Three o’clock is a precious thing
a gift all to myself
since I allow no-one, or very few
the honor of accompanying me here.
This hour is a deep galactic void
rift in space-time itself
wherein only Bacchus commands me
and that, only as I please—
it is a fancy, a merriment, 

a salacious, solitaire banality
crafted carefully of selfish indulgence 
and bittersweet abandonment
to a treasured solitude.

November 2020

A Certain Uncertainty

I confess a certain uncertainty
not that you’re wrong, but perhaps
Truth is a multiple exposure &
overlapping like waves of water,
sound, or light. Then maybe God
sees us all at once, not this moment
or that sin at a time; maybe Truth
pierces us like shadows on a door
. The movement may be here, or outside,
the brightness from a sun, a car, a lamp;
maybe I am the darkness. Or, reorient:
what does the light not strike, behind the door,
as it reflects? Could be anything. Still,
though the light would have been here
anyway, I had a part to play, maybe
just being wrong at the right time.

November 2020

Earth Endures

Somewhere out past a dark galaxy
in a vast, blind cloud of dust and gas
my consciousness envisions it—
the impossible expanse, the long reach
I am certain no human eye can actually see,
which I have only ever known from
an artist’s impression, an imagination
—pales to these argon hues, the chlorophyll
decomposing into yellows, oranges;
all of this: I’m certain our species will leave
the Earth, but she will follow us
in our vision of beauty, our silent moments,
so long as the memory of her remains.

November 2020

Fall

Hello, Fall—
I’ve missed you;
how many years has it been
since I met you this way?
The sweet musk of leaves
under deep-crisp blues
and wispy cirrus finger trails—
has it been a decade? Two?
Well, I’ll only see a few of you
this way; though I acknowledge
you’ve been wearing beauty, thus
for millennia. Today, though
hello: I’m glad I was here for this.

November 2020

Again with this question

Frankly,
most of us
do not know why
we create.
Imago Dei? Perhaps.
A very few of us
do it for money,
more for the hope
of money, I guess,
but most of us—
just have to. So we do.
The trash piles up
with our frustrations;
waiting for a fire, or something;
clocks ticking near dusty books;
that sort of thing.
I’ve had professors
whose houses always had
one candle going; I think
we all wish we could be like that.
But instead
I still don’t know
why I create.

November 2020

Weddings

Weddings
pinprick a shadow world with blatant idealism
unapologetically embraced—worshipped, really
to remind us of worlds where ceremony,
idealism, worship, perhaps all three
are the stuff of Earth, no different
from burlap, from a stone, from wine.
The door closes behind us; the wind is chilly,
the music now muffled in walls, but
I notice, now back in the world of cigarettes,
an afterglow remains.

November 2020