Written when camping in August '23

Don't offer me the moon 'cause all I know

Is the dirty earth beneath my feet.

Don't offer me the stars that shine and glow--

Don't offer me the ocean wide and deep.

Don't offer me New York at Christmas season

If you don't plan to stick around through spring.

Don't offer me a place in shining heaven--

My people just don't do that sort of thing.

Instead just cook me dinner in your kitchen

And maybe take the time to bake me bread.

Instead I'll help you wash the dishes after--

I won't take stars when soup will do instead.

Candle series 3

 I have never met someone as ruthlessly and joyfully efficient as Barb Gilbert. 

Her executive functioning makes the rest of us look like worms

Like pedants

Like bumps on a log

I struggle for accurate metaphor and the thought crosses my mind:

Barb would have the perfect comparison here.

Candle song series 2

Darling you're burning that candle from so many ends

You must be frazzled

And you're so bright

I'm dazzled

And so hot 

I'm sweating

But where are you getting

All that wick?

And what if you run out?

Imagine space for all your thoughts your therapist says

Do you need a field? A forest? A lake?

They don't fit in your head

I need an the grand canyon,  you tell them, an ocean

It doesn't stay put in the sky

All that commotion

All that noise in just one brain, those wheels must be tired

Your brain's only water

Your candle's just fire

Fish in the sea

 People say there are plenty of fish in the sea

But you're my entire ocean.

I am immersed by you,

Dragged by your undertow.

You are the sand, gritty in my eyes, 

The brine in the breeze and 

You are the sunlight and the places 

Even the sunlight cannot reach.

Chanukah Poem

 Darling, you're burning the candle from both ends and the sides too

And you're so bright

I'm dazzled

And so hot 

I'm sweating

But where are you getting

All that wick?

And what if you run out?

Tangled silk

A spider web sits, woven across the double doors with perfect droplets of dew catching and refracting the sunlight.

Undisturbed it waits. Waits to be seen? To be understood? To catch a fat and wriggling fly and to hold it, living and nourishing until the spider arrives? 

How easily I could tear this web, first through the double doors as I am.

How strong it is, holding the weight of itself and the sparking water and the sunlight and the spider's expectations. 

I expect to see you in this poem. Are you the building? The doors? The web seems most obvious: full of contradictions and beauty and light. So strong and so easy to destroy. 

Maybe you're the one entering the building, ducking around the web. Making the plunge, despite the risk of destruction. All the power in your hands and still you chose kindness. Maybe you're typing these words into the keyboard, your fingers feeling the smooth keys, your ears registering the gentle click as the words move on.

Specificity, the head of fundraising tells me, is the key to being relatable. People are more likely to identify with a specific story than a general one. 

My poetry teacher in college tells me, avoid vast concepts like love and eternity. Think of intimate ways to access things too big to imagine.

All your poems are about you, my brother says. 

Maybe this isn't a poem. Maybe it's a sentence. Maybe it's just that I saw a spider web today and there were dew drops handing from it like jewels and the sun shine through it and I though of the way your eyes are so brown they almost turn green. 

Maybe it doesn't have to be more than that.

Life of the unliving

"My phone died," My tongue forms the syllables, easy, unthinking, as I blithely toss my phone onto the couch where I sink beside my sweetheart. 

Here it lies, ignominious and unremembered. 

What gods are we, to fix life and death with a simple twitch of our hands

To watch as it flows through corded wires and sit un-amazed

The glowing green heart-blood of my laptop's charger

Veins under skin, a declaration of vitality,

I live, I live, I live

The following week, in a parking lot, surrounded by towering oaks and waving lindens

I do not mourn beyond a muttered fuck,

Kicking the tire, and calling a friend.

"My car just died. Can you come give me a jump?"