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Personal Ethic 6: Decoupling Money and Work

The least helpful advice I received from adults was to ‘do what I love’. The advice isn’t necessarily bad for everyone, but it didn’t work in my case. I really started to make progress when I treated doing what I love and how I support myself as two separate questions. The professions I gravitated toward tended not to pay well. I think the most extreme was when I tried to write poetry for a living. I started to put more time into making poetry pay than actually writing poetry. What worked better was to find a profession I didn’t hate that gave me plenty of autonomy and free time. That seemed to be the best deal I could cut. Moreover, I enjoyed what I loved more without the pressure of having it support me.

Check out other work in the Personal Ethic series here.

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Uncollected 74, Can Peace Be Interesting Enough to Endure?

nobody said how boring dishes 
sitting in their cupboard would be
it all felt right and ordered for a while
the bowls were full, warm
contentment rose like vapor
from the table
and on the streets
the nods, the glances
the fellow feeling
and commerce did thrive

what would it take 
for this to be forever?
can one write a poem
for a peace that lasts?
not one written
in the bosom of strife
but a poem for peace
after years of peace.
a poem whose desire 
remains undiminished,
a poem that longs 
for what it already has.

there is a book about peace 
in the Bible
that no one ever reads
things happen for sure
but there aren’t the stakes
no plague of boils 
or a pillar of salt
peace is promised
only as a tonic 
to our worldly suffering
and that promised salvation
lasts forever
there is no book in the Bible
that hints how we might
endure this salvation.

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

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Personal Ethic 5: The Productivity of Experiences Compared to Goals

I initially worried that I wouldn’t accomplish as much using experiences, but paradoxically, I’ve accomplished more. Here are my guesses as to why.

  1. The desire to keep working: I don’t experience burn out or discouragement like I did under my goal paradigm. With larger goals, I was keenly aware of how far I was from accomplishing them. That can be discouraging. After I switched, I still have goals but more as an excuse to have a certain kind of experience.
  2. The goal posts don’t move: Another problem with goals is that after the immediate high of accomplishment, you don’t really feel that different. Goals have this illusion of completion that they never come through on. All there is after any goal is another goal. Now that I focus on experiences, each day is about renewing the things that make me feel like me. There is no illusion that what I have done is finished. The work is the reward, the renewal. 
  3. Losing that deep concentration of focusing on one or two goals at a time worried me the most. So much progress is made with that focus, especially the initial burst. What I didn’t realize before was the trade off for that progress was losing sight of my other goals. For example, if I spent three months drafting a collection of poems, I did almost nothing else. Once I had time to return to my other goals, I had forgotten the reasoning behind some decision, forgot something I’d already learned, or lost contact with someone who was helping me. Switching from one goal to the other, I would lose a lot of momentum. Now all my efforts have more continuity. This might not work for everyone. You have to be able to compartmentalize. It is also hard not to throw everything else to the side when a bout of inspiration comes. I’m still working on that one. 

Check out other work in the Personal Ethic series here.

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Uncollected 73, Propofol

Jim was minus his head
and looking for something
nice to say
propped up in his bed
at 45° of cogency
addressing his doctor

Kate, I love
your Negro otherness
having a bird in the basement
made me rethink the day

well, he tried
as we all do
to say something honest
to be well-received
I felt a-Jim

a few hours later
Jim has found 
his head 
the bubbles have
left his thought
that worries me
I am again 
scared of his mouth
and its intentional offense

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

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Racists of America Club Note #24: Character

But while the diagnosis is clear, the solution is obviously much harder. I do think it essentially comes down to character. You cannot have Socratic mouthpieces. These need to be characters that you make the reader feel are real, that we have known or can recognize as true to our lived experience. You need to think about who these people in your story are. Sit down and think about their backstories and what has brought them to the present moment of your story. Ask yourself what their greatest fear or hope is. What’s their greatest shame? What’s their biggest wound in life, or their greatest joy? Where did they grow up and why is that significant? What’s the one thing they’ll be thinking about or remembering on their death bed? Not all of this will actually appear in the story, but they will help you get to know your characters. These questions will give context and complexity to the way in which you write/present them in the present narrative of your story. -WF

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 19: Among the Musk Ox People

