one giving up something important. He didn’t understand the situation at all. He never did. Just like that time I wrote him a letter the morning after I’d heard him and mom up late screaming at each other again. Wrote him that I was sorry I hadn’t cleaned my room or put my toys away in the yard and that I loved him and hoped he had a nice day. Then I put the letter and a crisp $20 bill I’d received for my birthday inside an envelope addressed to “Daddy” and slipped it under his bedroom pillow. Back then, twenty bucks was a lot of money. I was going to use it for a new baseball glove. It was all I had actually. I don’t know what I expected. From the beginning I’ve always been a soft, sentimental little bastard. But I never heard a word. The act went unacknowledged. I never saw the twenty spot again. Over the years I’ve tried to imagine what may have happened. Maybe it fell to the floor under the bed while he was sleeping. Maybe he put the envelope in an inside suit pocket, meaning to open it later but forgot about it and then it got lost at the cleaners. Maybe mom found it, and pitched it in the trash. Or maybe dad opened it, put the money in his wallet, spent it at the gas station or wherever and went about his day, oblivious. Maybe he meant to say something to me but forgot. It remains a mystery. This was my first experience with the hard fact that one doesn’t always get what one pays for. That giving comes with no guarantees. That giving is just giving, nothing else. That love freighted with fear, anxiety and materiality can be misinterpreted. Or just missed. The world keeps the things you want returned and gives back the ones you’ve willingly released. To this day I get anxious with any sort of giving. How much will I have left? Has it been wasted? Should I have given more? And receiving is no easier. Acts of love pass right through me like invisible quantum particles and I don’t even know it. It’s all pretty fucked up. Man hands on misery to man etc etc.  Look at me, casting a shadow starting to look suspiciously like my father. Making it all about me. I ought not to be so hard on myself, though. It’s different, I say. I was just a kid, uncertain if I was being seen. If I was even in his field of vision. That’s the problem when your parents divorce. When you’re with mom, dad can't see you. And vice versa. Whoever you think you are gets split into two. But when dad is 2000 miles away and you only see him a few times a year, there’s a risk of disappearing. Forgetting you exist. Or at least it feels that way. Especially when he gets married again and has a whole new batch of kids he comes home to every day. But you grow out of that— which is a way of saying that something on the inside hardens. You basically have to or else go insane chasing after it. I have other people looking at me now. I feel their gaze like rays of morning sun after a midnight thunderstorm. I don't know where the dumb dinosaur is. I’m sure it’s lost forever. Part of growing up is learning some things only get found when you stop looking for them. See? It’s in my hand. My empty goddam hand.

6/15/25

poem

 The Wasteland

One day you stumble upon a secret realm

Of color and harmony.

It’s the Land of Poetry!

Everything here is made of it—

Trees, grass, squirrels, the

Pain in the ass neighbors

Who complain when your kid’s ball

Rolls down the hill into their yard.

We call them a sestina.

But you think — What a marvelous discovery! 

It’s been here all along!

Just when you thought all the magical

Wonder of the world had been used up  

And there was nothing left to write

That hadn’t already been said

And no good way of framing it

That hadn’t been done before. 

But soon the adrenaline wears off

And a certain kind of paranoia sets in,

An anticipatory surveillance

Where the watchers are all waiting for you

To start doing something about it—

Linking and braiding and looping 

Some of these bits and fragments

Back together again in interesting ways

We’ve never seen or heard before.

You know you’re on the right track

If just reading one elicits

Nostalgia for the ethereal world 

Of dreams our old selves used to have 

Alongside memories of events that actually happened—

What we did and how it felt

Finally meeting up after all these years of parallel play.

Summon everything you can muster

In the form of an archaic keening, as long as you can, until your voice goes hoarse

And you're forced to either take a breath or die.

But before the sudden silence swells a second longer 

You hear someone else screaming back

And it’s not just your own echo.  

Configurations like that only rarely resonate

Across the canyons of isolation

But you don’t know how.

You’re a poem yourself

Written in a dialect from 15th century Gallipoli.

To your mother you’ve always been 

A walking, talking Shakespeherian sonnet.

All your friends could see it

And loved you because you didn’t.

Good old Jeff, trying to pass himself off as prose again—

Over-plotted, whimsical, and morose.

Even your notepad and pen

Are stray verses wandered off

From an ode on the love of your life.

6/9/25