Saint Catherine Speaks Candidly to Saint Cecilia on the Occasion of Their Single Foray Into Town Together on Market Wednesday

We make art because life is an affliction a fatal accident, frame by framea flaming vehicle screaming jesusbecause life is an iron maiden manglingwith twenty twisting augers, heaven's marauding tenant killing with one casual crush of a thumb because there is no hope except we midwife something not of fleshthus impervious to painAnd so we …

Semantic Bleaching

"Life on hold sucks!"read the bus shelter ad. They meant the pandemicI suppose But what a wry, ironic understatementIf you think of the awesome reality of life on hold. {That's awesome in its original meaningOf inspiring ecstasy and terror, the experienceThat the Romantics called the sublimeAnd that must have also crossed Aristotle's mind when he …

Morning Prayer

don't worry about my soul, just give me back my stylus Hail MinervaFull of GraceGoddess of Disappointment,Petty Theft andFlaked Tuna in Broth It's Dave.Remember me?Eighth floor? From the depths of my Shame and squalorLargely self-induced, but whatever,I cry to thee. Restore thou to meWhat I have lostGenerally, my innocence, butSpecifically, my smartphone,Which I may have …

One-night stand

I had blitzed your sectors completelyBut all this time you've surviveddiscretely Interred in my one-terabyte drive: Knight jonesing for escape, five fingersdismissingPassion, fondling my door handle,kissingGoodbye our too-easy improvisation. I conjure desperate devious strategies:Charms, supplications, jammed connections, elegies,Viral replications, heartfelt blackmail.Impatient, lover? Hanging in thedelusionOf my blue-screened doorway, our fungiblecollusion Of dull bruises, ragged tears? …

Jazz for insomniacs

for James H. IF WE WERE POSSIBLE—Christ, what a thought! — it would have to be in some other continuumstrung out in time between Lost In Spaceand Planet of the Apes— the original, not the remake— where my love like giantNoma bulbs leaks Red Green Bluepure Christmas colors onto snow;it would have to be  suspended in aspic somewhere …

A Satori

  If seedlings are waking up in clay pots on my balcony, if there are tiny, fragile seedlings that despite their tininess and fragilitystill manage to express their true nature,just as distant stars express theirs; If this expression of stars and seedlingsis inevitable, yet innocent; And if a seedling, a wisp of green, a mere tendril, can heave …