They were aesthetes, which means
I was forced to eat a hard peach,
commissioned to paint a twelve-foot abstraction
based on watching host cells collaborate
in bacterial infection, and at night
chewed the soles of their mukluks
till they were soft again.
If I ventured outside the igloo
and saw a celebrity,
I felt so inferior
I wanted to die.
To conceal my envy
I was given dark glasses.
If, on ther other hand, I encountered
someone to whom I was vastly superior,
one of those ill-clad, raving, wandering hags,
I felt ashamed and wanted to die.
To appease my guilt
they were given by the Elders a little of my grub.
If I met with an Ordinary,
someone not dissimilar to myself,
with dissatisfactions roughtly the same,
I felt the world was senseless
supporting so many look-alikes
and again I asked to die:
life reached a maddening peak
out there on the ice when
we were hunting and could move only our eyes.
Still, like a seal reaching his blowhole
in the dark, every seventy-two hours
I came to my senses for thirteen minutes
and continued to live with the knowledge
that deep in the oyster bed of blood
layered spheres continued to build round
my name, cold, calciferous, and forgotten.
When The Giant Orphan At The Bottom Of The Sea
appeared in my dreams,
demanding I write the story
of three generations of Ox women
resulting in the birth of a performance artist,
I knew I would need a knife, gun, needles,
kettle, scissors, and soap,
and gave up, at last, my finest skins.
I made my escape across the shrouded inlet
away from those who believe that outside
our minds there is only mist,
and with my skills at flensing
never feared for the future.

I get a little lost in Mary Ruefle’s poem toward the end. But the middle is so good I don’t even care.

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

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Personal Ethic 4: Goals vs. Experiences

I used to structure my to-do list around goals. One problem of making a list of goals was the narrowness of focus. I’d end up spending most of the day on one or two big ones. Say I was focusing intensely on writing a collection of poems, that goal would take up the major part of the day’s actions. I would get deep into the mindset of a writer, which was initially thrilling. It motivated me for two or three days, but after that I had to suppress parts of myself to enable that deep concentration. I would begin to crave learning something new or miss spending time with my family. In my forties, I started to orient my day around experiences. It took some experimentation but I’ve settled on this list: creating something, learning something, working on my relationship with my wife, fostering relationships with my family and friends, engaging with my physical body, working on my financial health, contributing to the benefit of the wider world, and accomplishing something at work. If my day touches on each of these experiences, I end it feeling complete. 

Check out other work in the Personal Ethic series here.

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Uncollected 72, Staring into South America

looking haggard
a dream of summer shade
a body is one of those weird places
you find yourself again and again

the man on a platform
addressing a crowd
cultivates errors of speech
how dearly the lives of the dead
the early morning light on their wings

there are birds of prey
and birds of prayer
both at home
in the same yellow sky
only their beaks shaped different
the dream of shade 
versus the dream of shadow

a man and a woman
build a garden between,
a river in repose
through the valley
the locusts come to chrr
in the late afternoon

South America, a myth to itself
no place really
a span of black feathers
an iridescence
a shadow play
screened on a valley floor
circling forever
high in the Altiplano  

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 18: Jim Trueblood: Father of the Year

I have a weakness for poems like this that permute the same words over and over again. See Seed Poem by Charles Stein I posted earlier. This hits that same craving. I heard the recording first. I’m not sure if that helped me read this one better than I would have otherwise. Either way, check out the recording linked to by the poem’s name on the Poetry Foundation’s website. Kearney kills the reading.

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

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Personal Ethic 3: A Different Holiday

Serbia has an interesting Christmas tradition. It is said that what you do on Christmas determines how you’ll spend your year. So on that day, you do many different things for a short period of time and you are intentional about which things. My wife is Serbian so this tradition is part of our family’s celebration. And note, that because Serbia is on the Orthodox calendar, this is a separate day from 12/25, the Protestant and Cathothlic Christmas. Strangely, I now look forward to Orthodox Christmas more than the Christmas of my youth. It has even changed the way I think about my non-Christmas days. What makes it so wonderful is the focus on experiences, not outcomes. The other is that I do a little of everything. It connects me, in a single day, to the variety of experiences that make me feel whole. 

Check out other work in the Personal Ethic series here.

