I pray you cherish 

the home you build, 

wherever it may be,

and I pray that one day, 

I get to see it 

when it burns.

Oh Divine Spirit
Seen in the green green trees
Heard in the babbling brook
The fresh smell after a rain

The light touch of hummingbird, butterfly
That light in your eyes
The warm glow of kindness, understanding
The everyday delight of children

That same spirit
Bless America
Keep her strong, beautiful, considerate, loving
Welcoming to all

Inspired by our freedom
Bestowed with your grace
May all be free
Bless us, bless us all

One in a crowd of a thousand,
Her face blends with those of your friends,
Threatening everything you hold dear
While living every day on a precipice
Between good and evil,
Truth and lies,
And the consequences of every move.
A grandmaster amongst us pawns,
She sees the great scheme
First built by those in power.
She has elected to play the game with them
At the cost of her identity and innocence.
When the time comes,
She will destroy everything to destroy evil-
We are the necessary sacrifice.

A kilometer, a kilometer,
a kilometer and onward.
And into the FPV drones
rode the doomed warhorses there in Donetsk.    

A kilometer, a kilometer—
—by God but those poor animals.
What unfairness for those noble things,
a cavalry horse killed by the whir of drones.  

Horses don’t start unending wars,
no more than the Russian boys riding fore,
no more than Ukraine boys using the drones.
Man and beast wanted one thing in their bones,
they all just wanted from war to get home.

Odd webs in the corner of a pig barn.
Skipping cracks, hopscotching
towards the sidewalk’s end.
The restless pets of the forgotten
cemeteries that stalked us. Lotteries.
Electric patchwork golems, dark wolves,
the iron maiden of Joo, skinwalkers
of the witchery way, the unspoken words
of sailors in a crunched submarine
on the floor as the air slowly fades.

Babar, umbrellas, poems grown
mad and bone in the children’s
garden.

The stories that shaped us
fishhooked to our memory
forever.

opossum 

If I ever marry. here
   this time of year
   I will gather my bouquet 
   from along the road side.

Queen Anne’s Lace
   white, broad and flat
   black speck at it’s center
   hairy legs

Orange ditch day lilies
   each bloom making the 
   most of its
   one day of glory 

Black-eye Susans 
   new moon domed centers
   sun ray petals

And early chicory
   tall spikes with small
   blue flowers 
   the color of June skies
   and my mother’s eyes

Slut for such disgusting precision,
attention to detail turns me on.
I notate the date/time as a graph
forms in silence on the blank
slate of your waist. A fissure
splits, gauges worlds between 
two juxtaposed Decembers. 
⅓ of your body weight is lost.
How many more numbers
can I scrape from your clean
downward trajectory?
I’m timing your breaths, smug,
wondering what more remains
to measure, quantify, calculate.
Digits get caught between
my yellow teeth as I’m gnawing
at your pretty bones, fucking you
over. The calibration resets 
in your throat, a hollow 
0, 0, 0.