Trial by Error



A meandering trial by error
Reality is a collective battle of wills
When pink converse 
Is the boot on your neck
In
Heaven’s justice 
Up until this very moment 
Rendered an incomplete victory 
In dreams and fantasy 
Now breaking through the surface 
To manifest 
The vision of a mischievous spirit 
That exists solely to please and harass
The best of us 
In a perpetual 
Dark night of the soul 





Hospital Music



Hospital music 
On a winters morning 
The Lilly in the valley 
With you
We fall into 
A merging with the universe 
A buffet of beauty and the sublime 
Oscillating between heaven and hell

Unexposed Inbuilt Power


What would happen if you met death, and right then,
you realized you were not just a cat, but a tiger?
And time says: 'Sorry, I can't do anything for you now.
From now on, you are much more powerful than me,
as you frame with death'.
But wait I can salute you for trying positively harder
to prove— what you are— in reality.

If all this happens with our hypothetical set of civilizations,
won’t an inspirational lie, filled with unfruitful attempts, set off our reality?
For this, it would be good to support the non-existence of souls—
in any horizon of concepts, emotions, and conventions.
Dying— accepting the lie that we practiced is moral,
Rather than living a whole life in a lie and knowing your truth at last;
when we meet death; and have no power to perform anything.

But that doesn't mean to neglect the quest to find our truth.
If we are dog but feel that our soul has the nature of a wolf,
it's our right to find it out and respect our senses.
But only during the daytime of our life,
or else this respect for other senses might degrade the honor of our emotions;
if we know we were tigers during the time you met death,
yet lived a whole life like a domestic, dependent Cat.

from Sick, Poor, and Stupid

 
A world not given to moments
Of lyric intensity
Among the discount day care centers
Prolific anarchists comfortably ensconced within academia
Or White Castles metamorphosing into KFCs
After long periods of weedy pupation
Encampments cyclically erected and destroyed
Graffiti layered over graffiti until every person and piece of art is illegible
Bright flowers that speak to you the moment before you vanish
Wait what
Your last words


from Sick, Poor, and Stupid

 
There’s the violence of capital
And then there’s the Presidents’ Day Sale

cinema verite

i relive my youth
at the movies
pathetic
i know

leggy dames
i will never
know no
different than

the girls i
watch walk by
curving away
unglancing

while i sit
this side
of my own
invisible screen

***

"Too much drink..."


Too much drink
sprains the tongue
and bruises the brain.

The mind, crazed
with strange elixirs
runs out ahead,

the mumbling stumble
of swollen speech

tracks across a map
of dimly sensed inconsequence.

The Moustache

The gentlemen's fixation
With the classically stylish
And suave arrangement of
Facial hair was but vanity.
The handlebar represents
The epitome of refinement
Of the most masculine gents.
The mustache wax always
Selected with great care, 
Using just the right amount
Lest, after dining at the Y,
The lady's pubic hair can
Be left particularly stiff.
  

The Neighbor's Dog

The neighbor's dog
Woke me up today.
It's not all that bad.
I sleep till past noon.
In fact, the beast's
Barking and snarling,
Along with the screams
From pain and frantic
Calls pleading for help,
Made me smile and
Laugh.  God knows,
I hate our mailman. 

True Crime

Certain women joggers listen religiously to true crime podcasts, gathering survival tips. “Okay,” they repeat to themselves, “you don’t get in the van with the serial killer.” Neighbors install window bars and door cameras for extra security when it’s the agony in their own minds they should be protecting against. It’s them and their feverish ideas, in fact, that I fear most – more than sharks or the homeless or foreign terrorists. What a period it is, a time coated in dirt and flies that, years from now, people will view with something like wonder.

Not on TV 


One more saviour 
Drowns. 
One more art 
Is made muddy. 
One more heart 
Turns out to remain stranger. 
One more color 
Goes unnoticed. 
How will 
One more earth look? 
Same as this
My niece answers, 
And searches for 
Her sketch book. 
I turn off the TV 
And tell my dad, 
To start writing poems
On how my childhood was. 
Was I one more 
Hope for the clear days 
Or one more melting candle? 
I search for meanings 
In people's heart,
And not on TV. 

Consider the Moon

 
Cold face of darkness, shape-shifter
shadow-maker of the night

streetlight for space travelers
receiver of wishes and prayers

brief beacon for the unhoused
and those who flee their homes

strong enough to pull lakes
and oceans to their edges

the way the ideal of home
compels a child to return.

Ditch Road                     

                    
I’m trying to listen
to the day’s 

public radio news

driving home 
from work 

when suddenly two cars 

so full of teenagers
some are dangling out

windows race past me

and go squealing around
the next corner

into their parents’ subdivision

in such a reckless,
frightening daredevil move, 

I wince, swear at myself 

and almost forget  
it’s safe to breathe again.

 

Lessons
     After Reading and for Fred Voss

When you all I ever wanted
was to write. I believed all the myths:
the dying young, the tragic hero, and most
of all wild nights with a bottle in my hand.
I scoffed at amount people drank to get
high, quantities I needed just to get started
on a daily high. I could surpass them all
And while it didn’t escape my notice
that the people I revered were sticking their heads
in ovens, jumping off bridges, falling off bar stools
as good as dead, death was an abstraction.
I spilled my guys on page after page,
published some too but as I grew older
it felt hollow, necessary maybe, but if
you were going to end up in a derelict shack,
hearing voices and seeing shit that could never exist
before they put you in a halfway house to
the morgue well, it became clear
that dreams did have responsibilities and
that yes, as Hemingway’s bartender told the story
of the guy who said he the dt hallucinations
were fascinating on an intellectual level but
hell, to live through. You can’t write if being
alive is worse than being dead. Yes, it was
like that for a while, being legally drunk for three
years is overrated and then afterwards, the calm
that settled in is almost unnerving; one big blank
empty space. Maybe you really did need to be drunk
to write. All those memoirs by and about drunks
suggested the same things: once you get
to the end of the last bottle there is nothing left
but darkness, the end of all things including,
the alphabet. There is nothing abstract about that.
Now that you’ve been where the dead people
go, where the inseam live, it was time to study
the ones who survived. To cultivate the calm.
No one gets out of here alive anyway, you just
Don’t have to be 27 when you go. It took me fifty
years to learn I was already too late for the party.
How do you like your green-eyed boy now, Mr. Death.

r.i.p 2/2025