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Uncollected 71, As Answers Run From Their Questions

I kissed his mouth 
it tasted like bananas
and thus our will 
and fate
did so contrary run

some people enjoy
verbal pleasure
and employ long sentences
letting water spill sweetly
past the lips

if a poem has no conceit
the emphasis falls
on reality: square, severe
the words now stretched

I remember Portsmouth
sleeping, the window open
and it felt like the sea coming in

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

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The Social Unit 13: Productive Inequality

Some people value material things more than others. Their drive to acquire a greater share is extremely productive. Not just for them, but for everyone. It increases the productive capacity of the social unit. However, there is a point at which the inequality no longer provides any marginal productivity. Further the inequality becomes politically destabilizing. The question is not how does a social unit rid itself of inequality, rather what levels are productive and stable for the social unit. 

Check out all the work in the collection: The Social Unit

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Racists of America Club Note #22: Aping

My brother and I had an uncomfortable encounter doing some fine dining at the Brown hotel in Louisville. Our waiter was white, but his assistant was an older black man. At some point, the assistant came up to clean the table. He complimented us on our suits, complaining that nowadays a lot of people abuse the dress code. He made a bit of small talk and left, but what was uncomfortable was the feeling that he was aping for us. It is interesting that an exaggerated display of deference made us feel as ashamed as being called out

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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The 17/18 Poems 41: Four Paws

when to a the what 
you might well know,
four paws.
in this trap again 
are we?
let’s not begin with goodbye
you know the interesting thing
about collision 
is it’s so mutual
stop trying to right the wrongs
of law and love
the children of man
are naked and featherless
feeble and querulous
and you want to be 
Moses on a motorcycle

don’t think it isn’t a junkie fall
many wish life was just 
one long blow job
but there are dimes
on the eyes of the walking
there is a poetry
to that kind of blindness
the world says no,
and all they hear is yes, yes, yes

four paws, listen to me
this net is a visible sign 
of my continued support
it’s old sad music 
always comes into major
sometimes the second chance
come first
there are opportunities here
for a comfortable earth 
and sumptuous heaven
there is now parking 
free parking
in Jerusalem

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

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Personal Ethic 2: The To-do List

Living with a daily to-do list can be great or terrible. I have noticed the difference between feeling motivated by my list versus grinding under its tyranny isn’t how many things I actually do. It’s only how much I do relative to the length of the list. Said differently, what matters is expectation. Therefore, the number of things I put on my list is important. I don’t write down everything I want to do. That list is endless and saps my will to work. On the other hand, I try to write down enough to push myself to be productive each day. Judging what my productivity sweet spot is can be difficult. It is much better to err on the low side though. When I finish my to-do list early, I usually have the motivation to continue working.

Check out other work in the Personal Ethic series here.

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Uncollected 70, Bad Case

One time I got a bad case of “the man”
I started telling my poems what to do 
like I owned them
slapping stanzas on the backside
as they walked by- What? It was a joke?
My privilege got out of hand,
I was micro-aggressing every line
and messing up all the pronouns.
There were repercussions of course
a heroic couplet threatened
to cancel me and go authorless.
I hated doing it
but I had to mansplain
the nature of the poet-poem relationship
right before rewriting that couplet 
in blank verse
who uses heroic couplets anyway?
Everything’s good now.
I reflected. I read some books
the whole incident brought out the best
in this white male savior

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

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The Social Unit 12: Poliecon

Much of the problem of money in politics (and vice versa) is that the two systems theoretically pretend to operate independently. Your amount of political power is not supposed to affect the amount of money you have, and the amount of money you have isn’t supposed to affect the amount of political power you have.

We all know this isn’t true in practice. Many have differing opinions about how great the effect is, but I don’t think anyone would credit that there is no effect. We need to start treating the two systems as a single dynamic system. We should not have the two sciences, Economics and Political Science. We should be looking at Political Economics. (I like Poliecon instead.)

