Shadows provide shade and shelter, mine to my son just till he’s ready to unzip middle-school pajamas and soar into the sun. Night holds future bodies still, revealing what’s inside, peeling the last curl of humility that laughs from a ripe insecurity, called pride, spilling secrets tightly coiled in the nucleus…
Open your eyes.
See the bioluminescence,
ascending rhythmically
up,
up
from the abyss,
or God’s firework show
descending hazily
down,
down
in dancing waves of light,
the Holy Grail of sky watching,
the aurora borealis,
the northern lights.
We need to hear and heed this NOW more than EVER! Be kind. Be understanding. People are fragile, whether they show it or not. Learn to recognize the frightened child in everyone by listening rather than speaking. Just as you were when you were a child—afraid of failure—you will undoubtedly be tempted as an adult…
Former political debaters
and Facebook haters
sheath their swords
of “cancellation”
and get the ultimate do-over,
a hard-drive scrub,
the perfect social media experimentation.
The sin particle,
an element
before the elements
of the Periodic Table.
An irritation
to the core
that makes it unstable
like uranium or plutonium,
an existential explosion
with the biblical force
of 100 Noachian floods
unlike the God particle
of infinite glory
that pre-existed the lies
that traumatize
the innocent child
at the beginning
of every story.
If words are a bubbling brook
above the geyser of our hearts,
they’re poised
to say something about
the nature of our spirituality—
a disjointed but shared reality—
seeking comfort
in the womb of bad religion.
A carcass with a pulse,
a miracle dipped in myrrh,
perfumed a Jewish beard
and consecrated a blameless soul…
This poem is for all of us,
horse lovers,
who feel that horses
make the world
a better place.
This world is so unfriendly and unkind. How’s a teenager with Zeus’s ADHD, the rage of Achilles and the passion of Paris supposed to survive the suburban hostility of drive-by bullets of bullying and cliques of cruelty with privileged popularity without losing his mind? If you want to get to know me then…
Sometimes monsters
of our own making
show up relentlessly
until we look introspectively
at the mess we’ve made
when we’ve felt incarcerated
without the possibility of parole
as both our own judge and jury.