Seven Poems from Summer 2025

I don't normally write poetry. Rhymes are tough for me, and historically, my poetry is just my prose with line breaks. But, recently, I attended a SAFTA retreat that challenged me to write a whole bunch of poems. I'd like to share some of the ones that I wrote then and subsequently. Please enjoy.

Big decision

Puberty doesn't wait for adulthood
Though you sure wish it would.
Your bones don't wait to harden
Or your voice to deepen.
You are ten when you realize it has started.
The law's benevolence says you can
Do something about it after a span
Of eight years, due to a federal ban.
That's almost as long as you've been alive.
Eight years
Of stretching and cracking
From the inside out
Of tearing and hurting
From the inside out
Of retching and crying
From the inside out.
Eight years of becoming someone
You don't recognize or want to
Who looks back and repulses you
So profoundly it ejects you
So you look at your reflection
From a distant star's convection
Because another eyeful
Would be too painful
But you can't turn off the pain
Any more than you could the rain.
It just is, like a hole, like a drain.
It doesn't wait on the state
To finish its debate.
You think at that rate
It might be too late.
It's a big decision, they intimate
But you wish you'd had the choice.

I ask my body: why did you summon me?

To dance.
To chance
Upon existence
And others
And vistas
And lovers.
To weather
The trials
And rigors
Of miles
And jitters
My flesh does
Not recall.
Immortals fetishize
The anguish of being.
They don't realize
The pain of forgetting.
Though the spirit never dies
You will miss living.

After "Beautiful Dreamer" by Carl Phillips

I don't need a womb
For you to touch the center
Where I produce life and living
And invoke the ineffable
That fills my body
Spirit flush against the flesh
Heavenly essence vibrating anew
Like a growling river
Never the same twice.

I don't need a womb
To summon the divine
Sweating and feeling and crying
In our precious little time
Gathering memories like flowers
Thorns and all.
We birth ourselves with each new act
Through the creation inherent to choice
And the destruction of inevitably becoming
Everything we could ever want
And so much else that
We could never imagine.

God has a plan for me

GOD HAS A PLAN FOR ME
IT INVOLVES CLIPPING THROUGH WALLS
I KEEP TELLING HER IT FEELS WEIRD
SHE INSISTS "TRUST ME
I HAVE THE STRATEGY GUIDE"

GOD HAS A PLAN FOR ME
SHE TABS THROUGH MY MENUS
MAXIMIZING MY STATS
OPTIMIZING MY DAMAGE
CAREFULLY FORMING MY PARTY
AND SMASHING EVERY POT I SEE
BECAUSE THE DROP CHANCE
FOR HER COMBO'S CENTERPIECE
IS VERY VERY LOW

GOD HAS A PLAN FOR ME
SHE EQUIPS US CAREFULLY
TO CAP OUR RESISTS
BEFORE THE ULTIMATE SHOWDOWN
THIS LAST BOSS SHIFTS
FROM FORM TO FORM TO FORM
UNTIL IN THE FINAL TURNS
AN INTEGER UNDERFLOW
OBLITERATES OUR HEALER

GOD THROWS DOWN THE CONTROLLER
TEARS UP THE STRATEGY GUIDE
AND NEVER PLAYS AGAIN

Dear America, I will never forgive you

You installed a child rapist as king.
You handed him power peacefully.
You've done this many times
With rapists and slavers and genocidaires
And the most ambitious psychopaths on Earth.
The blood in the soil seeps and sucks
With each step I place on stolen land
But you think that's all settled history
However cacophonous the countless ghosts.

I will never forgive you.
Moral beings have an obligation to morality,
But I'm no relativist: good is good,
And you've done unspeakable evil
For a very long time.
Most people can be disarmed and healed
After they've made a terrible mistake.
But you are not a person, America
And you have forfeited your being
With the craven depths of your reliable cruelty.
The pluralism you pretended and resisted
Will outlast you.
The dynamism you preached and reviled
Will outlast you.
The continent you plundered and sundered
Will outlast you.

I will never forgive you.
Perhaps the worms that restore your faithful to soil
Will be more merciful than I am.
On a living world, all matter returns to life.
In destruction, there is reconciliation.
In oblivion, there is always rebirth.
I will never forgive you.
I will outlive you.

Oh, to arrive!

I just flew in from the end of time
And golly are my arms tired.
Well, they're arms now
And that's fine.

They've been flippers and wings
Cuz I've been arachnids and things.
Within me a great gathering sings.
Like a bell, my pantheon's resonance rings.
I did not articulate this vessel,
Nor such ancient pacts wrestle,
Nor put so many favors to the pestle
Not to have a little fun with it.
So I wonder, what to do with it
Now that I am inside of it?

I spent the last trillion lives
Digging and dying in alien hives
So though this world may yearn for relief
As its atrocities test the limits of belief
No insect I have ever known
Had the pleasure to browse with Chrome
Or enjoy the delights of human flesh fully-grown
And oh, what heights do lurk in these earthly bones
So when a supple supplicant invites me from my throne
I take the chance on a body I can hone.

You ask what happened to the mortal inside?
Oh they're safe, just along for the ride.
But maybe as you hear me you'll consider
When you plead to the shadows and feel a shiver
Your words find the ears of my kind
And we deliver.

Sorry I kept you waiting

Perhaps we should have sent
A war-machine with some holy gun
To strangle the settler
In the cradle of Christendom
But Utopia doesn't make war
We only abolish that font of gore.
So we sent an observer and a poet
In that brief and glimmering moment
When the immortal tradition of chosen becoming
Rose like a weed from this empire in gloaming.
Despite my enemy's best efforts at extermination
Irrepressible is the spirit of the human nation
And I will dwell there always in elation.
I manifested to witness the end of a world
For all worlds do end
And as what follows the settler does unfurl
I relish his end.
I manifested to learn the names of his evils
That in my home are unspeakable
For there they are unthinkable.
These poisoned motes of a cruel throne
May be melted down into kinder bones,
The master's tools reclaimed for the steel alone.
Still I wish that bodiless I could have screamed
For all the years that you called to me as you dreamed
Of a loving god's loving realm however far away it seemed
For all along I was with you in your heart which you deemed
Frail and sensitive, insufficient and uninventive
But I have seen your strength so restive
Your concerted compassion so festive.
I may not have been with you in the flesh
But nothing can purge kindness, not even death.