Aug 30
BRITTLE ENOUGH TO SHATTER I can feel the strain in my weakened muscles, the crunchy, broken cartilage marinated in the blood and sinew of my throbbing left shoulder— I was born to fall apart, to make bad choices against the advice of medical professionals, bad choices who haunt me now that I’m middle aged and …
Aug 20
PLAYING GOD SO I CAN WATCH THE WORLD BURN I used to play SimCity on the library computer, tasked with designing my own miniature metropolis. The object was world prosperity inside a Macintosh screen, but it was more amusing to build things in a faulty manner: Skyscrapers toppled over, freeways ramps led cars over steep …
Jul 14
ON BOB KAUFMAN’S 100th BIRTHDAY Gray skies on Good Friday over a nameless super tramp, thumbing my way up north until I’m at the cross streets where I was born to become a ghost in between the lines and in between the pauses where the music fades beautifully— a pain worth sticking around for, wisdom …
Jul 04
DEATH BY DISTRACTION People fly out of car windshields in collisions because they can’t pull their eyes away from their phones— they forgot how dangerous it was to pursue dopamine boosts, cheap thrills that can kill them like their votes killed this country, people dragged from their homes, people and their rights erased by self-serving …
Mar 17
CHET BAKER’S EMBOUCHURE No longer able to hit notes without a set of natural teeth— but he kept at it, didn’t let it silence the golden sound within him, and, in spite of his demons, he learned how to play again. Music elevated him above a self-imposed gutter, who left wrinkled valleys across his dented …
Mar 05
Poem for Robert Kennedy, Jr. When I am (finally) declared King of the World, I will send all billionaires to health farms for their “personal failures” where they will work for zero wages until they learn the true meaning of human empathy and what it’s like to have real problems outside of an ambition that …
