poem

 Check Out Time

We wheeled our luggage to the hotel pool

After checkout like small coffins

Reminding everyone we all 

Have something to get back to.

Pale recent arrivals stared and tsked 

But we didn’t care, we had every right,

Our plane didn’t leave until later. 

We ordered drinks and read our books 

But got so hot sitting in the sun

We curled up inside our suitcases

Next to our still damp swimsuits.

Someone called the concierge for a porter 

Who carried us away

And buried us in the trunk of the airport shuttle.

3/31/25

poem

 Theodicy

Justice is for the earth. It loses its power in the scale of the eternal. As for right and wrong, it’s either now or never. This tiny sliver of human existence swaddled on both sides by an infinite darkness may have been filled with myriad unredeemed instances of inscrutable incommensurability and sadness and suffering and loss but in the grand scheme of things what does it matter? Anything divided by infinity approaches zero. Its light grows more and more indistinct. A tiny speck in the night sky, many light years away. You’ve moved on to the moon, who never complains. In the afterlife anything can happen, an infinite number of times. The guy in Ohio who ripped you off, fucked your wife and left you for dead? What happens when he’s in heaven too? Somebody whispers, maybe this is actually hell. Which means justice, in a way, prevails. But that doesn’t seem right, you say. Eternal punishment for the way I lived my short miserable life? That’s not fair!  You shake your fist at the heavens. This scene plays out over and over for a million years until one day you decide you don’t care. Or that no one is listening. You can’t even remember what you were so mad about. Heaven becomes a place where you are surrounded by strangers you’ve never wronged. Everyone here feels the same way about you. In the meantime you have to live until you’re dead. Yes, it's all based on nothing. Yes, it’s all made up. Yes, it’s a vast collective fiction. But here you are. Too fearful to do anything about it. Too proud to be like all the others. A Christ rejected by your generation’s Grand Inquisitor. Other than one or two like you, all that’s left are the masses of stupid true believers and the self-selected few, the cold blooded killers who see the opportunity that arises in the void of pointlessness. They write the rules and reap the benefits and everyone plays along. And so a long period of avoidable suffering ensues. The weak get exploited. The faithful are thwarted. The hopeful get so tired they decide to wake up.

3/27/25

poem

 Name Change

I went down to the courthouse to change my name. I wanted a new name. I was tired of mine, Jeff. It now sounded frowsty and old fashioned. I wanted a cool name again. Like Liam, Rowen, or Ryker. Or maybe Beckett. The lady behind the window made me sign a form and that was that. I was no longer Jeff. For the time being, nameless. But when I went to submit my new name she asked me for a bunch of corroborating documents that I didn’t have. I’m very sorry, she said. There was nothing anyone could do. She was simply following policy. Ok then, I said. Maybe I’ll track down all these stupid papers. Come back tomorrow. Just then, two large men in quasi-law enforcement uniforms appeared next to me and asked where exactly did I think I was going? Home, I said. Do you have any forms of identification? I pulled out my driver's license and they looked at me funny over the top of the card. This isn’t you, they said. And they were right. It wasn’t me. At least not anymore. I tried to explain that I was in a sort of a transition period in terms of identity, but they weren’t having any of it. But by now they had me in cuffs and a black hood and they led me to the back of a steel gray paddy wagon. On the way to the detention facility some guy in back tried to interrogate me for a while. The old fingernail extraction trick. The old waterboard treatment. But you can’t torture an truthful answer out of kindness. It will just tell you whatever it is you needed to hear. When we got to the facility I was hosed down and sprayed for lice. Handed a crude outfit made of rough canvas. A number was branded to my forearm and then I was directed to a cell on the third floor. Once the swelling went down I spent a few moments every night staring at my number. It’s not one I would have picked. Just a bland assortment of 8 random numbers.  Everybody in here has one. We go by each other’s first three digits because it’s too hard to memorize all 8. In here, I’m 772. I have a poker game every Thursday morning in the yard with 349, 901, and 635. Sometimes I see people in here I know from before. We always greet each other in silent gravity. It’s disrespectful to use our dead names. In any event, I don't think I’ll be here very much longer. I’ve found an escape route. Blowing this popsicle stand next full moon. When I leave here I’ll sear the numbers on my arm to an inscrutable black eschar. From then on, no name, number or mountain themed pictogram will ever capture my essence.  I’ll remain nameless. Numberless. Except to you. I’ll answer to whichever name you choose.

