Hi, I write things. I wrote at least one of them with you in mind. Try and find it. If I did my job right, it should not be hard.

Whoever you are, know that you are not alone and we are in this together until we're not. Then, it doesn't matter anymore. The universe goes on and us along with it.

You are suffering in your own special way and for that I am sorry. Being human is a pretty tough gig when reality tends to shatter our worldview on the regular. Here's hoping that my words reflect some fractured piece and make the whole puzzle a little more put together.

Fuck the fascists and break the machine. The times are changing and so must we. The time has come to pick up the fight. Let's all band together and make things right.

Mother Issues

I am sitting across from my mother,
on a two day yoga retreat
as she reads my first book of poetry
and I explain away my life.

She is horrified, editorial - amused,
oblivious as I get eye-banged by fellow yogis,
who like bad boys who dress in black spandex,
drinking Rooibos out of recycled cups,
listening to sad songs on big headphones,
taking breaks to recite lurid poesy to his Catholic mother,
who salutes the sun with the woman who raised him
who stands with his mother,
imperious against the dawn,
and flirts with rural girls in search of a soul.

There’s a 95% chance
I am going to have sex with one of them -
with some controlled breathing,
all the props,
getting lots of asana
on a combined yoga mat,
in some monastic cell.

My mother will be in bed.
She is one of those early risers.
Ignorant of the pot smoked in the temple
And why we really practice our stretching.
Someday, she’ll read this poem too.

“Hi, mother, this is me.”
You son has come home
and it’s time you got to know him."

“I am here because Byron Katie was bullshit.
I learned everything about being alive from you.
As you drink tea and read obscure literature
and laugh and shake your head and tch in disapproval
and need no cult or book circuit to teach.”

“You taught me to live, no matter what.
Life is painful and that pain means we are alive.
Why disregard our emotions and try to be still as stones?
Rage against the dying light.
Stand defiant against the dark.
Embrace our stories and feel our feelings.”

Why deny our baser natures when that is the way we were born?
Naked and already dying,
In the hands of a woman just as fallible
who considered aborting me as a viable life path.
And who I would not blame in the slightest
if she had taken the clinical route.

“Open yourself to the universe,”
said my therapist,
“And you’ll be surprised what happens.”
Apparently, you find out you were this close
to playing it as it lays,
dodging coat hangers,
wrapped in umbilicals
and ironically alive.
Saved by the same conservative morays
I tried to shed like unwanted cells.
like Joan Didion grew up in the coal region
Instead of the California wastes.
He’s definitely onto something.

He’s a cancer survivor with a missing leg
a incisive mind and a no-bullshit kinda attitude,
who’s super power is being able to shut me up.
He encouraged me to reconnect with my past.
He also knows that life lived is painful.

He’s why my pro-life Mother is reading -
My poetry about gay threesomes
Learning about all my formative mistakes,
The details of failed marriages,
The drugs snorted and the bottles drunk
the songs sung and the messes made.

It’s a really good thing she has a sense of humor.
Else my therapist would get the Freudian slip.
Somehow, I doubt he meant using her
to pick up hippies in converted monasteries,
Charming my way through these secular and restrictive corridors,
Earnestly pantomiming a sensitive soul.
What’s a narcissist with a broken childhood to do
Even he has to find his shavasana somehow.

Whether pretense or past tense,
Being a momma’s boy certainly has its perks.
Her decisions are why I am alive.
I just hope my therapist approves.

Halloweened

Don’t get married on your favorite holiday
Unless you want to meet the shades of Charon
Every time you cross the damned street.

You’ll start seeing that boatman everywhere.
He’s in costume at every party.
Reminding you of the journey to come.

This holiday represents the end, remember that.
It is a hallowed time.
Glamorized, but still monstrous.

Our childhood treats are someone else’s trauma.
Our jack-o-lanterns used to serve a purpose.
When their febrile toothy grins were enough.

He waited there, but we didn’t notice.
We were too innocent and naive to be truly scared.
Not like we ought to be.

The adult version isn’t much better.
Cheap imitations of a sexualized zeitgeist.
Party city wigs over dancing bones to be.

Now he’s just waiting outside the party.
Skimming his ferry ever closer.
Just outside the revelry’s reach.

The older we get, the more we lose.
The worlds draw closer.
One parted veil at a time.

And always he waits, that grim boatman.
Waiting patiently for his fare.
Grinning because he sees what we will become.

The older we get, the more we remember.
As we see glimpses of that eternal shore.
As we watch our loved ones go.

By all means, celebrate.
We build bonfires for a reason.
We glorify our comorbidities across the gap.

Tonight, we gather on the docks.
We pay homage to past voyages
And await our turn.

As he paddles ever closer,
we throw one hell of a party
because we are celebrating our final transition.

