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 

Share

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

Share

Prelude to a Runaway

running from
the past
but kept on
its long leash

wearing memories
with such fit,
I forget I have
anything on at all

I’m not sure
how long I’ll run,
if ever there’ll be
a sudden choke

maybe forever,
the past is a kind,
seemingly kind
dog owner

lets me forever roam
with only heated hints,
still so attached
to that home

gone and still
ultimately capable
of stopping me
at any time

so obsessed
with the running,
the illusory escape,

when the more consequential,
real liberating action:

a pause
in the vicinity
of the self
I no longer wish to be
for however many
needed hours

to finally
remove the collar

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

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!

Share

Subscribe now

Debtor's Depth

The beautiful moment
I couldn’t be content with
until further discovery

What was given
could only be
provisionally experienced
until some meaning
was found

And its finding,
to mean anything,
had to be intentional

So I shunned
the surface
on which all lay
and started below,

digging with
the strength
my curiosity provided

I never considered
the eventual effect
of this
on my seeing

All I gathered,
I never lifted

not realizing
the lack of light
I mistook for the lack
of everything else

Share Birds Watch Me

Share

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

Subscribe now

Share

Share Birds Watch Me

Homecoming at 39

oh fallen
leaf, mute
of color

lying now
as if trying
to listen to the root

thoughts of merging
if only
to return

to an inward height
a new mantra

veining through
dissolution:

“what green I’ve been
what branch I may become”

Share

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

Share

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

Share

Subscribe now

Prayer for Ice Fishers

I know how
this thick,
interceding,
freezing layer

preserves
at some depth
the capacity
of the soul to flow,

but without
outlet, how
can it not
mimic its keeper?

And so
I pray
for cracks
from above

Share

Subscribe now

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.

Share

Subscribe now

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

Share

Subscribe now

Shellshocked soldiers of your inner world now huddle together at a veterans club, day drinking and storytelling. Can’t move out of it, dispirited identity. Trenches of dug-out victim status. You defended yourself against that peculiar world you were born in.

Digging was especially necessary for those like yourself, born hillside. Your forefathers would have surely seen it as a place fit to build up. From good land, the urge to tower above rises when not actively suppressed. But alas, we were taught differently.

What it was for us, the privileged and unlucky. More ground to work with in covering us up. Greater depths we made accessible to hide from the accusatory onslaught. Last remnant of a winning line, tempted toward conceding.

Here’s the lining: We’re not entirely out of the grip of youth either, planting somewhere deep its last burst of strength.

A generation of potatoes, you, me, and our people. Hoarding within ourselves last memories of classic America. But potatoes can feed large populations in times of great famine, and their loss can be the cause of such episodes.

Still underground and not yet ripe, waiting to be dug, not knowing that we aided the wielders of the shovel that planted us down here to begin with.

Tubular flowering, what the next and most necessary revolution will look like.

Subscribe now

Share

*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.

Subscribe now

Share

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.

Subscribe now

Share

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.

Subscribe now

*this was first published on November 3rd, 2024 - but given our stupid world, seemed a good time for a repost.

The dog was dangerous. We all knew that.

We knew because we had repeatedly heard and read so. Quite rightly, the dangerous reputation preceded the fact of the dog itself, preceding it to such a degree, in fact, that all the most celebrated dog trainers in the nation advised citizens to warm up their kicking foot on approach. Every time it opened its mouth, we all knew a bite was coming.

Ironically, these famed and highly credentialed dog trainers helped to guide us just as much as the dogs in their care. Words can hardly convey the degree to which our reflexes developed, mostly thanks to their guidance. Over time, our interactions with the dog, as dog-bite victims, were characterized by reaction times so quick that, at first glance, it might seem as if we were the ones kicking first.

Of course, the public knew we were innocently defending ourselves, and justice-minded lawmakers always backed our claims. Charitable organizations were also formed to help reinforce this fact preemptively. Funds were set up to pay for PR representation for those who knew in advance that they would be in the dog’s vicinity.

