It wasn’t to hear him speak/on piety and justice

my history–yes, I’m still hankering
after songs of money and love,
love and worry.

I could have lived without opening the car window if he didn’t smoke, but he did, and not just cigarettes but a pipe as well, and sometimes a cigar.  In our tight quarters, he managed to light a cigarette, place his pipe somewhere, and drive a stick shift.

The world went clanking like an old tin can,
a cranking babbler on its wind-whirled way,
tossed on immodestly, without restraint,
and little mercy from the tar it spanked;

Could have been worse, everyone said. / It wasn’t meant to be…

This river is like an ocean, force of the surf and wildness of the wind, but it’s a body of fresh water moving, boundaries on either side.

Sometimes you get lucky and walk out of your bombed apartment

But my eyes tell a different story. They’re squinty, looking off to the side, hiding my thoughts, my eyebrows ever so slightly furrowed as if I’m already questioning this whole pageant.

His father’s voice
came to him
in his dreams

learn
to be better turtles,
to stick their necks out…

I go down to plant a red amaryllis, ripping open the plastic bag of black dirt in the box when I can’t get the knot out…

Later, the sun poured over our shoulders
as we read our name
on the grave stones.

Were it not for the other mothers,/ fathers, families, and grandmother/ that kept it pulsing, my heart would be long dead./ They made it a sea, deep enough to weather storms,/ until a day, when love settled home, opened me up,/ and guided my heart’s tempest until it was repaired./ Remembering everything, my heart, at last, broke./ And now? All we feel is gratitude. 

…the moody sighing of beech leaves and the persistent grasping of rhizomes of grasses, the roots of pittosporum, as well as the hiss of nitrogen fixation by the underground nodules beneath the clover and, too, the industrious feeding of earthworms and termites…

Lately, I have become more aware of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can do or even should do in our short little lives, plagued as we are by nihilistic melancholy and fear of anonymous mediocrity. Stories grown from ideas put into our young, inquisitive, spongy childhood brains by our parents, our teachers, friends, ourselves…all the messages we internalized, that grow into neuronal connections and pathways we keep carving deeper and deeper through repetition until they turn into trenches of thought patterns we can no longer escape.

How much is left here, o universe, trembling and alive.

I am in a dentist’s chair in July, watching a plane make two parallel lines across a clear blue New England sky, as that racy heart-feeling from local anesthesia kicks in.

When inventing a religion, be sure to include laser-focused, arch eyes, at least if you want your religion to have a God, a catechism, etc.

Guys, I love you but I have bad news: we are all fucked by Time as surely as we are by our wireless internet providers. And during the flicker and fade of our brief lives we will burn too much time sorting laundry and navigating the labyrinthine phone trees of insurance companies who make billions betting on our mortality.

I am an old man in HomeDepot and I want a lightbulb.