some poems written during the summer and fall of 2025.

Trees and Treeing

The tree is treeing no longer and you watched it fragment into hundred of shattered branches dancing out the door.
My entangled arms caressed the lightning streams
and my knotted eyes were too weak to see
the danger posed
by those without time.
I felt the pebbles at my feet
and watched them manicure the calm elapsed by twisted green and forgotten shade.

Did you know I heard the hushed voices
and watched the embers entertain
a circle bound
to the rhythm
of a fading flame?

It was all a speck, shrugged off skin, the same that autumn granted and abandoned
in the slushy torment where I lounged, ambivalent and still standing.
Did you see my delight in the afternoon rain
that extended from that young woman’s young children’s playdays
before she filled the house with strangers who bury mice at my feet
and say strange prayers that may be older than me.

Old women are are young children
and strangers forget that cuts scratch out decades and instants all the same
I am the tightest circle in my trunk and the weakest digit in my outstretched palm.
I am comfort and charity, endurance and envy, absolute and absent
as i slouch toward your rotting concrete
the same that I happily cracked with my thundering feet.

I heard them say
they’d cut me down
on Thursday
But I only thought, which one?
They extend across the horizon, unbroken and complete.
But you live without time
And I pity the day of the weak.


August 17th, 7am

I play the body game of getting lost in flailed limbs. It is my birthday. I am alone, playing the body game of getting lost in greens turned blue. And then again, back to green. I’m trying to reassure myself of my self in a way. I gathered people I enjoy spending time with, and kept saying that I really just want good conversation, laughs. There’s this repetition, as if I’m trying to convince myself, I’m not sure if others hear me lost in the loop, the reassurance. I guess it is a part of acknowledging and moving past other lives I’ve had.

A new poem about dancing

And I return
Blue slipping past
A smudged edge
Charcoal on the bridge of my hand
Extending the fragment of my finger tip
Til collapse, catastrophe
And I return, the arch bending, tracing, murmuring
“Have you ever fallen”
Of course!


Punk Time

A court date is the eternal return of the same
Deferred judgement for fabricated crimes
The petty tyranny of frightened hordes
Bended backwards in stuttered time.
A mob chases its own movement
Anarchists trapped in a rainfall of letters
To addresses abandoned
After the day where my roof was filled with cracked boots, reckless renegades, and the sound of a note pitched to an accelerated ambivalence.
I am back at square one, in a game of murmurs
I misheard the clown cars hum in the crackle of cicadas
But did they not rev their engine so loud in the forest of forgotten names
That I let my face slip in their flashing gaze.
She forgot the DIY HRT, but remembered the drive through donuts
Keep your eye on the circle, not the whole.
A cookout drive-thru completes the circuit,
But the cashier keeps forgetting my food
So I drive around and around
As the hitchhiker tells me I have such pretty hair
Does she know I hide my thoughts in the tussled mess?
I forgot my comb, but remembered where I lay my head.
Leaving too late, trying to return again.


Birds in the JFK Terminal

The din of hurried movements
Framed by haphazard chirps
Birds fly in holding patterns
Float above granite skin
Shuffle eye lids
Dream of wings caught between surveillance schemes and flying dreams
When the heart beats in a fragile cage
Doubled back on a haggard frame.
Traveler, do you wander to lower or higher worlds
Overburdened by the song slipping from cracked beaks
Cry for affectionate flight, flow w/ the jet stream.
A song burrows into the heart,
vibrates wings and arms,
taught cry for air,
breathe,
expand as the terminal screams.


