When a crisis becomes undeniable — when you can see it, every day, in real time, on the screen in your hand — it stops being a political opinion and becomes a personal reckoning. You have to decide what you stand for. Not in theory or merely in your affiliations. But in your actions.

Who cares she thought —

running among

the hedges of shapes,

the green of youth,

the wrestling of brocade —

A country with two right feet

cannot keep its balance.

Goodbye California with shackled ring like impending doom,

then New Mexico opened its mouth under the wide motel night—

and his hands decided the rules and the border.

In a tilting room the future went dim,

and my name was a light he could shut off.

Walk the Fire

Walk with me through cinder—

or don’t come.

On nights like this

heat runs to the blood

and it doesn’t blanch.

In love and horny,

I know, it’s corny

But:

the leaves and the trees,

the birds and the bees,

the flora and the fauna,

the heat in a sauna,

Peace In Abundance (For you)

The Art Desk.

I used to party impossible summers—
white-faced cliffs with money whispering,
harbors tucked behind unmarked stones,
no clicking cameras over cheap florals—
and sea-light turning rich boats into diamonds.

Turn your gaze toward your own portion of the matter. Ask whether the discharge of frustrated violence—turned inward or loosed upon another—has ever proven worth the cost of its eruption.

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Do your eyes wake heavy—

do some mornings find them so?

Mine see a wound I did not make alone—

the wound isn’t me, or even all the world,

but hands that hide the light beneath a fate

not ours.

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to see doesn’t end

the mystery

or some desire —

it transforms it.

The Quiet

I’ve leaned my white faces to a wall:

Now they keep their mouths closed—

color has been too eager to confess.

The brushes lie rinsed and sunned—

their bristles call out to my wrists

and my hands that once moved un-trembling.

It All Begins Here

Carrying It

Beauty