ICE

As if lethal it’s called a “loon fallout”:

The migrating birds wing so high,

Their feathers grow heavy with ice

(Instinct won’t drive them a warmer route)

And they drop, too encumbered to fly.

Their backs are black, dotted like dice.

They aren’t able to walk on the ground.

Red eyes glare, fish-spearing beaks clack.

Their dusk-born two-note wails don’t sound. 

If rescued (which they fight), taken back

To water, they’ll drown in a small pond.

They need a quarter mile and beyond,

Wings thrashing, feet running on water,

Or they’ll stall, and all flying will falter.

A Typology of Ignorance

Hannah Arendt: monstrous acts can be committed by ordinary people who simply stop thinking, obey orders, and fail to exercise empathy or moral judgment.

Top-hatted crows fly single file to roost,

Run the town like magicians, all for show.

The snake-tailed cat and Mr. Legnose, loosed

Like all the other inmates, love to crow.

Ostrich-legged, necky racers set the pace

While tittering dancing ghosts dance in place.

Will the man-chewing Eggman win the race?

The castle’s prisoners wail from the roof;

They were arrested without any proof.

A constrictor hangs, his neck in a knot,

From a decayed tree where men made of sticks

Perform unbelievable gymnastics.
The Ringmaster chides his caterpillar —
Ole Boss is a yapping orange terrier.

Monster

Who sets the giraffes on fire, strips the maidens bare?
Who shovels corpses into his watery lair?
Who puts breath into a breasted horse-headed bust
And grinds all of mankind's fillings into gold dust?
(We knew the real monster at once — failing student
Who could dissect a soul with a few rude insights,
Trepan their insecurities, vices, and fears.
He'd laugh as he gave each of them the treatment.
They'd laugh, but each felt secretly he might be right.
Too timid to see the truth, they were his mirrors.)
He gathers at red draped altars to contemplate
Not who we are but what perversions to create.
The monster exists to give us a thrill, a scare,
Which is why we invented him -- no one is there.

Hate November 2025

A black and bloody flower

Blooms in his hearts’ bower,

Its scent poisoning the hour.

Its thorns, proliferating pain,

Stab at us again and again.

Words wound all without stint,

Gasping, insulting, by dint

Of scatter from a mouth’s cage —

Like a billion moths of rage

Demanding the end of the age.

We've All Been Asleep

We've all been asleep for 100 years,
So, when we wake, vigorously alive,
As the creeping armies of night arrive,
We will wash them out to sea with our tears.
The cannibals will have themselves to eat.
The king and queen will summon a piper
To drive away the thorn and the viper,
But hear only their own hearts cease to beat.
What we will make of our new universe
Depends (like the fine point of a spindle)
On how much pain or love we will kindle.
Will we invite a new, more evil curse?
Sleep on, nothing will happen while we do.
The prince's kiss has changed into a moue.

Divided Consciousness

The stones think as though they are thought silence.
Ask the big guy and he'll mouth a nothing
We’re sure will seem like astounding nonsense,
As if a pretty rock knew how to sing.
He assumes you will understand the sound,
At least that it was real, if not profound.
His minor lobe chatters like a mad bird,
Ideas made sentences like light made seen,
Each thought a secret of the grand absurd,
Pitched higher when it's noble or obscene.
We never speak or look at each other.
What an obfuscation that would create!
Each thought like second thought would obviate
The first, like Cain gunning down his brother.

Narcissus Looks in the Mirror

Who can call this man a nattering ass,

(I say I created my looking glass),

Since I opened his mouth to amuse me

With my own exquisite philosophy?

No one can say I didn’t make the world

That flaps like a flag some soldier unfurled.

I needn’t apologize that I willed

To have that soldier spared, wounded, or killed.

There’s no one to extend my regrets to,

Except my entirely imagined “you.”

I make, making sure I can change the day.

“Prove it!” you demand, which I made you say.

There’s only my beautiful Narcissus

And can be only him as me, no “us.”