To hide
I undress
To dissemble
I disassemble
To repent
I rebuild
To reveal
I redress
– Untitled, from “Spring Cleaning, Ontologicaldociousnessly“, March 7, 2025.
This is a pitiful availability
Are you serious?
All you purport is you are a harassed
Overstrained paperweight
All the tearless basics on your agenda
Are unmoved by poesy and embarrassing
To most commonly unforeseen imprudence
All resolve to evolve into moods specious and disproportionate
And misinterpreting of compromises
Again and again and again and again!
– Observations from my spam folder, December 19, 2019.
What I Am Not Saying
As a child, I did science
To contain and explain
Madness
I wanted to be more
Than flesh and bone,
Hormones and hysteria
I knew … like I knew everything
That logic could
Let me leap out of the mud
Allowing me to fly
Through even God’s fingersIt did.
In college, science didn’t want me
I was too mad to love
My logic all circumstantial,
Conditional,
Anecdotal
Poetry was a better fit
But I knew … like I still knew everything
That poetry could
Starve me so much
That my meat and its needs
Would betray me
Crushing me back into the dirtI did not give it that chance.
In adulthood, I have said
“I am not that“
I was this instead
“I do not do that“
I said
I did this instead
“And I will be“
And I was someone else
“And I will do“
And I did something else
But in truth, I have just done
Only what a bee does
Fading flower to brighter flower to next flower
But dumping my cargo
So I won’t be forced to landThere is no more ground to fear now
And I am no longer as certain of the sky
Or that I know anything.
– April 12, 2016.
Oh, how to start?
Where I am now
Is even less me than art
The feinting thump
Of an armadillo heart
Hey, I can walk in your shoes all day
Probably best to keep it that way.
– Words that got stuck in my head on repeat somewhere westbound on I-40, February 1, 2016.
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