Tag: Napowrimo 2026

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Poem

My idea for a poem was brilliant because it left me

before I could get my hands on it. The shower rinsed

it away. A delicate network of sugars turned gelatinous,

a killswitch offensive. The poem already knew me from

before I was born. It showed itself to me the way two birds

showed me their plumage yesterday by crashing into a window.

Instant death, and with it, taxonomy! Azure blue wings.

Stripped of miracles, the idea can live unbound. It was

an Eastern Bluebird, I think, a male and female who saw

nothing but sky ahead and then nothing at all. All day 

I knew I had killed them. My settlement by a marshland

bashes small necks and makes mud of the spark of life.

I sing “The Owl and the Pussycat” in my mettlement,

my clever harshland with its runciple grasses. I move 

the birds to a stone out of sight, my mind shivering crystals.

Hi friends! I had a hard few days at work and in life and am now 4 days behind. Trying not to let that bum me out. But I’m back!

Posted on by — 2 Comments

INTROSPECTION BREAK

It never occurred to me I could walk into a room

and not care for everyone

I could cut to couch

sling my whole body like a big fat dick

When you said your mind is the setting for a carnival

I lit the sound stage

I tossed the red pepper yellow pepper

I didn’t believe you

I held my papers tighter

apologized for sitting on the bench

which I was only testing for safety

Is this my treat or a piece of tape

Posted on by — 4 Comments

SHOW UP IN A BODY

Two minutes late is not considered late

but two months

better wear roped pearls back to the machine

for the puppet show starring a nervous radiologist

who never said once don’t worry many are called back

they come here they sit pretty

they tulip around like a doggie after a bath

Somber is not the same thing as sober

I can have fun

For example I didn’t know how rebellious I was until I was caught

Even when I was drinking

I was always sort of sober

Squeeze a pair of tits hard enough 

something comes out

like a mousy laugh moan 

or milk sort of always there 

like back of the fridge milk

dinosaur milk

a memory of calcium

or a lecture about Raphael

and woman squishiness emanating from color

I have a body designed for compression

and a mind designed for apology 

I’m sorry to cause so much trouble

Pretty much you’re terrible she said

Put your arm down 

She touched me right on my somber nothingness

The only other way to detect cancer is to give it to you

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Doom

For new world
New skills must be
Learnt

New tools new
Teeth fingers

Trust process not people
The process is to live
The living way
ASAP among germinals

Poem? Po them back

These fighting words
To the death they fight
As oil under water

The prepositions volve
Surfaceward
You get used to it
Are you going in?

Gelid and gilled
Your capabilities abound

How thou you are
To accommodate
Such provocations

Where others are kin
You are kindred

A poem titled doom
Read before writing

Like shoot first
What does fish food
Smell like?

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Oriolis

Fear is louder
At noondawn
Oodaing clocks
Of twelve instances
Wordtimes
I’m trying to hear you
Says the jackhammer
Cordless, no strings
Just empty cups
On plaster walls
It’s above my pay grade
Says the paymaster
Everyone likes to say things
You don’t
Even have to pay them
They’ll pay you
For listening
Song for song
Intimate intimation
Beat your heart
With symbol
It’s ambiguous you say
Like an optical illusion
You can only see once
No why not nu
Humble particle
The river
Fjords no fork
Sinisterthesias
All the ambi
Guosity creeping
Out to sea

Posted on by — 3 Comments

a blue hole

My body where the dead fishes live
Invites the oxygen down my wrinkled
Flesh like every other corpse where
The light doesn’t reach

My body where the dead fishes live
Somewhere there is a god for them
Falling out of flight and calling suns
To burn them
Is that warmth equal to love? Or
Do we just burn to burn?

