A poem about the tension of living at the periphery as a social being — Friend, I know you suffer, I know the pain of digging deep into the blackness, where despair awaits to hand you all its crumpled memories. But the call from the abyss is like the plaintive song of the whales searching for an answer, an echo in those mystic depths. You…

A poem about no longer belonging and moving on — We’ve all been ghosts at one time or another, returning to places we once belonged. Today, I became a phantom, haunting the halls of classrooms where I once told stories, taught math, read poems; a place where I spent more hours than home. At the school’s winter fair I…

A poem about letting go of becoming immortal by your works — Into my cave of a studio I turn on the torch-style lights, and a trove of hundreds of creations instill me with wondrous delight. Canvases upon canvases, large and small strata of meditations and countryside walks; some I remember their conception, others, born in a mysterious fog. I greet…

A poem and commentary about the illusion of death — Believing you were born, I exist. When you know otherwise, I’m not. Your belief in you and the other adorns me in a cloak, with each stitch a fabrication of your deeds, words, and thoughts. When I pull down my cowl, you place upon me a mask, created by your…

An ekphrastic poem about the guidance of angels — It is the wings of angels that guide these words, pulling my finger from the upraised hairs upon my neck. Under the gray skies of clouded thoughts, like dust kicked up by the tired traveler’ walk, forms await discovery in this valley where death’s temple has been carved by forgetting…

An ekphrastic poem — sail, beloved explorer ascend with the moon upon this sea of consciousness return across the honeyed waters of your dreams where existence and the void become meaningless in the silence of settled being follow the light-fashioned passage keeping shut the box where your worn compass lies let your sail be…

A poem about letting go — it is only fitting that i am sitting on the shitter every morning more regular than meditation my bowels seek emptiness and i am ready to let go yesterday’s ingestions i pick up hemingway or ramana or whatever reads that awaits on the floor to fill my morning mind with words…

And why would I even care? — As a long-time Beatles fan, I was excited to listen to the final Beatles song, “Now and Then,” on YouTube. Hearing John’s voice so clearly in this melancholic song watered my eyes with a sweet, nostalgic mist. As the channel’s all-knowing algorithm analyzed my viewing activity, I saw a reaction…

A dream poem and commentary about war and children — We milled about, our gray uniforms indistinguishable from the battlefield, the blood camouflaged by the muck, our eyes unblinking in this lull behind the lines. Then she arrived, a soldier as besmirched as the rest, but she wore yellow clovers stuck within the mud of her uniform, little suns that…