Category: Uncategorized

Cloudy days never faze
Me in the slightest
I will not let myself forget
Those moments curled in the hammock
The feeling of Zen, as droplets fall in
Through the screen of the back porch

It’s a wonderful day, some may say
Only when the skies are clear and blue
As if it might be the sunlight
That determined a day to be good
And any cloud was just a shroud
Hoarding beams of sun from us

I don’t hate that I appreciate
Grey skies all alone
It just means I get those scenes
All to myself, because
Who else would attain that twilight before rain
If I had not been there to love it

How could I see the sky
As anything except beautiful
Regardless of moment, I won’t relent
And forsake an alluring sight
Just because it has some flaws
As if I did not have any myself

New Ice Core Analysis Shows Sharp Greenland Warming Spike
an AP headline

I have never seen Greenland
but I know it is a canvas that
painters color white; it is where

poets get lost in its blank
blizzards of words, peering
through the whiteouts,

hoping that there at least
winter will always stay old and bold and cold.

But no, they must write and paint its freezing truths
before the art of winter wanes

•

I was an artist in winter,
painting landscapes in drifts
with an icicle, sonnets of snow

foxtrotting with snowmen,
going downhill fast without
a tank of gas (a sled did just as well).

Once my wife and daughter sledded
down a West Virginia hill,
our basset hound bounding behind,

legs too short to keep up, the excited
canine dragged his private parts
through the fresh and friendly drifts.

This is winter art – galleried and
archived – until lost to the
book-burning winters of now.

•

Winter is also literature, it is
Tolstoy putting the final period to
War and Peace, for winter is war and peace,

waves of wintry wind
sweeping across the land
as it sleeps … in peace.

These classics we no longer read,
preferring the TikTok winters of chaotic
climates, which wouldn’t be so bad

but for all that lost knowledge, the library
of wintry books sitting darkened in the
sun, its doors locked, librarians laid off;

no one reads anyway.
Greenland was such a library
or maybe a monastery

where Inuit monks dipped their quills
and penned the classics of winter
before a dinner of whale blubber.

Greenland was cold for us all,
literate for the illiterate
Even if I close my eyes imagine

my boyhood winters of ’77 and ’78
I rarely state the truth: that Greenland paintings and books are through.

Diamonds across a horizon as water droplets reflect the rays cast upon them

Like miniature stars dancing across the surface in front of you

Standing, staring

Too dazzled to step forward for, after all what if even the slightest movement meant the shine would dim

As you look above the sparkles you see Apollo descending in front of you, turning his domain a rush of cherry blossom and tangerine

Colors dancing thorough the heavens above you as you still refuse to move

For in this moment as the world glistened around you and sounds of waves shifting between each other, their rhythmic movements acting as an orchestra to this scene

You paused and take a long steady breath

As the world felt open, free, and most importantly glistening once again

Abstract:

There is a smokestack
and I am two herons
gliding across the bay
that it looks over.

Under the stack’s
power plant torso,
there is a mine
that makes gold.
I shave down coal
to smudgy bits of ore,
until ash runs up my wings.

Introduction:

This is a constant thing—
Plumes from the stack
swallow up
heron mating calls
and spit birds back
as baby angels
as green comets rain down
on all the dinosaurs.

Methods:

The night before the herons—
I call it life support. Gangly wires.
traffic cones on our fists. Pretend shooting.

The buzzing drone of the parking garage
funnels drifters out to color inside the lines.

You wave down a yellow cab. We pass things
as we search for a place to watch stars.

The bank? No. The quarry? No.
How about the mall? There’s a better place.

And the highway becomes a ballad
threading through an album of tunnels.

Results:

A hubcap by the guardrail
has crushed a heron and a porcupine,

so now just guts and feathers and needles
lay where life once tried
to cross the street.

A loose ladder on the stack
as we climb halfway to the top.

A concrete awning with a fence and graffiti
to look upon the skyline.

But there is only smog.
Smog and the distant clanks
of machinery that would make
the hair on the back of a hill’s neck
stand up straight.

Discussion:

We make our money
to pay for construction
and watch birds
choke on the bay.

Appendix:

Us on the concrete
awning with a fence
and graffiti.

I can’t see any of the stars
that I should be able to see.

But the worst part about the city
is how wonderful it looks
when it’s posted up behind you.

Unsteady fawn legs, womb wet
Mass of red brown fur
Knocked down by the rough licks
Of a mother wiping away the scents of birth
Traces of the fears that may have hidden inside her

There is safety in the quiet open spaces of the wilds
In the stillness of green, brown, white-
clover dotted meadows

Suckled strength seeps in slowly but stays, holds fast.

A perilous world waits
Sharp, long ears hear – a deer runs!

Stolen love cries out for vengeance
Like wildflowers that lost their roots
Leaving behind broken patience
Where there should be holy fruits

Don’t even ask me why
As we fall apart
Don’t even try
We’ve been this way from the start

Cry out for me when it gets lonely
But don’t hold and wait
If it goes to slowly
Regardlessly loving like our fate

Don’t let emotions fly
As we fall apart
Don’t even cry
We’ve been stuck since the start

Trying so hard to let go of ourselves
Only time really tells
If the world overwhelms
As we ring our bells

Silence.
That’s what I miss the most
the constant white noise
of cars and honks of trains.
will never put me to sleep as easily
as hearing a soft breeze or heavy rain
alongside lowing cows and snorting horses

I wish.
Just five minutes of peace

to lie on my bed and not
be bothered
by other’s commuting
and instead be bothered by disgruntled
calves

We get another four years of dismantling;
Mother nature ready to spare nothing;
Until whole cities are within the clutches of the sea, brutal yet so devastatingly beautiful
all at once
The smog hiding the sunrise, basking it in an opaque haze that
Disenchants the youth; infants no longer stare at the sunrise —
Shades of scarlet, orange, yellow, but shades of grey and cement;

But that’s beautiful enough right? It mimics the same cement that overtakes the land,
Killing the natural ground.
More (more oil!)
More (more wealth!)
More (more greed!)
Let’s take America forward and assault the environment while we’re at it.

Who is mother nature anyway? An entity that no longer
Exists to those in charge.
Crying out for help as species start to go extinct,
As the glaciers disappear,
As the sunrises are covered in smug,
As the rainforest burns,
As communities are torn apart,
As cultural sites are destroyed,
As the ground is ripped opened. Assaulted for what it holds. No more autonomy.
No more will.
Let’s march forward and keep assaulting the earth, because this agenda will save us
from our impending climate doom, right?

The coldest place within,
Frosted whispers echo in the silence,
Once tender, now a fragile shield,
This desolate expanse,
Is this heart of mine.

Heavily burdened heartstrings,
Never stolen, never amused,
Icy nonchalance builds great peaks,
Unbothered, unreachable, unmoved,
All safe, until comes heat.

Arrogance cloaked in bravado,
Hanging by the thinnest thread,
Entranced by a re that scorches
Confusing this heart of mine,
Yet I linger at the edge, ready to thaw.

It is now fall,
Enjoy this time with an open mind,
Try to be happy and kind,
The falling of the leaves,
T-shirts go away and sleeves become the norm,
Work this season with great form,
Fall is a time to reawaken your soul,
For this must be the goal,
As time passes the world evolves,
Take this in time with great interest,
For those people love to use Pinterest,
Put your photos of fall in view,
This will be great to us, all and you,
Seize each moment,
And of all carpe diem.