New poems

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The search

We search for someone unknown
and, finding them, find them unknowable.

The Aim of the Nightingale (Shah)

A nightingale who happened to have no home of his own decided that he would try to settle in a certain forest. The birds who were already there, however, had their own ideas about the matter, and soon drove him out.
    One day, sitting disconsolately by the dusty road nearby, he was spied by another nightingale, who stopped to ask why he looked so forlorn.
    "I tried," said the first bird, "to make my home among other birds, but they pecked, and they mobbed me, and they flapped at me until I had to leave yonder forest."
    "Perhaps you were boastful," said the other nightingale. "When, in a similar situation, I sought a tree of my own, all the birds first collected and asked me what I was doing, why I was singing."
    "Yes, those birds did the same with me," said the first nightingale.
    "And what did you say?"
    "I said: 'I am singing because I simply cannot help it.'"
    "And then?"
    "And then they attacked me, as I have described."
    "Ah," said the other bird, "that was your mistake. They thought that you had no self-control, that you might be mad and that you might try to make them behave in a similar manner. When I was asked the same question, I said: 'I am trying to please you with my song.' That was an aim which they could understand."

Idries Shah, The Magic Monastery

On purity

Purity is the greatest perversion.

Irrelevancies (Shah)

Irrelevancies are often more striking than relevancies. Interesting yourselves in the striking rather than the significant thing is usual but not useful.

Idries Shah, The Magic Monastery

Change

Change something and you change everything.

New poems

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Quick 2018 Summation

Books Read:  74
Poems Written:  508

One number up, one number down. Given the chaotic nature of the year, I'll take it.

Prunes (Xie)

One self prunes violently
at all the others
thinking she's the gardener.

Jenny Xie, from "Tending"

Amazing (George)

It's amazing how unimpressed people are by being loved when it doesn't fit in with their plans.

Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop

Rat's Ass Review

My poems "Discontinuity" and "In Ruins" have been published in the Winter 2018 Issue of Rat's Ass Review. Check them—and the other poems in the issue—out!

Resurrection

Resurrection is not rescue.

Position

Position is poison.

For granted

What we take for granted is taking things for granted.

Our daily bread

Respect is the appetizer; fear, the meal;
disdain is dessert.

Escaping the tyranny (Harkaway)

At the same time, an increasingly ontological science tells us that the world we see is no more real than the ones we imagine: the universe is not what it appears to be at our clumsy macro-Newtonian level. Are we simulations? What does that question even mean? How is an informational model of a quantum world different from a quantum world made of information? As government takes steps to control the inside of our heads, freedom reaches to a future where even physical reality is not legislated; where what is written in stone is no more fixed than dreams or water. To escape a fascism that has become internal, we embrace an external world that is ultimately fluid and where the tyranny of the real itself is moot.

Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

Cherry rhubarb crepes

A poem

A poem doesn't have to tell a narrative to be a story.

Closer and closer (Knausgaard)

All of this still existed. The smooth, flat rocks were exactly the same, the sea pounded down on them in the same way, and also the landscape under the water, with its small valleys and bays and steep chasms and slopes, strewn with starfish and sea urchins, crabs and fish, was the same.... The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child's reality and an adult's, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn't, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One

The Animal Commitments

My poetry chapbook, The Animal Commitments, is now available for pre-order! If you are interested in buying a copy, please place an order during this pre-order period, as the number of pre-orders I get will determine my initial press run and the number of author copies I receive from the publisher.