In true poet fashion didn’t really follow the prompt of using five random song titles, but did a thing where I worked some of Chet Baker’s titles and lyrics into a poem about him. He fell to his death from an Amsterdam hotel window in 1988: A slow note, sad, not of this earth, a pure tone getting lost around the corners of the night. You fell in love just once, foolish man, fell […]
It will be the ocean that gets me in the end, all and always the ocean— kindly, with none of the biting hungerof a breaking wave. I do not knowthe body of water but it will be calmas it often is at dusk. I do not know the body of waterbut the body of water knows me.Even here far from the coastit pulls on me like riptideto return, return, return. It will be calm, it […]
I had to relearn everything — how to breathe, how to wake how to walk a city block without my little crutch my hands were awkward birds for months, flapping around for something to do. We practiced endings every day, another after another fire to filter, another thing gone, another thing done and past — and yet of all the things I’ve ever quit it’s a your papery kiss I miss the most.
OPTIONAL POETRY 