the a list

  Got a short, polite email at 7:00 AM this morning from Craig at Zoarium Magazine.   I even got an (entirely unnecessary) apology for taking a vacation and still responding within 11 days.  It was nice to find a home for this poem.  It is filled with ancient memories of my mother's parents (and donuts!)

  Over Near the Big Christian Indian in Lowell I got to a Lowell cemetery to the gravesite of Jack Kerouac. They say that information Is just alienated experience. That’s just another way of saying life is more fucked up than the news. So, it follows that the grave is just alienated information about a life. Senseless too.  Senseless as Jack, whose is dead,  and oblivious to the rhythms of you and your soulmate making love to the idea of screwing near Jack,  and each other. Drunk on Cognac or boredom You’ll eventually come to terms  With how separate anything afterlife is. It’s more meaningless than information.  Less than memory, or being hated,  or sharing a smoke with your soulmate  after a good lay in the graveyard. Published in Duck Lake Books August 2019

these paint cards are artifacts of my paintings.  I frequently use paper to lay over blobs of paint on the canvas to create a worn, speckled effect.  I usually save the paper I use for this purpose for additional design touches and then mount them.

  No Home Where do I put this dust; without a mantle  and the yellow paste of nicotine to hold it fast? Walls and windows cling to me, Desperately; Like a name to a place or a face Or like my love is stuck to you. The brown bristly welcome mat tells me The universe is not a home.  As do the locks, the lamps,  and the chimneys. My coffee stains and I Would have no place to leave our mark. Words would make no sense. The dog would just go anywhere. What a stupid thing  to think the universe is anything but a cold dark other. What else could it be? There are no floors and no ceilings. Breakfast and the cycles of love and hate Are left, space less. As if God had nothing to say And the trash had nowhere to go. The preachers that say,  “the moss on the house won’t need washing”  They lie. It was cholera that built these walls, not love, And I won’t give them up. Published in Ink In Thirds June 2019