“Title: Hair and Leaves — There is a subtle contradiction, probably not obvious to y’all, between how I compose poetry and how gate(less) (henceforth its gate(less), not Gate(Less) ) comes into being. It is akin to changing my jacket or moving into a different space, along the same empty road, or standing in the same place at different times”
“Title: A selfie of the aging process — Believe me, looking at this bone was much greyer than this picture represents. How many of you remember this bone from last year? It doesn’t matter if you had joined gate(less) yet, I’m assuming the gnawing of age is universal. How is it the same? How is it different?”
“Title: The corner where I pour old beer. I call it an altar — The beer in the foreground is the worst beer I’ve ever had. It was redolent of desperation, tasted vaguely of stale cigarettes, and brought me back to a friend’s memory of passing out at the bar at his local VFW, back when they allowed smoking and people still felt bad about all the killing. I was saving it to find out if someone else felt the stale sunlight, the relief of agoraphobia, and the sound of slow-dancing to a barely audible baseball game. In the background is a beer leftover from my night before the wedding, party, deep in the woods, along the shore of Little-Bad-Luck Lake. No one calls the lake by that name anymore and the BarkEater brewery closed, I wish we could have shared it.”
“Title: How Proud the Robin in Spring Sings”
How Proud the Robin in Spring SingsCon/Jur/d, 4/7/2021
How proud the Robin lightly stands, watching
amid working houses ready to spring & spring.
To say we miss our youth is a useful reminder,
identifies who we banter with, again & again.
Let’s not make this a song, simply lift it up, sing
eaves, clouds, clotheslines let yourself fly & fly.
Love the joke, “I can see your house from up here,”
from this angle, we can see whole worlds & worlds.
Spring’s chorus calls us to spring forward, let go,
fly & fly, become worlds & worlds, again & again.
