As my wife snuck into our son’s room to swap his tooth
for money, I imagined this scene playing out decades ago,
Dad, tired from a long day’s work, keeping his fingers crossed
that I stay asleep, Mom, tired too, tiptoeing to my bed that…
Before the election, I was on a panel discussing how its outcome might impact the pace of action on climate change. A consensus emerged that even though tackling climate change has become a partisan issue, many of the actions required […]
art is for the rich
(the world has gone bananas)
artists should be poor
I write this list in the spirit of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Indeed, there is a lot of overlap, and I encourage you to read his list too!
At seventy-eight and eighty-one, Mom and Dad
are still going strong. Halfway between twelve and thirteen,
Chance, our Beagle, is still going strong. Civilization…
The first time I was called a poet, I took offense,
for poetry is good for nothing: it neither
makes love nor wages war, nor pays the bills.
Christmas lights went up early this year
(not a whiff of snow, the pines immature)
to ward off nightmares with forced cheer.
To my tongue, honeysuckle tastes fibrous and bitter, like
any common shrub or vine. I only know its sweetness indirectly:
hummingbirds guzzling the nectar like a newborn
her mother’s milk while I sit in the shade and imagine
a branch soaked in honey, my head forced back,
sugar dripping down my throat like a panacea.
I dreamt I was a kelp forest swaying in pitch-
-black waters. Above me moonlight fluttered
like confetti and seagulls roosted on cliff-sides
and buoys. An oil tanker drifted by, the workers
Near-half want me dead.
It was all a joke they said.
Love pulls just ahead.