What Gets Me Through
And if I have to be transparent,
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Katherine’s Coffeehouse
Backstories
Even dandelions have backstories,
if you think long enough about your
past. How when you were supple
I Do Not Know the Name of this Town
And I would like to label it just a bad mood,
this feeling of being closed in, trapped by
failing bone and muscle and a system set
tightly around the rich and healthy. Except
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I Was Okay Until I Found Her Collar
Moving inherently means sorting
through the ages, opening trunks
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To Me, an Apology
I owe me yet another one – another, I’m sorry I did that
to me, another, please forgive my insensitivity, my inability
to protect us from the unexpected week’s end, blasting
the same old lie, that we were never good enough to survive
Thirteen Ways of Looking at My Past Employer
I
I was of two minds, now
Returned to one: You do not deserve
Anyone.
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Opus Number Something – On Gratitude
I was this many years old when I learned what an opus number
means, how chronological order is not always set by composers,
but by scholars, historians, and academics. And having looked
up the word, as I am wont to do, having taken the head-first swan
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Shall I Tell You?
Shall I tell you I am disabled?
That I no longer can fend for
myself? Or shall I tell you
I now write the poetry you
mocked me for because
it does not pay the bills?
The Gestalt of God (A Philosophical Draft)
Let’s set the record straight.
I do not claim to know what god
might be, nor do I entirely get gestalt.
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This One, Too, is for Traci
I did not know what I would write this morning as the treeline
got etched in wisps of ivory blond—until I remembered
I did not get to properly grieve you. Not really, anyway. Sure,
I wrote you a poem. Sure, I teared up now and again, like I am
now when I think of everything you did and offered, but mostly,
selfishly, I miss your listening,
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What You Would Rather Hear
What would you rather hear? That six or seven
or twelve times or more I actually had ideation,
or that I walked away, instead, unharmed? That I
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**Backpack Part II
It’s not that I shoulder a navy
pack on my disintegrating back.
It’s not that I have swallowed
the kind of pills that retch
even the rage out until
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*Lincoln from the Grave
Oh to be unconditionally loved when dead,
division dissolved by the peaceful inevitable.
Oh to the victory that made us one,
the blood of battle and repair
no longer questioned as worthwhile,
immune to “what if?” in its sad reality,
replaced by “what is” and “what was.”
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The Wisdom of Ancient Things
I return to that Place of Peace,
and the wisdom of ancient things,
the one that reintroduced itself
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Ode to Charles
See, you were the only Black kid in the whole damn school,
and the teacher had to split us up because of how hard
we laughed together.
You Made Me Feel Illegal
This (unedited) poem won first place in a contest on The Political Poet. And while I am grateful, that’s not necessarily the important part. The important part is the way this debate spun out of control. The way citizens were encouraged to gang up on other citizens as the county turned a blind eye to hate groups and racism.
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Advice Giving
I am not sure what is more important: to tell you how I used
to narrate my life in my mind while I walked the neighborhood
as a child? How I never moved my lips, but somehow
made more exciting that single horse farm on the corner,
the one without the palomino I imagined should have been there?
**Storyline
You see, after a while, you get tired of telling
the same old story again, the sad one, where you
are the interstitial animal living between grains
of ancient sand, separated from both
land and sea, by some careless hand that said
you were made to be lonely. And while I know
being a writer is solitary (how else will we ever
get these so-many-words out of our salty-sweet
minds?) I do not think anyone was made to be alone.