The Good in Me

What once
showed itself
too briefly

and honestly

was unable to keep
pace with my
increasing elevation

germination
too prone to
rain dancing
for more soil 

and years passed
uphill,

and years passed
uphill.

Now at the treeline
I keep watch
for straggling seedlings

that slow as they may be

crucially
never slowed 

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Fellow American, increasingly, there is being built a kind of Berlin Wall between us and our history, and my hunch is we are to the east of it.

History progresses, you think. Of course we can’t go back. But it’s worse: you are actively prevented from doing so.

By what?

First, of course, laws. Social pressure too: to openly express a too ardently nostalgic wish, especially when we are talking about the heartlands of the past rather than just its border regions with today, is seen as suspect.

But really, most of all, by ourselves, though unintentionally so. We consume too freely the ideas propagated to us, their self-designated labels as consensus truths. We swallow ourselves into perspective determinism. Everyone knows the story of the 1960s goes like this, means this, is a triumph representing this, etc. (The meaning of the 1960s is but one of a myriad examples, “many such cases” as the saying goes.)

Above all, what they don’t want you to ask: is it possible that most of what was lost was actually stolen?

To lose something feels like an Act of God, a fact to be disappointed at but ultimately accepted. Acceptance then fades out the energy associated with the adverse event. To have something stolen, however, inspires in any person with a reasonable supply of agency a program of recovery, and a desire that the perpetrators may face justice.

Bad weather, the decline of civilization, who’ll blame the sky for its rain?

I think it’s a movie set. The thunder crackling, a thunder sheet struck to the left of the frame. A lot more is staged than you think. And you may be just an extra, but you’ll be asked to stay for the entirety of filming.

And not nicely.

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Out of desperation for a deeper silence, I uttered my first words. My expressions, mute as they were, had begun to give too much away. Yes, involuntarily, but this is also to say more truthfully than I had wished. I needed control over the giving of any part of myself. No part of me could be allowed to work independently; it must always report back to the whole, a unified conception of self that only the most conscious aspect of my being had authority to impart. In short, I decided my path was in the arts.

To direct a light in one direction is also to shade another. I wanted to retain myself entirely, giving only a greater appearance of expression. Not to share the self, but the self-created self, which is to say something other than me, but of me. The man who only wants to share his fruit. The apple tree camouflaging the leaves, so that it appears to burn all red in the summer sun. And when the leaves finally do change colors, it is only to become more fruit-like in appearance.

I wanted to give and be the gift. Self-creating the self, arrival without precedent. An artist is always born in a deep shade, if truly left to their own devising devices.

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May as well admit what my way of living has already long since confessed: I am content to live in the imagination. There’s an unreality I’ve cocooned myself in, and it has generally sufficed. But should it?

The missed world turns into a cousin of memory, imagined memory itself. Experiences, upon sober reflection, that were in fact within my physical reach, but were bypassed out of fear. Or was it just as I’ve described: a literally imagined sufficiency?

Youthful powers of spirit and body squaring off, with the intangible almost always coming out ahead. Advertised as this generation’s fight of the century, it certainly hasn’t lived up to its billing. Our poor senses, overmatched.

But here is how the balance of power plausibly changes: assume the soul’s immortality. Meaning, it is the firstborn. It has been the older brother in this fight the whole time - of course it’s had the advantage.

Oh world at my physical fingertips, I have begun to believe this: my experience, rather than my conception, of you is about to hit its own version of puberty. Soon, perhaps today, it will begin to hold its own in this tussle of brothers.

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I knew Spring once, but I stopped speaking. Funny, I must have thought the summer was implied. But it wasn’t, and that spring of mine faded without resolution, compressed petals falling clenched. And, as it wasn’t the season for foliage, what did fall found no audience. Oh hints of blooming, I relied too much on the context of youth.

It’s less that what I produced was not seen, and more that what I started to make was not seen through. I silenced myself before giving the world a chance to listen. I attributed that self-silencing to everything beyond me. But, on final count, the blame falls only here, like a spring rain in a city with its mouth closed by concrete. It was I who shoved the roots and buds together, so tight that not even a seed could fit between them.

But still, any forthcoming summer would not be out of order. Oh late saving grace of a chronology only stalled, not shuffled. The right flight, long delayed, is still far more useful than boarding the wrong one on time and finding yourself, at its conclusion, somewhere utterly foreign, for which your passport is not valid, waiting only in detention until eventual removal.

