“I was drinking my coffee,” Ralph said. I’d stopped by to see my friend. The books from his bookcase were all over the coffee table in irregular piles. I immediately began putting them back. “I was sleeping last night, so I didn’t get your text,” I said. “When a meteor fell out back, and an …
Comatose
Often, in the morning before work, I’ll sit in my chair, and a part of me will start to feel like it’s fading away. I can feel a kind of comatose coming on, and I worry I’ll either bite my tongue off in a seizure-like middle place between sleep and waking, or just straight out …
The Mallard Lover
The soon to be ex-husband never came back. Priscilla and I lived a long and happy life at the house on Willow Lane. Little Josh grew up and got a job at the local Walmart as a manager. And Priscilla and I had a lot of fun over the years. She was a really great …
The Unmanifesters
“Let’s manifest them,” I said. I’d just read an article in a self-help journal at the doctor’s office about manifesting what you want from your life by visualizing yourself having it. My friend Sander looked at me with a face you don’t want to look at you. We both had crushes that barely noticed us, …
Pepper
I remember walking up to the fence and how Pepper would see me approach and come running over to lick my hands and look into my huge, brown, watery eyes. I fed him handfuls of hay they put out for us just over there. How simple and beautiful that was. I felt so glad about …
Pileated Woodpecker
It bores into the tree like how I’d imagine a miner from the gold rush with gold fever picking at a wall in a gold mine after seeing his more prosperous future flashing in some rock, like a seasoned boxer just past his prime, picking his shots at a young fighter who mistakenly thinks dancing …
Betrayal
I wake enraged, at the behest of my subconscious thinking of a crush kissing a best friend, then looking at me as if to say, you had your chance, and you blew it, even though I barely know this person, and I actually initiated taking things to the next level too many times to feel …
Curb
A kid grinds one with his skateboard outside my window, and is making my head spark this fine morning. He’s out there shaving metal every sunrise, spring through winter, as if to say hey, life is loud if it’s a happy one, so, chill out bro, and make a ruckus while you still have tendons …
The Observation Room
I thought, so this is what happens to the ones they can’t follow the wires of, to the ones who’ll dumfound the doctors for centuries, growing up inside a haunted house of other’s flashing questions meant to agitate the brain, the way certain fish are agitated by a fluorescent lure, when they glued red and …
Crane Fly
When my father told me the adult crane fly, which looks like a mosquito on steroids, can’t suck the blood of humans, he affirmed my repeated life lesson that even though life can appear to want to swallow you sometimes through its long, needle-pointed attempt at healing you without telling you, it’s not always looking …
Flamingo Watching
Most of the flamingos had fallen over onto their other leg, once or twice, because of the wind, and one by one, they were lost to crocodiles. “It’s not usually like this,” I said. “Agree, number 237. We can usually stand on one leg for hours, and must, if our nervous systems are going to …
Barking Up My Man Tree
The time my father taught me to use birch bark as a firestarter, I thought he was magic in the way he knew how to make a fire rise from something so seemingly unwanted by the birch tree it fell from, you’d think he was a master of woodland alchemy. This secret knowledge I passed …
Crankshaft
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 …
Splitting the Ore of the Self
Whenever I’m asked what I think about something, it doesn’t really matter what it is, something in me puts on its hard hat and grabs a pickaxe, and sets off into the tunnels of the self to mine for ore I’ll extract precious memories from, that, like the unexpected jewels of feeling at one with …
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 …
Our Dog
Our dog Max loved to eat so much he’d choke himself and vomit trying to figure out how to get food off the kitchen counter. He loved you when he wanted something except when he was eating at which time you became at best a raging shop owner trying to catch a shoplifter, and at …
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 …
Conger, Kraken
The time I saw what appeared to be something resembling a conger eel the length of a person and with the girth of a fire hydrant, I let my feet dangle over the edge of docks, and every body of water had an abyss somewhere out in it nobody but me could ever find. Someday, …
My Poety Place 
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