Posts for June 3, 2026 (page 10)

All my enemies use JSTOR
and check shit
i don’t check shit
i make up words and say them

i get drunk and incant
i come up quick
to fever pitch
and stay there far too long
wailing in tones of limpdick and guttural pig

“sit death row, hollow hydra
shake in dada dance and disquiet
stay near backpage n spit out soot
then slam the screen door, 
back n forth”

and down, like misery’s shadow 

slow, slow

to a shallow tone

and up again

The soundtrack to “The Sun Is Also a Star”
plays in my head as I pick raspberries from
the front garden
The zinnas in garden plots send green shoots
promising butterfly food.
The world shifts

Does the bee feel it as the ecosystem 
adjust to hold the choices we made on native plants?
Does the bee hear our prayers for this garden?

Sweet like honey
dripping down the back of your throat
as you swallow
It has many names
but none as promising as it really feels.

A weekend
of endless possibilities.
Dive off the boat dock
hear the laughs of your friends in the cove
no one else knows you are here.

It is a life lived separate
Connected by weekend visits and phone calls
but it is a life all yours.  

Violet Fibonacci flower swirls
twisting in mathematical jazz rhythm
velvet sprouts dusted in golden pollen
stick to bumblebee legs in constellations

Hummingbirds pause at my face
nectar absent from my smile
he floats in midair lecturing me with a sideways glance
probing for coherence

Kindness we give a stranger
urged by that whispered nudge
resonates from when it was withheld
and then recollected as remorse

Accidental angel acts may be intentional
or nonchalant mercenary giant killer strides
like when I step on an insect by chance
and I solemnly mutter “sorry” before moving on

Mountain laurel crushed beneath feet,

Petals scattered like lost innocence,

A beauty fragile and ephemeral,

Stems cruelly detached from blooms,

Strewn like dashed hopes

Or a sash wrenched aside and soiled, 

Trampled and tossed

Beyond the path,

Decorating the dirt floor

With their sullied splendor,

Decayed at the coming of age,

Seeding the ground with

Future generations of belles,

Blush-hued looks passed down,

Along with the toxins that run

In their floral bloodlines,

Poisonous to men.

When left alone,

Laurel does not wither, but

Pollinates itself,

That fabled mountain ingenuity

Issuing the next line of progeny.

Be careful what you pluck:

What does not shrivel survives.

I like feeling stupid;
Happens everytime I learn something

spring elm –
crooked resistance
reborn shade

I walk two miles to lay on the kitchen floor at
the house of my friends who just got married.
I am overheated and
saturated with feeling.
Not about anything in particular,
just indulging in personhood.
As sticky as this is it’s also
refreshing.
Like Ramsey said at a show in Chicago,
about this girl who loves me without any sarcasm.
Well, that’s refreshing. And it is.
Or looking at my naked body in the mirror for a long time.
I have been feeling neither satiated nor
saturated with feeling.
How can you grieve as much as I have without
accidentally blowing yourself out?
Grandparents and muscle mass and short skirts.
I am bereft and floppy and mature. Horrible.
Everything’s changing except,
I always try to light candles under the ceiling fan.
Discovering, surprised, that they have been extinguished.

Here on this walk, though, I’m blue at the base 
and still lighting matches.