In keeping with my National Poetry Month ritual of blindly choosing a random word from the dictionary to riff a poem off of, I read the definition for “crankshaft,” and realize I don’t really understand what one is or how one works. Like eating canned peas that always make me gag a little, I search …
Hovel
I never saw myself living in a large house with kids and a wife, though sometimes now I imagine being happy to have them, until I realize they’re too much distraction, noise, motion, and energy, at least for now. Also, there is the fact that I had a wife once, and I’ve worked with children …
The Choice to Self-Publish
Two decades ago, a writing mentor asked me the most important question in my writing career, when he asked what was more important to me, writing poetry for poetry’s sake, or writing poetry for communication’s sake, and I said what I would say to him now if he were alive, which is that I believe …
The Goldfish
The goldfish kept dying in my fish tank and I couldn’t figure out why. “Have you gotten rid of anything that might hurt them,” Donny said. He’d been my go-to at the pet shop for decades. “Yeah, I took out all the things, minus the water,” I said. “Ah, there’s your problem,” he said. “What’s …
Buskin
Practically falling out of our buskins, we all come home eventually. One way or another, we arrive, to see all we’ve loved and lost hanging over us, from a heaven we thought we wanted. In high school I wore buskin-like sandals that resembled boots worn in ancient Greece, and it wasn’t long before they earned …
Before Medicare
Sometimes when I’m walking from work alongside kids who live close to the school, I imagine living on a car-free island, where everybody carries a backpack, and there’s no electricity or computers, and where neighbors at the end of a long day, come over to your house to quietly sit on your porch with you …
My Poety Place 