Check out all the work in the collection: The Social Unit

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Occasional Verse 12: Someone Compares your Poem to a Poet You Don’t Like

That’s a compliment that is hard to take. 
Remember, it comes from a good place.
And that place must be messed up
because there is no way
I write like that. No way.
…or do I? This compliment is really
starting to suck. I work so hard
not to sound like that poet. 
Yet I’m falling into it while trying to back away.
Falling headlong into the prophesied mediocrity.
Writing myself into oblivion.
All by my own hand.
Damn it! This is so greek.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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Racists of America Club Note #21: Get Out Of Slavery Free Card

In the nineties when I was in high school, my stepfather listened to a lot of Rush Limbaugh on AM radio. One day I was walking through the kitchen and Rush was discussing the reparations question. He had a guest on the show whose name I wish I could remember. The guest, as a prominent black businessman, thought the idea of reparations was ridiculous and promised to send anyone who contacted him a certificate pardoning them for slavery. The idea seemed so preposterous to me, but there was also poetry in it as it perfectly embodied a white fantasy.

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 16: “Any fool can get into an ocean…”

I have to be honest this poem wasn’t love at first site. I’m not sure what it was. I think it had something to do with the the language not really projecting the authority to make the kind of declarations it makes. But it’s famous enough so that you hear run into it a lot, and slowly it got its hooks in me. Check it out here at the Poetry Foundation’s website.

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

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Notes On A Personal Ethic 1

I mean “ethic” more as how shall I live rather than as what is right and wrong. It is roughly how I organize myself daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. A lot of these observations overlap with personal productivity literature. However, the telos isn’t productivity, it is living a better life. The scope is bigger than simply moral improvement. Living a good life must also address questions of meaning, satisfaction, engagement, and fulfillment.   

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Uncollected 67, There Was The Time

There was the time 
we thought we knew better but didn’t
There was the time 
our indecision made everything fall apart
There was a time
and a time after that

Once we made the powerful and brutal
more powerful and brutal
Once we lost interest
halfway through
Don’t forget the time 
we did it on the cheap,
or the time we gave them
what we thought they needed
not what they asked for

Regrettably,
there was a time
we gave them refuge
but no home
and, how did we not 
see this coming,
the time business interests
co-opted better intentions

Apologies, apologies, 
more apologies
and still there was the time
we gave them something
they didn’t know how to use
and there was that time
the worst time
we gave them something 
so precious
they killed each other for it

Check out other work in the Uncollected series here.

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Occasional Verse 11: Bathroom Diptych

Waiting Behind Another Man in a Public Bathroom

If you ever desired the power

to make time pass slowly,

I am exactly that superhero.

Please forget that I’m here though.

Please stop the sideways glances.

I mean you no harm.

Let your mind go to peaceful,

fluid landscapes,

visions of strong flow. 

The story of uncomfortable

meets embarrassed

will soon be over.

Behind You is Another Man Waiting to Use the Urinal

Is this worse than writer’s block?

My plumbing has seized.

Should I just scratch this attempt

and come back later.

I should have taken a stall.

Settle down. You can do this.

There is no issue at stake but time.

Time! Why did you think of time?

How long has it been?

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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The 17/18 Poems 39: The Doing We Are Talking About

the doing we are talking about

the clench 

the cry stifled

the table of strange theatre

and each and all in the night

slowly home I’m saying

confess my head the dirty bit

finger on nail, the hammer

of manner and motion away from a source

of meaning and the matter it makes

of mother-work, the merry and the dead

quite broken, the blacktop, I’m speaking

a turtle’s back

wet asphalt and now the rain

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

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Occasional Verse 10: Trying to Find Your Underwear After Sex

Do I address the underwear 

or do I address you, 

now naked pair,

whose underwear disappeared

into that oblivion of bed clothes,

as if to say there is no way

to put that apple back on the tree?

Maybe there is someone approaching,

a child that needs sparing,

or a lover betrayed?

But that, of course,

only makes the underwear hide harder.

Could you close your eyes

you might be able to see yourselves

just five minutes before,

in a tangle of elbows and feet, 

pushing your underclothes 

back in time, almost to the first day.

And now the price of that pleasure 

is an eternity of search.

Nothing free in indulgence

is quite free of consequence.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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Occasional Verse 9: Accidentally Giving Someone the Same Gift Three Times

I just gave my dad

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

for the third consecutive Christmas. 

This is enough

to break his waspy resolve. 

He’s called me out in front of the family 

from sheer exasperation. 

I’m shocked.

I can’t tell if it’s worse to be called out the third time 

or not to be called out the second? 

The book is well outside 

his taste: history or spy-fi. 

It was a risk to begin with, 

and I don’t even remember taking it. 