Oh Spring, finally you’ve reminded me of what I have yet to do. I hope you will not judge my slow, shy steps too harshly. Anyways, if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit you’ve procrastinated in coming this year too. (Perhaps there’s a little bit of New England in my becoming too.)

Spring, I accept your invitation. How wonderful to discover that, as the flowers open, so too do doors. No longer ignoring this weight on my branches, I understand more and more that your promises can only be kept in direct sunlight. To come out again before the world, with an opening not choreographed by the reputation of the season, just dancing to the same music, giving the appearance, naturally, of Spring and I finally in lockstep.

What was once silence now, to remain so, must be silenced. Oh God, we pray with no audience in sight. How much less faith is required to present our own words to the visible world. If nothing else, I pray that my own prayer may be audible. I speak to myself, but will now make sure to do so also in the vicinity of others. This is how I will find an audience. They will be near because they share something with me, and thus my speaking becomes intelligible. My words to myself are intercepted, and so I am spared accusations of insanity.

This time it will be up to the world to decide not to listen. I will no longer make that decision for it.

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In the spirit of the season, and with the assurances of my speaking, why don’t you susbcribe?

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Gloucester Easter Fog

To ride the 
breaking surf
is to understand
there’s no arriving
upright,

destination splash,

Easter morning
in a fishing village,
on a beach now
with fewer
fishers of men,
more surfers 
of waves,

yet colleagues
in spirit 

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Do not take to heart judgments that come from too close at hand. What good is a surveyor who lacks all height and distance?

These judgments, mind you, are not necessarily directed at you, but at the world at large. Crowded by those to whom you are unknown, they, in asking the world to be different, are really only trying to change, or create, your opinion on the matter - that you may be led to believe the same. From there, a sterile union of collectivity, but no community, ensues.

Consider this image: a circle of figure painters who never look beyond the person ahead of them for inspiration as a model. Taken as a whole, the character of the loop never changes, though it is always shifting.

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oh joy
of creation,
return!

for too long
what might be
remained unborn!

that I still can
transfigure, transcend
not to lose
but to arrive
at the day!

a little work,
kneading uncertainty,
understanding obscurity
does not rule out
but in fact points toward
absolute clay!

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Vault Sweet Vault

vault door
kept cracked

peeking in
looking back

what’s piled
within eyesight
and out of reach
quiets the grasp

the lie
of the big impossible heist

snatch a little
spending money

you’ve got something
from it now
enough to get
you somewhere new

prospector
with more sunrises to pan

the trove
protected
from the world

but years
added a closer threat

becoming more worldly yourself

one eye on each
yourself
and those memories

not the looting
the keeping
now even from you

it’s time
past time

for the shutting
of that heaviest of doors

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Share Birds Watch Me

Lacking,
now backing
into all-
consuming want,

asking, then not
thinking
the asking
is taking effect,
so more asking…

all the while,
each one on target
striking the
intended dam

until a simple
drinking fountain
is freed but immediately
compounded

and what was empty
now can’t
retain

the torrential
blessings

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Two Parts

Part fatalist,

for I’m sure
I’d never have
happened upon
this turn-off
on my own,

so I trusted the universe

until it was time
to trust myself more
and turn

onto a path
that would never
have been set upon

if not chosen

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A Localized Spring

It was you
who went beyond
the branch’s
pretty remarks
of wet,
cuddled snow.

“Who are you,”
the question,
somehow shaking
much of it off,

returning it
to better posture,
though perhaps
less immediately
picturesque.

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Words into Woods

As for
these human words,
untreated,
pouring out…

I can see how they 
and all like them
are a stream 
in the deep woods,

if not now then soon,

they’ll be only drinkable
through some great filter,
or by boiling,
into a stillness

drying up
on the passing through

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*Looking back through some notes/free writing from late August 2025, the following are some fragmentary words written on a Budapest balcony, 16 Nepszinhaz Utca, District VIII.

Let us write freely for a second. Oh Budapest morning, outside on a Népszínház balcony. The street alive, the air blown by its activity. Oh fresh awakening. Bricks worn down and ready for more wearing. A day that fits perfectly on my soul.

Street sweepers in yellow, dispatched to prove that even vicious notoriety is just another removable dust. A cigarette butt of spent reputation. Rust, deeply rusted iron, the now uncertain curtain. I love a people still a people. What shuffling lives, better at protecting something within themselves that belongs to nobody else. The mixing is a surface distraction, while a depth remains secure.

