I’m pretty burned out this week, so I’ve decided to share a poem I first wrote a few years ago. It has seen several iterations over the years, but the form it appears in here is the form in which it was published this year in ACU’s literary magazine, The Shinnery review. The other poems… Continue reading

singing anthems of glory and songs to impress, I form words with my mouth loud and “convincing” to those marauding machines whose mechanistic noise exists only in the background, just some grand cog wheel forever turning without guide or direction or evaluation. such shallow perusing of the creative impulse results in a solely external projection:… Continue reading

The ragged man sits in his jail cell surrounded by the scattered refuse left to him. The stuff they didn’t bother to take. And he hears their steps, coming ever closer. free from fear and saved from the hands of our foes He lifts head from the puddle of tears. his holy covenant remembered He… Continue reading

I will awaken the dawn. Again. It’s happened again. I return to consciousness and there is no light. I can’t see my hand in front of my face. Or the twisted remains of my certainty littering the floor. And I stumble outside and look up. Only blackness. And so, again, I begin the tortuous climb.… Continue reading

My grandfather, Sam Bryant, died this past September. At his funeral I told a story about him. I explained to the people who had gathered to celebrate Grandpa’s life that he had cared about his grandkids. We weren’t annoyances to be ignored. Rather, he invited us into his workshop to “help” him, not that I… Continue reading

A dog, jealously possessive, proclaims his outrage at my intrusion into his settled home. I am a stranger to him. In his place. Yet he doesn’t bark at the wind caressing his back or at the bird flying against the firmament, nor even the sun staring intently at his domain, which ignores the dog as… Continue reading

I forgot about this poem. It is my response to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Rand and Roark by Greg Jeffers   I wish you hadn’t so readily slept in her dead arms. Didn’t you feel the cadaver’s iciness as she hollowly sang a lying lullaby: words of loneliness to the melody of self-absorption?   She… Continue reading