It is the kind of thoughtlessness 

that prevents me from being a good gift-giver, 

or even just average. 

And my father still hasn’t read the book. 

I think if anyone had given me a book three times, 

albeit unknowingly, 

I would have at least cracked the cover. 

Maybe I’m shifting blame here, 

my deficiencies as a gift-giver exposed? 

Maybe I’ll double down next year,

and give it to him a fourth time

starting a game of literary chicken 

that can only end 

in a new pair of running shoes for Murakami.


Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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Racists of America Club Note #19: Entropy

Actually, Pynchon of all people has one of the best lines about this. In one of his very few nonfiction writings about his work, he talks about an early short story he wrote titled Entropy. Entropy, of course, is the central Pynchonian metaphor and a concern for all of his mature work, but early on he tried to write a story about it with the word in the very fucking title and he has this great line about it: “The story is a fine example of a procedural error beginning writers are always being cautioned against. It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol, or abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.” -WF

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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The 17/18 Poems 38: I feel like a wall now

of what whose habit is

to be by daylight pain,

like a Danish mope.

(I hate patience.)

I hate you,

and hate you in every color.

go chase rain to someone else’s doorstep.

I feel like a wall now.

Something I could shoot arrows off

or pour boiling oil 

all over your square-jawed silence.

May your lyrics try to keep peace

and always cause war

May it hurt when you laugh

May you watch

as the last snowball in hell

melts through your fingers.

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 15: another tin woman

I read this poem at Sixfold magazine. The journal has a really interesting submission process. Essentially the people who have submitted poems vote for the best submissions and the top 30 make the magazine. Anyway, this is by far my favorite poem of all the different submissions I read. The user was anonymous, but if he/she ever finds this post. Let me know your name please. …and send me more poems. I love this one!

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

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Occasional Verse 8: Hearing Your Own Pettiness in the Words of Your Son

As you drive them to practice,

your son tells his friend

that their tennis coach is 

not the sharpest pencil in the box.

He says this with the same smirking condescension

(and cadence!) that you said it with, 

just two days before.

Moreover, feeling his point might have been 

too subtle he says it again.

At which point you interrupt

to correct your son in front of his friend. 

By which your son understands

you are not correcting his meanness

but his lack of guile.

And you did this all to seem 

nicer than you really are.

In the silent five minutes left 

before you reach the tennis court,

you realize your legacy will be total. 

Your son inherits not just your sense of humor

or your fluid single-handed backhand

but your vanity, pettiness, and spite.

He doesn’t just see you as you present yourself,

or as you conceive of yourself

but as you are. 

And all those not so comic foibles

will become part of him too. 

His words, your words, echo in your thoughts

for five long minutes and then a lifetime more

as you gaze vacantly through the windshield

at all that is before you in time

looking into the future,

the harshest kind of mirror. 

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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Racists of America Club Note #18: An Attempt At An Essay

Title: Recovering from Racism
My proposal is that we start working on racism using a recovery paradigm. The kind used to fight physiologically deep problems like alcoholism. I don’t think racism has the same physiological basis but is culturally very deep. Not only is it deep like alcoholism. There is an incredible amount of guilt, shame, and denial surrounding both the term racist and alcoholic. What I love about programs like AA is first owning the problem. Everyone gets up and says ‘My name is <blank> and I’m an alcoholic’. This seems so simple but is actually quite hard. Many in recovery have been in denial for years with both themselves and those that love them. They have given all kinds of qualifications. You have probably heard a million of these excuses. I drink a lot, but I’m not a drunk. I like to have fun. It isn’t affecting my job. I drink but it is definitely under control. You get the idea. And just like with racism, there is usually someone to point at that has a bigger problem than you, which is why you never start working on your problem. Saying you’re an alcoholic in AA is not meant to make all drinking problems seem like they have the same severity. It is the acknowledgement of a common struggle. A recognition of the struggle and therefore the ability to improve.

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 14: Eric with the Light Brown Hair

I have no idea where I found this poem. If anyone knows the poet, let me know. I would love to read more of this poet’s work.