And what essential services these charities helped provide. It took more than quick feet to fight the power of the dog on a national scale. Previews of press releases, announcing yet another violent encounter, were made available before the fact for any necessary edits. All soon-to-be victims were also advised to provide a photo of themselves that did not accentuate their capacity for defensive resources, so that their successful kicking resistance might be seen as all the more laudatory.

And yet, despite these efforts, the dog kept attacking. Even so, to our great credit, our resolve did not let up one bit. We, the good and justice-minded, found great meaning in our duty to preach the dangers of the dog. For the public good, we increased our volume as the number of victims multiplied.

As already expressed, this ordeal has gone on for so long that we could not help but develop ourselves in opposition. Knowing all too well of the dog’s unfailing plan to attack, we became quick indeed at kicking back.

This did entail a potential risk, though. Observers, unvetted independent dog trainers that perhaps had sneaked into line of sight, might be inclined, and this is an assertion so ridiculous that I can hardly write it, to say that we, the victims, the incessant and continual victims of this dog’s attacks, might actually be kicking first.

In any case, a people endangered for so long naturally end up developing certain traits. And our ability to act decisively but defensively really became unmatched.

If any video evidence existed at all of an initial encounter, we had to train our official sources to look more for the mauling intent in the eyes of the vicious dog than even the act of the bite itself. The dog’s infamy, well deserved and wholly self-inflicted, had grown to such a degree that even those with average reflexes had become so proficient in defending themselves that their actions could conceivably be misinterpreted as an instigation.

Of course, this was just the lie of appearance. The captured image, as we stressed to our public, was not the truth of the matter. It was deceptive without the context that only the best dog trainers could apply. And the context was the dog’s distinct history of aggression.

A history that was self-evident, thanks to our rich legacy of reporting on it, and really, to our credit, only on it. So that anyone well informed, and since we have done so much to disseminate the danger, we too must be given credit for this, could always make out the intent of aggression in that evil dog’s eye, making it deserving of every courageous kick given it.

And so, we kept kicking and kicking, but we had to, because the stats did not lie. Dog-bite victims were only increasing. At each and every juncture in the crisis, further escalation had always proved necessary.

And this is what led to our famous last stand. A rumor had started that fellow dogs, kept in kennels as our pets, had begun to sympathize with the biting dog who had been deservingly kicked so much. These other dogs had not bitten yet, but knowing dogs, we knew it was only a matter of time. True, most were good dogs, but the fact was they were still dogs.

To fight the dogs en masse, we needed the bite of the dogs en masse. But to get that, we preemptively needed to incite them to reveal their true, dangerous character. So, we grouped them all in close proximity to the evil biting dog, the one we all knew, and then began to close in, charging to make our final defensive stand.

How many pre-kicks will it take before the biting commences and we can officially start kicking? The cameras are not rolling yet. They are waiting for the unofficial prologue to end and for the origin story of our great defensive crusade to, shall I say, kick off.

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.

Subscribe now

Share

More constraints, yes, but also the opportunity for a form better defined. To no longer be limitlessly young, at the age now where I’m more a poem than prose. Some things, out of necessity, must rhyme. And yes, limits are now placed on the meter. I must fit this thought to this length of line, this length of time. The time left allotted, the place, the beauty comes from this fit. The perfect word for the rhyme, the closest match to meaning. Nothing compromised, because the form itself cannot be compromised.

Hold yourself to this standard. The life left to live is still a poem waiting. You may no longer have the seeming boundless possibilities of blank youth. You’ve waited, you’ve taken this path, then turned back, then taken another, then slowed your pace out of anxiety.

Become now the villanelle. This and that aspect of yourself, this past-defining event, oh, it can’t be totally erased. It will need to fit into the structure. No longer a life of blank verse ahead of you, and yet the future is even richer for that fact.

This isn’t a limit on yourself. You are the limit, what is unchangeable. The aspects of yourself you cannot diminish can still be made to rhyme with a greater fate tomorrow.

Why this line from yesterday? Because it was a setup, as demanded by the structure, for the line you are about to write, which now lands that much more forcefully, which is to say poetically, because of the setup demanded.

Subscribe now

Share

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.

Subscribe now

Share