Category Archives: leave no trace

Song O’ The Willamette

Seek ye sounds and hear the collective bugle calls!
O’ osprey n’ lumbering locomotive bawls
Hear its honking trombone plunger muted feature
Garbled warble like the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher

Galileo

Like all the famous
astronauts and astronomers
who spent days
peering at the heavens
I’ve stared too long at the stars
orbiting inside your baby blues
to no longer deny that God exists

The Drought of ’22

The body of missing teen found plastered over headlines
Barely mentioned, the lake and its 500 year low waterline

A society that buries itself in fantasy buying virtual land
Will eventually realize that our bodies cannot drink sand

The Antihero

I am the undrank cheer
and the spilled champagne
Of the New Year’s promises
that wind up supine, dead

If I Was The Planet Mars

If I was the planet Mars
I’d break free from the Sun’s hold
And escape into the dark cold
Forge a path into the vast black
and never, ever, ever come back

This Muddy Wake

Soon I’ll molt off my sun dried summer skin
And ditch the campfire and beer songs
To a cowboy’s goodbye, a wink and a smile
Knelling his shiny bell and his trusty steed
A sequin stitched requiem fallen fallow
Of Fall’s fraying executioner’s dark hood

Song Of Fawns

Stained holy the color
A throne for august queen
This vale of hearth
My elegant womb

New Anthology

I am pleased to announce that my poem Some Kind of Blue will be published and included in a new poetry anthology by Ingrid Wilson called, “The Anthropocene Hymnal: Songs of a self-defining Era”

Re: Redrum

A carnival of meats
Creaky carousels of subjugation
of the tortured and sentient
Wide eyed and scared
Naked and bleeding
Braised and bruised
Animal corpses splayed
On dinner plates

Solvitur Ambulando

This is my journey
To this goddamn place
I pace just behind the edge
Or at least what’s left of me
This, my purgatory
My paradox
My gathering
My reckoning

My Hands…

Grasped thumbs
Cupped breasts
Rattled shakes
Played with dolls
Bounced balls
Jumped rope
Reached for love
Clung to sun

Good News

She fell upon my hardcover
book on the lives of caterpillars
from a wispy cedar tree burl
I scared away an excited robin
and some boys with fishing poles
I watched her crawl back and forth
doing a 50 leg two step on my arm

Paper Tigers

I keep my paper tigers close to me
Anxiously pacing, dogged and untamed
Like the very last satyr in the world of man
Crumpled wads, all bark and neutered maws
Gilded divertissements that tiptoe around
My real demons and the elephant in my room
Like my fear of getting chained to comfortable
When all I dream about is running as fast as I can

Runaway Trains

There’s this divide
Thirty seconds wide
Trillions of commercials long
Most everyone I have ever met
Want to save the planet
While filling up with gas
Or vote to save the environment
But refuse to leave their cars

Something Precious

Eventually the sum of infinity catches up to my panting Achilles
The wolf closes, encircles, halving Zeno’s paradox striking distance
Something precious like a final breath betwixt time’s pendent jaws
My single bleated prayer offered up as a lamb just before his pounce

The Escape Artist

Fawn eyed creatures
Like me have no chance
My ocean targeted. Dredged
Every sea dollar spent
My hiding spots albescent
Snowing and pregnant with plastic
I hide out during the workday
Sitting on my gender neutral throne
My island at my job. I write poems
While pretending to excrete
While thinking these words

Angel Light

In moonlit alley
Ashy clotted arms
Tangled silhouettes
Gather like crows

Rundown carousels
And jilted roller coasters
A perpetual creepshow
Of attractive nuisances

Like bare veined angels
With come fuck me eyes
Pinhole sized pupils flash
Dirty wheedle smiles

Mountain Mettle

Mountain don’t give a fuck
Way up there we must appear
Like nests of rustling ants and ticks
Scurrying about everywhere
Making jobs, lies and politics

The Abolition of the Automobile

So one of the most remarkable and hardest decisions that I have made recently was to sell my car. Obviously, for a lot of Americans the decision to sell their car would be unconscionable. It was a difficult one for me. I loved my car. However, there comes a time when the very act of ownership becomes a reinforced complicity in a failed and rapacious big oil paradigm that is predicated on the domination and exploitation of this place we call Earth.