Eric with the Light Brown Hair

I have no horse! I have no horse! 

cries Eric sitting on the porch 

of the Twin Maples Retirement Home 

and it’s a fine spring day, 

I am walking to the playground 

when I stop to hear this, 

the most profound moment our town 

has seen since the ice-cream truck 

adopted a rendition of Stephen Foster’s 

Oh! Susanna

the profundity of which should be apparent 

to all those who linger in blissful repose 

over the sad lives of great forgotten men 

I have no horse! I have no horse! 

Eric behaves as one does 

after a beheadment 

and I love the ology of it 

and the ism of his cry 

I love the ology of clouds 

and the ism of rain too 

but not as specifically as 

I love Eric, who seeks his red rose 

in the fume of the moment 

his mouth oily and explosive, 

wide open, waiting for someone 

to throw a few peanuts in 

God has made some pretty weird comments 

in his time, about the nature of human 

life and all of that, naturally 

they are profound 

but somehow they seem like a morbid imitation 

compared to Eric’s 

and even if he goes back centuries 

every time he gets stewed

like the wildflowers who wither on the shore 

far from our native glen 

I sigh for Eric, who I unanswered, 

I sigh for Eric who once had light brown hair. 

as I swing 

floating like a vapor 

on the soft-spoken air

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

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Occasional Verse 7: My Son Fishes Coins Out of the Fountain at the Mall

My eight year-old son can’t believe his luck.
That there are just 
“all of these coins left in this fountain.”
He easily fishes them out.
He’s recently become curious about money
and where it comes from. 
I’m afraid this is sending him
the wrong message.
I’m also worried about all those wishes.
Will they still come true?
I feel silly for even thinking that.
I would feel really silly 
saying that to my son, 
who might think, as it now stands,
that one obtains money from fountains.

I am desperate for one of those signs
that are on some fountains that say
these coins are collected for charity.
Then I could tell my son to leave the coins
for the kids with glaucoma or something.

My son is really raking it in at this point. 
His wet little hands filled with lucre.
People are starting to look.
Other kids are getting curious.
There might be a run forming on this fountain.
All I can think to tell my son
is that we have to be somewhere.

Later at home we count the money–
“Count de Monet!”
Nothing.
He’s too young for Mel Brooks jokes.
Three dollars in change.
Not bad, my little capitalist.
He is now asking for a water feature 
in front of our house. 
I didn’t expect that.
I try to explain that nobody 
would make wishes in our fountain.
He wants to know why the mall fountain 
is better for wishing 
than a fountain in our yard, 
to which 
I have nothing to say.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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The 17/18 Poems 36: Kelly

I hear Kelly, I do Kelly

not so much saved 

as salvaged

until I couldn’t 

I couldn’t

just for the moment 

I’m saying

spell comfort

C-O-M-F-O-R-T

this plan is about envy

this play is about summer’s prices

a cock will burn down this city

a Minneapolis in the purple rain

we’re gussied up for the going down

I want to see Kelly

I want her to know

that hate, cold as it is

is only love’s winter

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

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Occasional Verse 6: Your Six Year-old Daughter Asks How the Penis Gets Into the Vagina

What do you say? Do you tell her?

I told her.

And now your wife

wants to know why.

So does your therapist.

Maybe it’s because you remember

the day you figured it out

in fifth grade,

a full three years before

it was revealed 

in junior high health class

by a football coach 

that said puberty 

poo-ber-dee.

You were riding your bike

home after school,

puzzling it out.

You knew that somehow

the penis had to 

get into the vagina

for babies to get made.

But it just didn’t seem possible 

that the penis, 

a squishy little piece of flesh,

could be pushed against a vagina, 

and do anything but crumple.

If only it could be made firmer,

if only it had another state.

Wait a minute, 

I stopped the bike for this.

I remembered that the penis 

almost has the desired properties

when you wake up in the morning.

What your mom sometimes calls a flagpole.

Yes, that might just work,

a flagpole penis.

Oh my God, a flagpole penis! 

If you don’t take into account my age

at that moment, 

you might be unimpressed,

but remember this was pre-poo-ber-dee.

An erection was in no way connected

to desire in my mind.

I was like a man who’d never seen water,

trying to figure out how a fish swims.

I was an anatomical engineer 

that deduced the solution from first principles.

It was my on-the-road-to-Damascus moment.

Okay, not everybody gets to be Paul.

But when the great engineer in the sky 

has called your name, 

you go out and you preach the word.

