Poem: November 11, 2026

You Are the Architect of Your Own Misfortune

Look at you standing there,

At the drafting board, T-square

And pencil in your blue-smudged hands,

In a sense, red-handed, even branded

By the lines, perpendicular and parallel, 

Laid to your schematic, and now,

Dramatically thrown into the 3rd dimension,

And need I mention, a truer, grander scale,

To tower there, looming, accusingly

On their shaky foundations and compromised

Angles and materials, swaying hard, 

Your very own house of cards, so when

In the imminent moment that follows, you

Find yourself standing in the debris field

Of your carelessness, out of place among

The hard hats, in your khakis, tie and shirt,

You will see your own blue lines trace back to you.

Poem: November 10, 2026 B

REM

I open the box because it is full

of paths and oceans and forgotten rooms.

This is where we find our bags of wind

and barrels full of sweet apples.

This is the home of every lost thing-

pocket knife, buckeye, life magazine.

And the ghosts live here, of course. Where else?

Grandparent, teacher, childhood friend.

Shake the box and see what falls

to one side or to the other.

Shovel, waterfall, overalls, mother.

Stacks of photographs shuffled and dealt.

And some of it just felt- an anxious heart,

arrow wound, mist and smoke, that which chases

or that we chase, like the feathered flight,

the lightness of sunshine and lying in the grass,

everything past and made present,

made liquid and solid and gas.

To close the box is to open my eyes

in darkness, to be locked back into place.

Poem: November 10, 2026

Settled

The simmer pot rattles

and fills the house with

cinnamon, cardamom, clove,

warming the cold, settling

like dust, the smell of 

something old, worn, rich, gold,

the same as library stacks,

and vintage playing cards, 

and seasoned firewood,

The simmer pot rattles

like bones and wind 

against the windows,

And I settle like dust,

slow like wood and soil,

and this threadbare notion

that nothing good can come

from anything new or

straightforward or inorganic.

Poem: November 9, 2026

The Strange Nature of the Remembering Self

The leaves fall away like memories- 

a year of moments that, together, form a whole-

form Tree, form Self in TIme, until

in small, cold, breaths, 

our moments unmoor

and drift

and drift

and drift,

separate,

distinct, 

colors caught in the light, until,

again, the memory settles in

to a new, chaotic and colorful whole-

ground cover, not tree

Self in Abstract, not Self in Time-

rotting in beautiful, pungent layers,

and there we are, red and gold, and orange

smudges in the sweet mash,

a swirling impression of the life we’ve lived this year.

Poem: September 17, 2026

Beater

You move your arm a particular way

and feel the slice of age in your shoulder

that you hyperextended in a fit of ambition

Saturday at the gym, 

And that isn’t even your biggest problem these days, 

no need to count the ways in which your body 

is failing you because everyday is a new betrayal. 

The tooth that needed to be pulled,  so that, 

now, eating popcorn hovers somewhere between 

unpleasant surprise and disappointment,

Or the bulging disc that ensures that reaching

down to pick up the cat bowl or crossing your

leg to tie your shoe is a cruel test of tentative

flexibility in a minefield of aches, 

Or the inexplicable thinning of the skin 

on the surface of your nose, which often results 

in serious bleeding from just an errant scratch, 

real bleeding in the middle of the day, 

in the middle of your class, and now you have to

spend the next 15 minutes dabbing at your

honker with a Kleenex, 

And let’s not forget the pills, organized as they are 

into their daily compartments. This one to tame the 

prostate, this one to clear the veins, another

to keep the food from burning as it travels

through the body, and another to tamp down

the breathless pounding of anxiety. Actually,

8 pills and 5 supplements in all, 

And what can you do? 

The machine has been running continuously 

for 58 years. Of course the gears are slipping. 

Of course the hardware is stuck or chipped 

or missing or hidden in its greasy patina. 

What can you do? 

The pit stops on the way can only replace the fuel 

And fill the tires that will push you smoking and sputtering to the horizon.

Poem: January 21, 2026

Forecast

Just suggest the possibility

of snow on the horizon,

and I become truly useless.

The storm’s three days away

and on a weekend, but I am

already (mentally and

emotionally) in my PJs,

drinking cocoa, wrapped

in cats and reading books

with no intention of moving

forward or checking anything

off of my to do list.

I like the hush of snow.

I like the stuck of snow.

I like the no of snow.

Poem: January 16, 2026

Whateverpalooza

Nineties music is all crunch and grind–

granola and iron and the fine dotted line

of the edge of a razor blade.

It is a shrug in the cold. It is an old soul

that remembers and opens the battered doors

of young energy and mourning.

It is earthtones, true, with maybe one or two

bold colors– gold and concrete, violet

and tweed and a pocket watch.

It is time passing and threadbare flannel

and sincere aching for a world out of reach

and the irony of artful uncaring.

All emotion and boot leather and street

names remembered and hard weather and

what is better than what is here?

Patched as it is, and mismatched and cobbled

together, even if it’s the question no one

can or cares to attempt to answer.

It is the tapestry of hope and broken hearts,

the woven home of pirates and sprites, poets

and dusty romantics, madmen and saints.