At yesterday’s event, I presented an essay that included several new poems embedded within. The poems (slightly edited from the essay) are below. The essay (which is rough, unfinished, and designed mostly for performance) can be read via PDF here.

Moon Road Poem

Corrosion of cycles

Hammering distances of cycles

The melodrama of so many rooms

And the understanding or lack there of (of patterns)

Faces I’ve known and haven’t

And will or won’t to will and to won’t

Including mine and mine and yours and yours

Specter, spectral, spectate

Here and now and there and then

And me and other and other and you

It outlasts, at last, and it shines

This road of moon

The travel of the cycle

 

Desert of Snow Poem

Like knives the ice waits

and it bleeds through the humidity

and the reflections are lit

microcosmic and forever

and frozen, unchanged

but there is one degree of change

and that degree is spacious

and that space is special

while my skin is burned by the cold

and my nerves have been deadened

but the realm is open, full, and it forms a future

and the future is filled with ice, still,

but also, the warming, as all warming stills

 

Poem for the Rugged

In memory of Freddie Gray, who was the first to die before I started to notice.

Shirked shoulders irked as we’re older

stones thrown into the gutter

I write this with the memory of the presence of the Duvall Big Rocks

and their placement emboldened and ready

I write this poem in the memory

of my worst nightmares having always been true

the “like father like son” illustrative

like country like citizen

and the death of our comfort

as the swarms of evil take over the meat between the borders

as we hold ourselves hoping we will know newly so

something better than the atrocities

recognized between the screens