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Poetry is madness until it is song…
—Atticus
Why can’t I just close the door
and let myself be more than yours?
—Lydia Loveless
Then I started writing again. Maybe it was how I was raised, maybe Catholicism had some sort of impact. Growing up, I didn’t see Catholicism as optimistic. But there’s something in this world, and beyond maybe. I thought I was ready to throw it all away. But now I feel like there are still things to be done. I know my time here is limited. All our time is. So what are we going to do with it, even so?
—Bart Solarczyk
It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for the lack of what is found there.
—William Carlos Williams
Compassion is the basis of morality.
—Schopenhauer
The dusks are easy now, as I bear the brand of a new and redoubled solitude. It isn’t just that loss has cracked me open but that my heart is a flue and takes burning, junk and her memory, and lets go of the smoke. What’s gone paints the low and warm sky. I am not speaking to death these days, as it rears and moves closer than it’s ever been I walk. In the city and through her. I came home with a poem but kept it only sketched in ink and lay looking through the glass doors up to the turning sky. I fell asleep and was startled awake by a priest in a vampire movie. I watched your video chat, smoking in the court. Calling me darlin’. The hard red line of your brassiere pushing up through your pajama top early in the first morning of the year. There’s an ease to and us and it eases me. I woke up like that, easy, 6 hours later with you still on my mind. This life we dreamed up for ourselves—it was so simple to them, they think it just dropped right out of the sky and not from the love we had and beared for them. It is no longer tied, and free. Free to our books and songs, strong black coffee and Export As, Ballade No. 4 in F Minor and Mama You Been On My Mind.
I put the ’21 penny on the altar to be burned. And a nickel from 2014. I took the Rumi calendar out with the trash. Full of flights and dates and hope. Threw it all in the bin, standing caffeinated under a pig-iron sky, staring at the neighbors, more than a little hurt and spry. I’m done leaving the hometown and stuck here, as far as I can tell and not going anywhere. I’ve still got a thousand dreams etched in stained glass across the cathedral of my heart. The old git’s got a broke string. The nut’s been gorged by a hack tech and buzzes some, despite Little Brother’s efforts. It’s full of those old songs we can’t sing anymore. Sturdy tunes but we don’t like where they take us do we. The cut path in the yard is snowed over and the phantom of our fathers have slipped the cage and left the door open. They took some of the old karma and beat-up love and we are here, wondering and free. It doesn’t matter the pain or even our looming end. I bought a used French press at Goodwill and my days are fortifying, calling out and pulling down another dream. We can have it now and each other and let go into the simple ease of the price we paid. Your voice and your fine legs and whatever this tame and wild life has in store. I can’t wait to see you.
STRIDE, perfectly bound in jet-black ink on gamma green covers designed by Snakes Will Eat You
4.5×5.5″ broadside of RECURRENT, letter pressed in black ink on 100lb. lemondrop yellow paper
Broadside of TO A DOG I MET IN CALABRIA, letter pressed on 110lb. Blue Vellum Bristol paper, 11×17″ and a stand alone piece of art perfect for a gift or to hang on your wall.
Going for the Throat 
Love these poems. They have a different, somehow softer tone, yet are just as powerful. May it be a good year. A healthy one.
I love that you’re calling them poems. Spells of a softer magic indeed, Mama. Thank you for reading.