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The fence has no yard to border
and the driveway is on fire.
The two car garage shields an empty cave.
Its automatic doors are two loose teeth
in a mouth without a tongue.
You open the front door and step inside
and there is a stranger sitting on your couch.
Your neighbors have the flu
and your children are coloring inside the lines.
These are the things we have come to know.
These are the things we have come to understand.
When the lights go out, we wander in the dark.
We use a flashlight for a sword.
We find the power bill sitting on top of a Bible
and a picture of a man that looks like you
charred and half torn by the fireplace.
there is nothing there when you look back,
just the open field that sagged
and dropped into the throat of the forest.
your grandmother is burning leaves,
holding a rake like a comb
and when the pine cones popped
and the briar vines curled in the fire
you caught a glimpse of your future—
a deja vu remembered,
a flash of what you would one day become,
a monster, a devil,
a juggernaut of words and thoughts
but now, bringing you back
to the field, your grandmother, the fire,
your shoe falls into a hole
and you feel the stings on your ankle
before the crunch of the hive under your foot
and with that backwards momory,
that inward peer into what you will become,
you take with it
a nest of bees to name your children.
(Note: a very old draft of a poem that would later inspire another, much more concise poem that will be included in my second collection, still being shopped around).
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My poem “A Brief Afterlife” is now up at Prick of the Spindle.
It is a poem from my 2nd collection, which is currently being shopped around.
As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.
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we have prayed the prayers of paperbacks,
kneeling in the confessionals of antique shops
with no rosary, just the tarnished silverware and lamps,
no Baptist hymnal, just the Dickens first editions.
But we have come to know a few things with certainty:
there are more planets than hairs on your head.
when it gets hungry enough, the rabid wolf will self-disembowel.
every book ever printed has absorbed the scent of someone’s father.
there is indeed a light for us all, waiting to be claimed
like the pedestrian picked up by a gaunt southern gentleman.
And when he shifts the truck into Drive,
the gears sound like a throat, like a ragged voice
and it is saying “Hallelujah.”
(note: this is a very early, shorter draft of my poem “How Prayers are Built” which was published at Hobo Camp Review, June 2011. If interested, you can read the final version, which is a bit different than this one, here.)
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When we passed the house where you grew up,
the car forgot its wheels
and you ran your fingers through your hair
like sifting through sand.
The back roads unwound like a spool of dark thread,
knitting up that one mistake
and when the crows set their sails from the trees
I pretended not to see you cry.
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it concerned him to know
that we walk up and down stairs while awake,
subservient, obedient,
all smart phones, lip gloss,
and concrete shoes;
and while he sleeps he can think
of nothing but burning buildings,
all those stairs devoured one by one
and he can’t stop stepping down.
and in his sleep, he’s smiling.
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Our bedrooms are tiny squares.
No windows or doors, just coffins stretched out
and moderately furnished as if there would be
nothing to occupy our time in the afterlife.
When you awake, you claim it is the sun
that caused your hangover and not the bars,
the blonde waitress with the low cut shirt or
the need to drink away that thing your father said.
Age has suited you. The only complaint
you have at your ready is something benign about
the weather, taxes, or the way the newscaster glares
at you like he knows where you sleep.
(Originally accepted for an untitled Sylvia Plath collection from Gold Watch Press; later published in my collection A Mouth for Picket Fences, currently available in paperback and Kindle version on Amazon).
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go into the closet that once hid you from monsters
and take the dingy sheets from the top shelf.
put those sheets on the mattress
that smells like your grandmother’s back room
although it has not been there for more than eleven years.
make the bed and then open a window to let the autumn breeze in.
ignore the song of blue birds and the rustling of weeds;
it might sound like applause but it is only nature clearing its throat,
letting you know that the car is now coming down the driveway
and your parents are bringing him back.
bringing him back to the house he built with his own hands,
bringing him back home to occupy this room,
this bed of integral dreams and sleepless nights.
bringing him back home to die.
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rising slopes of mountains
purple in the dusk,
shy from the rolling thunderheads
that graze their summits like fists
(originally published at A Handful of Stones).
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there is a ghost in this room;
it does not haunt, it does not move the chairs
but it remembers what skin is like:
the beating of a heart, the relief and sting of weeping,
the pleasant burn of coffee on a winter morning.
and when i feel the hairs on my neck and arms
standing on end like children pledging allegiance,
i know it is him
and that he is only reminding me
to enjoy this life while i can.
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My poem “Demolished Tongues” is currently up at Every Day Poets. (link in “blip” above)
One of my more abstract poems, the idea came to me while doing an interview wherein I described my personal feelings on writing darker poetry: to me, the aging man that has recently lost his wife, sitting in his shed alone, drinking a beer and tinkering with his lawnmower engine in silence is much darker than the blatant killer or a zombie lurching through the woods.
“Demolished Tongues” was meant to be about loss, anger, and disrepair.
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the ceiling fan sounds like an ocean at midnight and
when you make love, the bed becomes your ouija board;
you can’t stop yourself from making your hands move
of their own accord
to touch a life that was never yours.
they only moan because they have forgotten how to weep.
*(originally accepted for These Reflections: An Anthology Dedicated to Ezra Pound and later included in my first collection, A Mouth for Picket Fences through Needfire Poetry).
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