Oh traditional safes, what codes learned by heart and forgotten by busy, surface-shuffling days. And yet the fog burns off, that shining again, the inner sanctum. Candles are not lit so much as reborn or risen. Oh wick, alive only at the mercury of daily eclipse and retreat. Oh mercury, lightning and otherwise mercy.

The moments know what they bring, or at least offer a fair fight. There is no moment that contains more than our worries. Our worries packed, packed, packed full. The moment itself has only so much space.

We live in a strange era of wealthy pseudo-communists, the universalists who want to transform every particular. Oh particulars, unannounced, glory to your safety. We who never planted deep, but who do not think of those depths as foreign at all, do not aspire to paved-over progress. If we cannot slow ourselves down, we at least feel the loss.

The street is already built and in need of repairs. Realistically, tearing it all down and starting over is no longer an option. A refreshing of some facades, but many structures are sound, designed in an era with better taste. Designed then as they could not be now. Another reason not to tear it all down. You do not want wholly modern architecture in your soul.

Oh these classic designs, what brought you up is lifting differently now. Maintain the height, but patch the weathering. Today, old street, I see a hole in a roof. Openness, but hardly as soon as I notice it, two eyes peer through. Your childhood, the early days, like the self designed as a city before a world of cars, adult efficiency, streamlined design, souls on a grid.

Lived-in, they say. Oh history, layers of meaning. Tram lines set, jumping on and off these habits. So long as I get off at the right stop, they help me through the day. Novelties are not walkable, needing a personal vehicle. Reinventor of self, and outside it, a world seeming totally new.

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Call me screen Gandhi, because I am going on a news fast. No more filling up on mass-produced information. What falsity I cannot bend, I refuse to grip.

Oh world falsely painted in so many images, I refuse to step in that gallery. How can I refute it at the time of it’s celebrated opening, its ticketed showing? As an onlooker, there is no way to not be outclassed. As an audience member, good or bad, your presence contributes to the appearance of success for a mediocre or malicious artist. So I do not enter that false world at all.

One man opting out, may I be the beginning of a leak in this dammed aspect of the collective unconscious.

Looking for the world, but not in the mode of a viewer. Nothing readymade, preconfigured. Consciousness as an experiential homemaker.

I was barking up a number of tall trees. But how many of them there were in this honest forest. Maybe I am not a woodland creature at all? Maybe it is the seas in which I want to bathe? Some more expansive, truthful depth. Less overhead view and yet somehow more connected.

I am learning, slowly, how to defeat the modern pulse. The zig, the zag, containing so many steps, leading ultimately nowhere.

What is, but will not be, speaks loudest.

It is not that I am consuming nothing, or making that impossible ideal my goal. It is that I hush the pedestrian messengers, that I may better receive farther sounds. Intuition. What feels born within has more distant sources than the rabbling talk of the day.

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I feel deep within me something that periodically comes out unsettled. Oh, I feel anxious, but I realized this: how lucky I am to feel anxious.

Why is it lucky? Well, let’s ask ourselves, what is the cause of anxiety?

When we put off something we need to do, a task we are meant to complete, we naturally feel anxious. To avoid it further only exacerbates the feeling.

So if we, at least periodically, find ourselves facing down a deep-seated anxiety, it might actually be a sign.

No, no mights. Blessed be my anxiety, it is surely a sign I am meant for more.

This slow evening after plateauing on a job that never was and could never be my calling. Oh, if that were all that I was made for, I would get off work feeling deserving of unproductive relaxation. Like those who know in their soul they have done a day’s worth of soul-fulfilling work, employing their whole self, to then guiltlessly collapse into relaxing hours with no hitch in their fall. Self-preservation, family preservation, mind you, is innately soul-fulfilling. A starving man hunts with his full self.

Anxiety is not necessarily a direction, but a confirmation of misdirection, a prelude to better steering. But more than that, a sign also that we are still chosen, still asked to do something more. By whom? Well, at root, ourselves, some fate that lives with us, trapped, buried under, lost in some depth of our blood seas.

Thank God for anxiety, God’s nudge that there is something put off, which means available and waiting. Better to have something put off rather than only an abyss beckoning.

Yes, there is yet something great to do. Something my unused spirit has been stored for, in absolutely sufficient capacity.

