Snow grows where yellow leaves fall, to the heights of skunk cabbage along winding mountain trails. Wind blowing in a ravage, the trees dance inside it all. Through thick sheets of hardened ice spring blades of defiant green, a bluebird sky’s beckoning. From the ache of such stillness to the pain of new movement, the… Continue reading The Rhythm of It All
A Promise
I wish I could send you away In the grandest finale Like a burning comet through space In the same instant Never release your hand How to let you go With a promise to never forget The little things grow larger And consume the corners of my heart My chest burns with a fire So… Continue reading A Promise
Blue Damselfly
How do I become a blue damselfly? Hopping from purple clover To purple clover, Quietly stalked by little ones With sweaty hair and bright skin, Just out of reach of the shadow Of their fingertips Blackened from digging for worms Underneath the old cypress tree By the seawall. I’d flutter onto honeysuckles With just one… Continue reading Blue Damselfly
High Country Haunting
Spirits stalk me in my sleep with count-down timings and pillowed double meanings They haunt me down the hallways and wait up the stairways. They follow me from swamps to mountaintops. Entities slither through aspen trees keeping watchful eyes. They comb through cypress moss… like caterpillars dropping on my head, like black widow spiders crawling… Continue reading High Country Haunting
Rocky VII
Some snowy lullaby inside a tribal Telluride, so I can take you to voluptuous grounds, where moons hang upside down. And I will melt down mountains with twice the electric timing. Hitchhiked with vans, white as my fingertips. Blow luck to bits— falling with stars— and me back home inside your arms. And I remember… Continue reading Rocky VII
Whispers of Everything
My skeleton dogwood gracefully clasped the ensnared, helium-filled intentions. It was mid-February, post-fourteenth. (I have always grown older in winter.) Still, such a fertile gesture was misplaced. But my natural instinct to ignore could not fight the innocence inside me— sub-consciousness that lives to make wishes, to pluck dandelions; blow them to bits; the urge… Continue reading Whispers of Everything
Sound Deck
Late at night, I go out to the deck to smoke a cigarette and soak in starlight before bed. The downstairs neighbor’s music fills the air with temple bells, Tibetan bowls on repeat— lullaby romanticizing this view of unpolluted constellations and magical Whetstone mountain. A midnight cyclist surfs the Nordic track, tires humming like a… Continue reading Sound Deck
The Shallows
Poets and singers write about rivers but sometimes you just need to write furiously and violently until there’s nothing left inside What comes next after debilitating grief Is it Nothing You text me about sewer rats and I feel like I live in the swamps Back to the channel where the alligator gar stalk and… Continue reading The Shallows
Crescendo of cicadas
Thoughts inside my mind swirling, twirling, twisting. Inside my ears: a crescendo of cicadas, symphony of crickets. Just calm down and cry, but I can’t release the tears. I can’t forget the whoosh: the end of the wind on the gustiest of days, the day you decided to exit– Grand Finale that doesn’t seem so… Continue reading Crescendo of cicadas