Posts for June 27, 2026 (page 12)

Fragments blur when you look too closely.
Ahead hangs a dark cloud,
swollen and heavy like a rainstorm.
You know it’s made of memories
but parts of it are missing. Gone.
As you move closer, the air turns cold.
Your breath fogs.
Black mist drifts from the cloud,
pooling around your feet.
You hesitate for a moment
before stepping forward.
The cold deepens as you walk and the veil around you
feels like walking through heavy, cold rain.
The dark mist clings to your skin,
settling in your lungs with each breath.
Around you, shadows flicker at the edge of sight,
half-remembered moments dissolving before your eyes
and the deeper you walk,
the colder it becomes.

today
            before dawn 
                                    breaks
when
            the room
                                    is dark
hums
            from the
                                    furnace
fracturing
            the seeded
                                    silence
the hound
            asleep
                                    on the couch
                                                                         snoring   
& you
            far away
                                     in Indiana
I sip 
            strong coffee
& see you
            entering
                                    the room
                      

I can still see it:
the scene that draws me in the dream—

the trip down a gentle river that I have known,
        the way into a familiar wilderness;
the editorial meeting where I present the article idea
        with all those talented friends now gone;
the backyard ballpark with lines chalked on concrete
        and the whiffle-ball game in progress;
the seminary in Dayton, archetypal architecture,
        remade in patterns inviting discovery;
the front porch upstairs in summer behind the awnings
        reading the latest Hardy Boys mystery;
the envelope from the stamp dealer
        who trusted a kid with items on approval;
the family store on a cool summer morning
        where the screen door in the back room
        looks out on the green lawn of the church across the way;
our 1965 trip to the Smokies and the Biltmore House,
        a real vacation after all;
the sacristy of Saint Monica’s
        and the challenge to say Mass
        when the book will not yield the text;
the Newhouse School in Syracuse and the classroom          
        in scriptwriting where Joe and I traded ideas;
the streets of Assisi on pilgrimage
         shifting in medieval revelations;
the streets of Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati from up high,
        as I leap from pinnacle to balcony in endless succession
        spanning a vast metropolis–  

so clear,
so real,  

until it all begins to slip away slowly,
a slick thing that you can no longer hold
until at last you see its shadow going
and must decide to rise and
(old guy that you are)
plod to the bathroom.

the birds unceasingly
fascinate  not the same ones I am certain
for years go by and  there  still
     the sense of continuity is in the feeling not the knowing
because it is for that
     one can’t always see them so much as feel them
          you know what I mean
that they’re there  making their noise  telling their stories  giving up a striking trill into this morning abundance
if we are keen enough
bright enough
sighted enough
warm enough
we are here
they say
what if this is 
that  one fine day

In time the rain stopped,
the clouds moved along,
a sky full of stars, hundreds 

if not thousands of them 
long dead, just no one knows it yet. 
The power came back on,

I blew out the candle,
she put the deck of cards
back in the kitchen drawer

that holds the good scissors,
ink pens, and credit card
used once to gain a discount

on the couch she sleeps on 
when the bed is too crowded, 
or the room too warm. 

Illuminated, we went back
to our separate screens, 
she to nurse worries over money,

an amorphous future, 
but seeing as I’d won 
the last hand, three queens

to her two pair, 
I felt better than I did
before the rain began.

after a fast
i expect you to need some time
space away from my demands
space to switch out of this repair mode
camel magic science
to tantrum through my double standard,
always wanting you to be able to ingest better
and only finding a way to that by these periods of
withholding

i expect you to whimper and whine
to claw at me
to complain
to attack me for the double standard
of withholding food so many days
and then expecting you to jump right back into eating

instead you give me sleep
a thing you can’t usually give
you calm me
you gracefully process my
offerings
food
water
vitamins
quietness
you even say thank-you to
the neighbor whose mow timing
would usually wrack you at five pea em 
our prime sleeping time

your grace is astonishing
science of ancients knowing you well
better than I ever could,
you
my only companion.

this time of ours 
            is the only kind of prayer i need

Oh how My heart is a bird and my head is a cage

Bubble baths in the dark and cranberry candles

can’t make it go away, the forever rage

My disease tests my soul to see what it can handle

It whispers cruel things to me when insomnia

creeps and holds me hostage under my sleep mask

Oh how my head has always danced with hysteria

but now it sits chilled on the other side of glass

Yes, my heart is a bird but my body is a cage

made of brambles and thorns that stab and ache

I continue to wish for my shoe size not my age

I’ll claw out the headache in my soul with a rake

My heart is a bird but my disease is a cage

The spotlight blazes / I smile / the world is a stage

From the first I found you, baby
wafting wallowing in my world—
a scintillate, alternating into electric.
I was left alone with my limbs
leaning on bald shoulders of a naked
Chinese wall, unglued and reformed.

I am a monkey man reformed
into the cooing picture of a baby
at suck from your body-naked,
my grasp unanswered by your world.
Each dimple of my doughy limbs,
starved neurons frantic-electric.

Have you heard of the ghost electric
trapped in the stone church reformed,
its jingly jangly dangling limbs
soft and tender as a baby?
Perhaps, you know nothing of the world
as you lie to me, lie with me naked.

Or perhaps, naked
my experience electric
is beyond your icy world.
You left me hot and reformed
as a hunk of dung, baby,
a steaming Hebrew Golem, its reachy limbs

gesturing mutely for your limbs—
your limbs frightened and naked
your limbs, like a baby
that curl my hair with fingers electric.
I descend to alluring Earth reformed,
though knowing nothing of your world.

Her body is a cafe of the world.
By these inarticulate fingers and limbs, 
I seek her, I seek to be reformed,
a tongue firing a kiln wet and naked,
the shock winter skin electric,
arriving to her arms a baby.

What’s become of the baby, reformed
as the watery world, a fish naked
and electric, a delta’s creeping limbs?

wild dandelion