Oh, what horror it would be to have a life with nothing to show for it, and then not even anxiety. Anxiety, that new moon still pulling at our defining waves even at the darkest hour.

No use pretending, we live at the change. Increasingly, our memories are of less value. Adding up what has been lost, when no direct replacement is possible, is a waste of time. What will not return is best forgotten, except in general spirit. Our better guides, the proper ones left to us, speak in new words. The past is a kind of Latin. Certain prefixes and roots of this new language are informed by it, but where we are going, this Latin will make us intelligible to no fellow traveler.

Tomorrow, we will confront those whose whole mission is a tearing down of the past. They are the destructive force, and they do seem to have the initiative. To counter them, our first instincts say that against those who would destroy, we must be the agents of preservation. Preservation tempts us to become our whole mission, a most natural reaction.. But this is no way to win against an energized spirit of destruction. What is preserved today still has a mark on its back tomorrow. It still whiffs of the past.

Instead, we must break up with the past. And then we must will ourselves to win the breakup, not looking back in anger. That is the difference between the destroyers and the creators. We have moved on, they have not. Their inability to move on expresses itself in an exaggerated show of moving on. This is what destruction entails. They are spiteful, resentful due to their self-perception of registering low in the former order. Thus, they question the idea of order altogether. They are no friends of any civilization.

We, all my proper friends, mortal foes of barbarism, are more prone to sentimentality. Being sentimental is like a good stiff drink. We can enjoy it moderately in times of reflection, but we must never abuse it. And should we one day even become teetotalers, in regard to sentimental reflection, it might be for the best.

This is because our destructive foes have left much creative work ahead for us. As we speak, they are burning the blueprints, the instructions, God and the Canon, Western civilization itself, reducing it to nothing more than a bonfire, extraneous warmth, mood lighting really, at some drunken orgy. And they think they have left us with nothing.

But friends, are not such valleys, as the worst among them are just now putting their finishing revolutionary touches on, calling out, in fact always calling out, even if now just a mist of a whisper, like once dense city blocks now cleared for miles, calling for some new building project? Something that aspires to be snow-capped in appearance? Saplings, in the shade of old growth, who did not call forth the lightning, but who anyway are now left with ashes they increasingly think of only as fertilizer.

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Symmetry of self, of traits, of place: a plea. Please return.

Ambition without patience is growth by tumor. The best conquests come to you organically, within reach of a strength honed beforehand, and are then born flexing, another gain of self.

Caesar in a rush is capable of growing only a lopsided empire. He presents as a lopsided figure. This, in time, impedes movement. That which began as a rush cannot sustain even a more modest yet still consistent pace. Real conquerors and real marathon runners are brethren in this. They must learn to pace. To conquer your life is no wind sprint.

The asymmetry of impatience is a necessary corollary. It is growth, a growth spill rather than a growth spurt.

There are false destinations toward which we unnaturally begin to slow before our time. For the sake of our ego, we lie to ourselves, we gently fool ourselves, convincing ourselves that this slowing is due to an impending arrival, one at which we claim we aimed all along. Thus we begin to perceive of pit stops as potential homes when, in fact, our fate is still a long way off.

Many of our previous self-additions, traits, even memories, gains in identity, will need to be lopped off to regain speed again, to maximize our aerodynamic potential.

Which ones need to go? The inorganic, rushed upon and greedily consumed into the self. What has become too much a part of me, sacrificing my symmetry? The foreign I.

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Opening Shorelines

Christmas tree,
Grandma,
Christmas
is here

sure and shore-footed
finding its
allotted ledge
of the year

unmonitored
direction
in the all
of its voice

total immersion
in the sands
of limitless
worn down choice

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Share Birds Watch Me

Port of inspiration, I wish to remain open.

I must calm myself into a bay, so that ships may land, ships of insight, nothing I could have imagined, seen on the horizon through the fog, taking anchor. What I could never have built now unloads: the most exotic cargo upon my shores. And somehow, miraculously, it is mine now to distribute.

Let me give back in the form of its ultimate dispersion.

You understand why the world is so barren now, right? All of us, our waters, are continually whipped and ripped, and the cargo loads, the payloads, that might have passed along routes just beyond the horizon note the storm shoreward and keep themselves at sea. Lonely shores we are: rocky and sea-soaked.

Make time for emergent bays, and there is no telling the ultimate goods that will come from them.

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