My body where the dead fishes live
Are calling something that they thought
Was hope but it’s planting root balls
Of kelp in fallow sands
Give them something rich, their
Scales are falling away and my
pale white white skin, crumpled like
soaked tissue paper
dye leaking enveloping
Vessels
the dead fish feed at least
I can give something else
The life that escapes me

My body where the dead fishes live
Limp under the pressure and
Each nitrogen breath creeps closer
To the borderlands
Falling into another hole in the
World
Blue if light reached it
Each movement an anchor my
Feather finned friends eyes
Loll like dead girl marbles
Catch my lip

My body where the dead fishes live
Keep the rocks sound
Chamberless and if the walls
Were glass I’d press
my body call
-ing them home

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Robin of Locksley

As promised disenchantments
Temper a clavier
Clay not the dirt desired
Quadruped pants

How much nots have nots
Don’t have
Riddles
Like poems devoid of poetry
Ostraneny umber ax
Sugarless pebble lemonhead

Any sack bigger on the inside
Inside it out
Presenting
Musics of quiet
Carved on clothes
History rising from shadows
A rage twills

Red breast
Burn the broken branches
Litotes plagues
Ironies maidens

Any hard thing
Is a someday sword
Act two, Chekhov’s gum
Slip on mind
Cartridges in the maybeverse

Give mirth to maybes
Poetry sheriff or ranger
Surest if
The first word in word is of word

Encycloramapedia
Instructions, outstructions
Run on the run
Craftwork lunch
Are you sure you don’t know?

Posted on by — 4 Comments

THIS MOMENT OF PEACE

She was the one they meant

when they said too many mouths

and she ate elsewhere in the garden during a lightning storm

so they wouldn’t know they fed her

That’s why it’s called a salad 

she said with proud low teacher voice

because it’s a little bit of everything

everything being the discarded scraps 

Who here is the real puppy

What’s it like in that nose hole

Does it smell like the land

or the flag of the land waving like a skin flap

What’s it like to be here

What’s it like to be her adenoid

that crawls out covered in sunscreen strokes her hair

and says if you cover your face a little more 

no one will know how old you are

Her whole fruit market no ribbons or price gouges

crawls on all fours

actually on elbows so crawls on sixes 

Go where the finger points to the good grass and right pop

down to the original wood

a place where they say circle for an eight count

Dress without weather in mind only femininity 

Most women are associated with a color but not her

A white bra? Pat the air

If she gets lonely she can host a press conference

Do you walk with confidence or do you walk plain

into the challenge of never laughing

Posted on by — 4 Comments

Likeness

Exude former ude
Your odes retracted
Palisaded etudes

Correct attitudinally
Dialogues and dusklogs
Mesmerize the message

No knowledge but know how
To dye-a-poem
Day glow in the sunshine

Flusters darkness in you
A riven flow, a pitted olive
Like a pen cap on the tongue

Only similar things are alike
Objects on fire
Repel the enveloping flames

The envelope is sound
When it is new but wizened already
Crowded in, crammed in crannies

Population populi
You have become accustomed to
The customs here

The double lives
Of triple agents
Student of happiness

You know the song
And what it costs
Tongue says face tells

Do I repeat myself
Beginner’s luck
Up to and including

The caterpillars caterwaul
Wrong movements
In right direction

Cautious cautionary tales
Raisin bread
For the raisins

Posted on by — 1 Comment

DEPARTMENT STORE POPULISM

Once a billionaire you can’t be anything else 

Shockingly thrifty or your origin story doesn’t matter

Laughter at the expense

Casual decisions make someone else die a little

You are a traitor to creation

less secret on the wooden floor

Trash separated and sorted

A bright sunny day means endless meetings

you’ll be tan anyway

The rat race is over

You won 

It’s more like a please and thank you pile

in which the rats discuss the confusing nature of assets 

with you as the love object

I like rats but I have never been one

Will the bank mow the lawns of the empty houses

The moral of folktales is to desire wealth

to love scarcity which is actual love

to leave in a carriage with a prince 

who can’t tell the difference between a girl and bird

and wonder if we’re all one soul or isolated

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Tambourine

Shade gardening
I masticate the message
Maser guidance
Hug routine

Just a single mar
A face in the bark
I call imagination for want
Of better

Who are your betters
As you join them
The rockiest rocks
Sound the soundiest sounds