Loblolly Pines

Green Needles Bristle
Above the waves of overtold stories
Stuck in youth
Where words are yet to have meaning
Highways open onto shadowy paths
Smelling of pine and draped in Spanish moss
Do you remember how the sand gave way
To cratered waterways
Rolling balls, tumbling time
I am a child playing a game for four
I am an adult playing a game for two
On the loose unpacked sand
Thudding rather than gliding
Amongst the Loblolly Pines


unititled 1

The competitive funeral director tries to assemble the most successful grief. He listens for the loudest wails, the same that harmonize with the softest whimpers. He collects bodies, but deals in feeling, knowing the mourner is a bundle of cries, curses, and contrivances. Mary at the Cross stares at the laminated Mary with Child. She inhales a plume of holy water, buoyed to the surface of the sky. The Catholic priest is stiff competition, with his ritual, his divine transubstantiation. If the director gathers bundles of feeling, the priest cuts the rope–the sticks strewn about form a cross that is grief, singular and of the world. The funeral director sighs. It is so difficult to compete with true believers.


untitled 2

I had no buck eyes red
To wear to my grandfather’s funeral
My father suggests a golf polo
To honor his father’s pastime
“Something to add to your wardrobe”
And here I sit, in my vivienne westwood,
Honoring one of my past times.
Destiny is always untimely
We don’t tune our clocks
To the eruption of red
Making its ways b/w the pews
After or before my westwood arrived
So that I snaked past the green and yellow mosaic of 9th street
To find a buck eye on the rack of Mr. Throwback
Why “The” Ohio State, he asked.
Another certainty I lacked
For they all reside in bronze
Grandpa Tom’s alchemy
Melting steel into buck eye red


An Interesting Cruelty

Kyo tells Rocannon that the wanderer will take a companion, for a while. Wordlessness is not loneliness, he reminds the wanderer. But the wanderer will always be a stranger or a god, marked by the outside of community or nature. True companionship is the wind between the leaves, the hum of a bicycle wheel over fresh pavement, the unspoken ease of a flowing pen.

There’s a relationship b/w wandering and walking,
Strolling alone and moving toward a group.
Disorientation or comfort.


Steve Aoki in Nassau County

Gabber Americana
Nostalgic Release
Sincerity, not even, just fun
Steve Aoki is the groundhog of Nassau County
Fall has arrived
Fatigued cake
Sanctioned rave, a flyover
Could you just dance, with a smile
On your face
Not question intent
Not craving criticism
Maybe that’s the gift Steve gives
After having ripped his shirt off
So soon into the concert
At the bar, in the subway, they would drink forever given the chance
I’m sober in a field of grass
watching neon and pastel overexpose
On the Jumbotron

We’re getting confused by ideologies, identities, and choice.
Collapsing distinction unfolding form the world
Into the heroism of selection.
Don’t assume the depths of the soul contain treasure.
The prize of possession is bullion turning into liquified gold,
Slipping from fingers not yet wet
With the black water humming beneath.


Deli Girls at Nowadays

A wormhole rather than a blackhole.
Pulled through time to a different space,
same sweat, different flesh.
When do things crack open,
splinter into shoves and pushes,
feet plunging into dirt-stained cement,
but the leaves of a spiraled pathway
have curled into windcut skin
and black finger tips stained with bike grease:
Bend backwards, “but I’m not bitter”,
that time turns thudding kick drums into
metallic arrows, screaming silver
moving at cybernetic speed,
tendrils that pull hollow arms back into a tangle of codes, glances, and battle cries.
Stumbling through Foley Square
to find slogans that hurt.
metal bike frames don’t bend
the way of finger tips pulled back
to the top of a wrist.


The tight spiral

I imagine that I am at the center of a spiral and that I am pulling it tighter and tighter. It coils around me, but it also is me–a continuous line bent into tighter and tighter curves. It’s like writing a sentence that never ends. Other times, it’s like a thought gathering more associations, more intricacy. A line of thought that wraps itself into a bottomless center. Sometimes, I fear this spiral. I wonder if it will suffocate me, if every coil is a sharper edge bearing down on the inside out line that I am.

But then I remember that the spiral is in two-dimensions. And that if I wrap it tighter and together that it will stretch into three dimensions, spiraling up and down–outward even as it continues to grow tighter and tighter. The line becomes an hour glass. Its edges unspooling, now duller and welcoming. Now flying and crawling and digging and swimming–all while still spiraling.