We are daring him ever closer.
We are taunting the monstrosities with our reveries.
As he propels his inevitable skiff.

It’s a bad time to make forever plans.

Consent to Let Go

I am aware of the risks,
radically bound to a shared ethos,
tapping into a collective consciousness,
as sane as can be in these torturous times,
with only a rather loose definition
of my own personal safety,
as I enthusiastically consent
to let go.

I summon the divine history
of humans who use pain as spark,
pleasure as tinder,
soul and spirit as wood,
and I enthusiastically consent
to be filled.

Share with me your burdens
and load them upon my back.
I will not break
for I am your elephant,
strong and leathered,
as I enthusiastically consent
to remember.

I Break

A glacier splits piece by piece,
into minute traces of bygone eras,
as eons of ever azure splinter
and release long suspended gasses.

A glacier diminishes bit by bit,
with melts too pure to be tears,
as the skies and winds of change
suffocate with pent up energy.

A glacier falls part by part.
Shards sinking down, inch by inch,
Torn asunder into sinking sheets,
Swallowed by turbulent sea.

ramble

The time has come for me to ramble.
Making every step a sort of gamble.
Crossing paths and making ways,
Cutting ties and sinking quays.

No homefires burn for my kind
Those who leave our hearths behind.
Forever hungry for what we seek
Swimming strong and stilling weak.

I evade an existential unease
With bowed heaed and bending knees.
But not to country, land or time.
I pledge instead to new ardors climbed

Trading stability for tranqulity
We shed our pasts like shed motility
We resist our tap roots sinking down
We find new nutrients on foreign ground.

Since I am drawn to die alone,
give me a death of unreknown.
No one please remember my name,
Someone else can take the blame.

abcs

August harvests of grain and gain,
Bountiful plains of slain and lain,
Country meadows tilled till twain,
Dying ideals crossing Oak and Main,
slowly we forget from where we came.

I Love You, Mom

I love you, Mom,
As you panhandle for golden lollies
and scab cigarettes off passersby.

You were beautiful, once.
You were as pretty as the faded floral dress,
hanging, gimbaled, off your bony shoulders.

Unlike most sons, I see you every day.
I watch you bleach and fade and loosen.
I watch your flowers go a little more gray.
I pass by your usual bench
as I walk to work.
You still wear the fuzzy, mint green slippers,
From a Christmas,
eight years ago.
You occasionally bark crude solicitations at the young men.

Yet, you never solicit me.
Even, if your milky eyes only perceive
a motion blur of pinstripes and briefcases and silver wrist watches.
You never bum a smoke.
You never ask for change.
You never say, “Thank you,”
when I press a fifty into your thin hand.

I love you, Mom.

Golden

I love golden showers
and I have a vested interest
in seeing the kink normalized.
So, I will write a reflexive ode to it
and sing its praises.

Zeus started it.
He used golden showers
to impregnate
a buried woman.

Think about that.
Think about how that’s stood the test of time.
Then, think of that heavenly ambrosia,
that stuff of legends,
gunneling down your partner -
painting their marbled torso,
etching abs and curves,
sliding downward with
a pungent warmth.

Think about what it is like
to kneel at the feet
of your god or goddess
and receive.

Zeus started it.
Golden showers,
Preserved in folk tales
of the people who
perfected the orgy
and were idolized by Germans.

Abrasive

We used to value grit.
It served a coarse purpose
In the hands of the maker.
It built bureaus and cut curios
and wore away the excess of elephants,
revealing only the polished products
creating something
by removing everything unwanted.

Of course, we valued grit.
It takes a rough hand
to move mountains
and to clear forests.

There is a certain destruction in creation.
A time to be as loud as a blasting cap.
A time to bite like the edge of an axe.
A time to split the core and get to the heart.

We selectively sheer the accumulated layers
Wood and stone,
Blood and bone,
House and home.

We will always need grit
when it comes to the finishing.
That pernicious insidious scraping
The stubborn scouring of the surface
Until all that remains is someone’s conception,
who saw something beautiful and useful
and set to work destroying.

Orchid

You remind me of my mother
who planted long rows of delicate flowers,
using only her hands and her coping mechanisms.
Every hole troweled with the fury of promises yet fulfilled
and seeds sown with deliberate, calloused hands.

She too could make anything grow.
No matter how hard the soil.
How acidic the water.
How unbalanced the bases.
She possessed an aspect of Gaia.
for she could bring new life to barren soil.

She had a greenhouse
lush with strange fauna
not fit for our respective climate.
She conserved an orchid.
Her mists fell like tears
and the stubborn bulbs flourished.

You remind of my mother
For you make me grow no matter what the climate
Even in the frigid months
When other flowers perish
I am shaped by your bell jar
Safe in possessive glass.