And that is why I told my daughter.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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The 17/18 Poems 35: A World of Made

a world of made is not a world of born

how many rain-soaked lives must I live

this makes me pain great cause, and again, and again

in this opportunity of space, I am an asshole

an asshole deep

from the day that sex made me

from wanting the page to roar back

from the future I’ll never see

god, please grant me, not serenity

not this cleat or that clod

or the beauty of the leaden peonies

god, grant not love and good conscience

but a deeper, blacker stripe.

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 13: Bear’s Night Letter

This Brendan Galvin poem is filled with such beautiful masculine creepery.

Dear Blank. That’s how I think of you.

Nameless as your eyes would disclose you

if I got that close.

You may have noticed me, though,

in my window above the street

where I pretend to be switching channels.

I suspect your mother suspects

I have been watching you,

and maybe she is correct to guard

her clothesline, the seven flavors

of your nighties, your pantyhose having a fling

with the breeze. If you think I am humorless

you are wrong. I see the comedy

of those popsicle-colored convertibles

you and your friends jazz around in.

I see your father’s pride

when he waters the flowers and you

practice handstands or pump your arms

and work over the grunts 

of a high-school cheer.

I’m not going to slide out of shadow

with a voice full of peanuts, Hey, Girlie,

a crank who stuffs pigeons 

into a sack. Oh, no. Secure in my creephood,

it’s enough to watch, knowing that one day

perfect teeth enter the pizza

that breaks the cartwheel’s back.

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

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Occasional Verse 5: Trying to Find Your Underwear After Sex

Do I address the underwear 

or do I address you, 

now naked pair,

whose underwear disappeared

into that oblivion of bed clothes,

as if to say there is no way

to put that apple back on the tree?

Maybe there is someone approaching,

a child that needs sparing,

or a lover betrayed?

But that, of course,

only makes the underwear hide harder.

Could you close your eyes

you might be able to see yourselves

just five minutes before,

in a tangle of elbows and feet, 

pushing your underclothes 

back in time, almost to the first day.

And now the price of that pleasure 

is an eternity of search.

Nothing free in indulgence

is quite free of consequence.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

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Racists of America Club Note #15, attempt at an intro

(Another piece of dialogue. I’m not clear on the context.)
-You should come to a meeting.
-I’m not sure I’d know what to say.
-Just come, listen. You don’t have to speak if you don’t want to, but you probably will. I hardly ever know what I’m going to say, but once I hear other people share, something always comes up. Most of us live lives rich with shame about race.

Check out other work in the Racists of America series here.

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The 17/18 Poems 35: I Miss The Future

I miss the future maybe more than the past

what was to be and now will not

tragically gliding forward and away from us

there were happier men in that future

there was justice in that future

and most of all there was great poetry

can we bring it back forward

or is it gone forever

men will never have the character and intellect

that was to be so

being of the future

this loss cannot technically be 

a fall from grace

but being so close to realization

it feels we really did lose something

and now that wisdom, gentleness, and peace

is never to be had, or almost had, again

Check out other work in the 17/18 Poems series here.

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Strange Faces Other Minds 12: Parade

Right in the middle of Parade by Tony Hoagland, I ran into this.

Something weird to admire this week on TV:

the handsome face of the white supremacist on trial.

How he looks right back at the lawyers, day after day

–never objecting, never making an apology.

I look at his calm, untroubled face

and think, That motherfucker is going to die white and right,

dissappointing everyone like me

who thinks that punishment should be a kind of education.

I felt so called out on my shit, like Hoagland came to my house, punched me in the balls and left.

Check out other work in the Strange Faces Other Minds series here.

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Occasional Verse 4: When Your Favorite Band Mainstreams

It’s tremendously gratifying. 

You were right.

This band is great.

But the very same moment they legitimize your taste,

they no longer serve as its marker.

You are a bit like a revolutionary

that suddenly finds himself in power.

It’s a little embarrassing.

What do you do now?

Who is left to convert?

There is no argument to make,

amazingly everyone agrees.

The only answer

is to find another backwater band

with which to bother your unlistening friends.

The guerilla needs to go back to the jungle.

If you don’t, you’ll find yourself 

saying silly things like

I liked them before this or that important concert,

waiting for your early adoption 

                              to count for something.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse