Gloomiferous Pooms

For my friend on the occasion of her wedding. What I know of mirrors is their imperfection, their imbalance of mathematics: one reflects...

For my friend on the occasion of his wedding. No eye for art, you said, and turned toward Hunger, livid color leaving you cold, neither...

It is not Death that watches us with suspicion, yet you invoke Her name anyway, make of Her a boundary, make of me an earthen intimacy....

Even untended, the grass only grows so high. Sunlight shows the gloomy drooping as it is, gilding mournful descent in unmet potential;...

I thought to call them faceted, the jagged edges of aspiration, and aren't they? One edge gives way to dozens, fractured glass casting...

I expected regret to rise like a bruise, black as a berry below kissed skin. What's left instead is yellow-edged, too sallow for...

The orangery takes on a different shape when you enter. Citrus branches stretch until birdsong fills the canopy, until dappling shadow...

Snow thawing brings disappointment, promises unfulfilled, hope's unattainable shape on the horizon.

We are alone in this room, the fire dimmed to embers. We are alone in every room, our flame bright as summer. We are walking home...

His back is to me, half-cast in shadow. Light lends depth, borrowed brilliance filtering through the window; we can't stay like this...

(incomplete, purpose served) She saw it before I did: stillness disguised as grief, how I held my tears, how freely they fell, as...

(incomplete, but worthwhile as is) You are not the tree sprung from the seed, but the forest in its entirety. Complexity in your canopy...

When has beauty ever come when called? My hands beg and beckon, but conjuration requires complexity, effort, the right shapes constructed...

Helpful Suggestions for the Infuriatingly Interesting i. Measure yourself against imagination. Take stock of all your short-comings....

Correction of an Earlier Point With reason, frequently renewed; With limit, acknowledging failure; With honesty, despite discomfort; With...

Sometimes, it's fragility, emptying at a careless crack. Sometimes, it's a key turning, opening a cabinet of ribs. Sometimes, it's just...

"Maybe a rabbit is next. If I can find gentler attendance in me." I'd not bend you towards gentleness, o wolf, were it your teeth I'd...

All my poetry has gone quiet, a silence settled everywhere, not grown around a hollowness or absence, but instead a presence, diffuse and...

But there was no water anywhere there. I found no water there at all. I found no water there at all. What heated dream isn't wet? I...

(a work in progress which will never be finished) i. I take tea in the afternoon, let the day settle, sort itself out. It's still bitter,...