I take my seven league boots
For a seven league step
Not knowing yet
How far seven leagues go

Fellowship, friendliness
How tenderly you forget
Like blowing up a balloon
With a tiny image on it

Growing but fading
Signatures of natures
Speech is the sound
Of destruction

Where the where is
A shell around a bubble
Contains no such thing
Sleep, water

The box folds flat
The flat folds too
Storyocious
Oblong obs

Posted on by — 5 Comments

Maybeterday

Yes the dramatic situation
Resembles other situations
Of yeses to other questions
The yes is a metonym
Of all yeses ever
The total yes
The galaxy revolves around
Exploding its explosions
Parsing parables, swishing swirls
A memory on fire
Until eventually the now
So totally subsumes the past
We have to stop to ask directions
Hermenaut
Don’t panic
Don’t again but more
Don’t with magnificent intention
As opposed to?
That is what poems are for
The opposition
Loyal or disloyal? Yes
Every thing is the same thing

Posted on by — 2 Comments

ugh

how the fuck are we supposed to feel calm, it is April 7

and the president proposed annihilating an entire people

and then capitulated to a two-week ceasefire by nightfall,

we celebrated V.’s birthday, I drank two glasses of wine in quick

succession, my sibling said in case this is the end, I love you,

the children said they would form a human chain around bridges,

people said they were willing to die, I ordered vegetarian ramen

and we talked shop, I got in my car and drove home, civilization is ending

and there isn’t a thought in my head, I finish and send a blurb, the seltzer

ticks in the can, I love the view of Milwaukee coming over the Hoan

and maybe the light of the buildings from a bridge can be a thought, 

a moment where consciousness buckles to hold a vision of such might,

the cats were waiting for me at home, my sibling texts crisis averted,

the crowd at the Taylor watch party erupted in cheers, I floss my teeth

Posted on by — 3 Comments

THE COURSE IS OVER WHEN THE SPLIT HAIR SINGS

8 pm deadline

Every mind channel shouts AMERICAN REGIME CHANGE

Go ahead and put the Bible on every reading list

Long books with many chapters are my favorite

What if it says not to eat meat

What if it says to care for those who have less

What if it says a lot about sharing

What if it says not to kill

What if it says don’t bother judging anyone

What if it has stories within stories 

The hills roll like lambs

in the time of helicopters and black flies

How will the future remember this

Posted on by — 4 Comments

Polonaise

How about a little endless in the afternoon
All the limited stock I prefer more of
My preferences not quite opinions
Like activities inventing a personality
Zero masque for the astral masquerade
As you wake up another person
Following seven dresses to the fireside
The ball glows by the air’s own light
Heat rising promiscuously off my body
Thermoceptive, sensing the gradations
Minimum inheritance or welcome curse
For the duration of poetry don’t cry
Here is the zipper where a soul shall be
A radio unraveling in the navel of the galaxy
Blackstars decorate whitehole
Ignore it you can only discover what you know
Coming back to life also the weeds
Overwhelmed with excellence
Living a higher life as on tippy toes
There is no such thing as bored only unready

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Joy Joy Joy

It’s really about how furiously one can tread water
If the dance is a dance you can do until
Every bone in your feet breaks and so on
But what about joy – I wonder as I read
On the way it’s all delicate ribbons layered
On and on like those crepe cakes or
Ribbon candies or piles of pages that
Bound on one edge make a book
And how even if I gave blood and tried
To save the risky living that there
Wouldn’t be any left for me anemic
Already the red cross rejects me

That saving something of myself
Is too something to be taken
Fistful and writhing like the meandering
Waters so slowly moving towards a
Destruction and a peace – these
Creations were never meant to last

If the kudzu can take it back
So can I and we can make another
Home among ruins or stars and
Starve and swoon like those Victorian
Ladies swaying our backs to the waves

The buttercups blooming like fire
Across my skin. What is there for
Each glittering moment
Blinking