3/17/25

poem

 Insomniac

I hadn’t slept in days. My exhaustion was an oversized wool sweater in the middle of summer and I couldn’t reach the itch. When I finally woke I had no idea what time it was. Through my window I saw an orange sun, low hung, just above the horizon and the sky was a recently detonated fiery explosion. It was either dusk or dawn. East or west. I lacked all context. This wasn’t my room. And it wasn’t my house. I was afraid to pull down the covers. To turn on the lights. The only thing to do was wait, do nothing, wait for the sun to either rise or fall. Give it a few minutes. Find myself in darkness or a gathering light. Time always tells you the truth. Whether it's just beginning or if this was the end. 

3/16/25

poem

 Reruns

Someday you’ll be able to rewatch every single day of your life

Via nano-chips embedded in the occipital cortex of your brain 

Some people will spend the second half of their lives

Simply watching everything that happened in the first

And then an afterlife watching themselves watching it.

Younger generations will pity us

All we had were journals and memories and delusions

But they secretly envy us

We could be anything we said we were

No one could say any different

You can’t go back and check the tape 

We were the only evidence.

3/16/25

poem

 Handshake Deal

We’ve all been taken

The morning sunrise is a con 

Every face you meet is a facade.

Even the buildings are a scam.

Roads and highways, follow at your peril—

A series of switchbacks up giant pyramid schemes

The sidewalks are bingo games run by gangsters

With pockets full of weighted dice 

Every pedestrian is a potential mark

Even love is a sunk cost

You never get your money back

There’s only one way 

To make it all worthwhile—

A secret backroom handshake deal

With someone you can trust.

As long as you both agree to believe it’s worth something,

Then it’s worth something

3/16/25

poem

 Love is a Getaway

You’ve been living in exile. The sign reads “Love, 10 miles ahead”. Your favorite dead uncle once told you, love is a getaway. So you follow the arrow. You come to a gate. On the other side of the gate is a town. Everyone there looks like you or your beloved. The bakery has only heart shaped macarons. The hardware store sells dark chocolate hammers. The cobbler repairs stiletto heels for a dollar. Eventually everyone has to get a job. You have to work for it. Nothing comes for free. At the end of the month you run the numbers. Whatever you put in should be matched by what goes out. The rich are rich because of the love they save. Every month they set a little aside but it compounds and adds up quick. Starts spilling out of their nostrils and ear holes so they reinvest all the profits. They make love do all the work. It becomes a perpetual stream of passive income. The poor, on the other hand, love too much. They’re careless and profligate with it. As a currency it loses all value. When they try to buy what they need they’re told that all their poems are written on worthless paper. They thought it was real the way play money is real in the game of Monopoly. They thought it was unlimited. That even if you ran out you could just tear up a bunch of scraps of paper and color them red, green and blue. That it was still legal tender. That every time they reached into their pockets it would always be there. That you would always accept it. But they’ve come to the wrong town. You must be thinking of Love, Ohio. That’s three states over. They start to realize they’ve been playing someone else’s game. A bunch of them band together and storm the gates. It’s a getaway. Fugitives on the loose, once again. Years later they settle down together in nice cabins by a river. Everyone got tired of running. This is their home now. They call it love.

3/7/25

poem

 When You Least Expect It

It comes when you least expect it

The sun sets, lights go off, the stars dim

Everyone stares at the black chalkboard sky

Waiting for a teacher to scrawl the answers 

To a series of questions you’ve been asking 

Yourself since the first sleepless night it ever

Made you shudder in the dark. 

Everyone has their hands folded on their desks.

Yours are in your lap

Holding a pair of dusty erasers.

3/7/25

poem

 Dali

After the Salvador Dali museum we bought

Fake mustaches and bottle cap sunglasses

And wandered the languid streets of St Petersburg.

In the glare of the sun the buildings wobbled

Like flicked Jell-O and sidewalks melted

And clouds liquified and spilled across the sky.

We laughed until tears fell back into our eyes.

But we knew it wouldn’t last

Eventually, everything began to congeal

Once again, the world was stiff and angled and hard

As every last possible cloud of probability arranged itself 

Into the myriad things and beings of the universe 

In terror, I reached for your quivering six-fingered hand 

Before it dripped away into the solid block of ocean 

We suddenly found ourselves standing on

3/7/25

poem

 The Seeking

We seek a lover 

So our lives

Coincide with another

We can’t coincide with ourselves 

That’s the way of sociopaths and suicides

The true way is a softer path

No one can help falling into 

Once they find their footing

When I tell you I love you

This is what I mean

Everything I say in here

Echoes right back at me 

But in the sound of your voice 

You start to forget who spoke

And who is just listening

One thing everyone discovers

Is the absence of difference 

Between loved and lover 

When you tell me you love me

This is what you mean

3/7/25