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.

Poem: January 15, 2026

Picture Frame

Not that I’m looking to go anywhere,

but as I was watching our lives pass by

in random order, flicking along every six

seconds on the digital picture frame–

you and I riding bicycles in Key West;

Riley, Sophie, and Annie leaning into

one another on the couch on Christmas Eve;

the cats as kittens; cousins and beach vacations;

and, again, you, illuminated and sweater-

bundled in the fire’s dancing shadow-glow–

I had this moment in which I noticed

the tap and ticking whisper of the clock.

And I remembered this moment a few years

back: Dinner on the back deck with

the whole family, and my mother’s hand

on the back of my father’s arm, and then

spoken softly, It’s been a good life.

Poem: January 14, 2026

 The Consequences

Covid broke this generation.

You can see it in what is absent–

the lack of social stamina,

the physical folding in of the body

when burdened with too many

people for too long of a time.

And also the intolerance for

time on task or ideas outside

of their own ideas (which

themselves seem empty of passion

or direction or wonder).

You give them a space in which

to write their responses to

important questions, and they don’t

put much there, if anything at all.

And the worst offense to them,

it seems, is to be someone

who asks too many questions or

asserts too many claims based 

on the institutional memory

of the system that broke down

and betrayed them in 2020.

Poem: January 13, 2026

Perception Is Reality

We are sitting in a circle

all around the room

discussing philosophy,

and the kids can’t help but

see that the ignorance

that Socrates is illustrating

for Glaucon has lingered

with us across the centuries,

as if it is hard-wired

into us. It is the reason

for our contentious politics,

and it is the reason that

some of them will stay close

to home when choosing a college.

It is their refusal to trust

some and their insistence 

on trusting others because, 

given the choice between

bright lights and shadows, 

they know that beauty 

is in the eye of the beholder.

Poem: January 12, 2026

Allegory of the Cave

You open the door, and an alien

is standing there, probably backlit, 

as those guys usually are– big head,

long, pointy fingers. The kind

of eyes that reveal worlds.

And because this is an alien and, 

presumably, technologically advanced,

he can speak to you in your own language.

And he says, You’ve got it all wrong.

What you think is real– your bathrobe

and your cup of coffee, the bare

limbs of the sugar maple in winter,

the warm waves of the space heater,

even the alien in your doorway, are

a misconception, a miscommunication of

your senses and the particular, meaty

circumstances of life on planet Earth.

But fortunately for you, the alien is here

to fix that for you, to lift you upward

(in a manner of speaking) into his awaiting

transdimensional, cerebral habitat,

for which you have no prior conception,

so that you can know what really is,

so that you can be rid of all this human

foolishness, so that you can rip away

all of the filters that limit you to

oatmeal and bicycles and Argyle socks.

Will this be painful? Of course, this will

be painful. Will there be a probe?

There will always be a probe. But 

imagine the scintillating emergence!

Imagine the electric and prismatic you!