Bathroom Break

On Career Counseling

Charlie Pike — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:14:27 GMT

Sunflowers wilt out of vase how a raindrop returns to the air ever brief after splashing against the street puddle. I think about money and wanting more of it. Tires tuxedos and thrift store guitars. The dreams I could do effervesce. Bubbles glint and take the sunlight. In the center of the sea a thousand miles from the seen tumults a seed of storm that raises water toward the sky until it breaks unto itself and this again and this again and then the waves have jangled to the shore. Have sizzled and swallowed the sand. Into eonic darkness. The plates shift the earth erected into light and wind. I walk the spine of rock and think of how the old and broken once again becomes uncovered by the ancient subtlety. The apples bud in moonshine.

On Taking a Beat

Charlie Pike — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:08:56 GMT

The ocean there. I could see under. Rocks and ranges like above, the water sky with beads of air and finless hollow fish discussing crab meat. Planks of ship wood sat returning. Heaps of mountain peak since felled to sand where shells surrounded soft and living names. I have not touched my heartbeat in a while. It is there. The coffee cools. I forget, and this saves me, and this breaks me, and it is good to be broken — to return to the sands of the thing.

On Stepping out for a Second

Charlie Pike — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:42:18 GMT

In broken mirror water he took sky clouds glitched together, bird wing refracted by angles of gravel drive. The mustang with a comb in mane arrived to scrolls of ink etched in the grasses: wind wind wind wind wind. Curtains of chlorine rose from the pool behind the house how droplets of dew bloom out of the mouths of leaves of grass wanting morning.

On 3pm Iced Matcha Latte

Charlie Pike — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:33:47 GMT

And so well I have not learned my lesson I have swallowed dry the matcha oat milk latte on a mostly empty breakfast sandwich stomach for the premise of a promise of a focus arrived disguised as the peanut-butter-spoonful with a pill inside that spills out shakes and worry / now the air that’s less than toxic has a fresh autumnal edge that’s dredged up classic end of summer melancholy though it’s only just July and only just a cooler breeze and only just a kiss on the arcing tendon of my neck and arms looped arms looped arms looped we are sitting on the couch of ever ankles lassoed by the creek of time that keeps on flowing by so that it’s always one lone constant. You are my vowel in the breathless sentence. A E I O U.

On Just One Lemon

Charlie Pike — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:34:04 GMT

I walked on brick. Above me a tree poured florets of honey. Bees clung to petals and pedaled legs into pockets of pollen. The leaves sang with bee wing. On my way to get a lemon from the store. Inbox staggered by emails. My statistics rolling through. There is so much that can knock me off my center. And there is you, patient in the edge of light, grinning back into and where my knowing heart has stammered out the one true fact of life is this toward you and walking to the store a lemon for the dressing I am drenched in fingertips the just-cut salad sitting in the bowl on the counter in the kitchen of my house.

On Self-Promotion

Charlie Pike — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:45:19 GMT

I took the silk from the sky and hooked it to a bucket I carried from the spring on the mountain to the sea in the desert where three camels dealt dry hands of gin to each merchant encircled by gnats who had fed off scent alone for centuries. This happened at the center of the Earth, where everything is. My iPhone burned from the maps app in Carplay. I had been sending emails instead of making what the emails said. Then I looked at the sky and saw the silk and that I could reach it, I still can, I am still reaching while the gnats shake into nothing over merchants slipping outlines into shadows by the camels spitting water that has traveled to the heart of brightness on the balance of my empty throated soul.

On You Eat, You Are

Charlie Pike — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:37:53 GMT

Damp plots of earth arranged in rows. Raven eye in the Cheerios hole. He bought the tofu wrap to-go and, brought to a bench by a feeling, sat with a pair of squirrels kneeling near his lap, upon which the tofu wrap nearly collapsed apart. Shreds of romaine lettuce and tomato juice. Mustard beneath his fingernails. The plots of earth in rows dried, thanks to the solar thrown underbelly of canned heat sky. Years built apartments and in them passed lives between neighbors and children and and and and children and on. He watched this from the bench. The wrap spread throughout him. Bones of mayonnaise. Lips of pickles. He rose, day thorn, us buds drooping off the dew-laden thought of morning. Which was coming around, he suspected, in an hour or so. His heart ticked the minute. We all watched and drank him to history.

I have a single out called "Charles River"

Charlie Pike — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:02:51 GMT

First things first, some links to the single streaming on Spotify and Apple Music. And for purchase, permanent keeps, on Bandcamp. It’s also on Tidal, YouTube, anywhere the music is. “Charles River” by Charlie Pike.

cover art taken by the lovely Phoebe Chase

Without my good friend (and birthday-mate, s/o June 16) Liam Jamieson, this song would not be in your ears. He believed in the music from the jump, and added his incredible percussion and pedal steel playing to dress them up, working with the equally awesome and talented Adam Reid, who produced, mixed, and mastered this single and the other five songs that will be on the EP. Without Mr. Reid’s ears, masterful Ableton work, & belief in me, and Liam J’s pure musical professionalism, this track would still be a shoddy demo destined solely for my family’s iMessage inboxes. Forever indebted to Liam and Adam’s swag!

To celebrate the release of the single (and forthcoming EP), I’ve got a few shows lined up! If you’re in Portland, I’m playing with my fiddle friend Luke on July 17 at Newscapes Brewing (suggested donation $10).

For Atlanta folks, I’m stoked to be playing a solo show at Eddie’s Attic alongside Jon Fooshee August 12!

And then even more stoked to return to Maine and play Johnson Hall Opera House with a full band on 9/5!

To stay posted on more shows (etc), you can follow the Instagram, stay right here on Substack, or periodically check out charliepike.net.

Music video coming in about a week…

Cheers!

Charlie

On Pausing

Charlie Pike — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:49:52 GMT

He sat himself by blades of grass. Sunrise made a fish stomach of the sky. Bullet of plane through fillet. He wondered at his wrists. A rabbit on a log the size of hands. Four blocks left a man installed the fiber optic cable. Elsewhere others did everything. He thought. His thoughts curled, and the curls snagged on each other. The sun had risen. The rabbit had left. Ladder returned to truck, truck returned to lot, man returned to office of synthetic cool and sun rays cracked across all earth. He stood, his blood fell from his head, vision blurring into settled dregs of daytime wherein what was left to do was walk on home.

On Roof Decks

Charlie Pike — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:08:43 GMT

I have to-do’s. Most are screens and sitting. Some are phone. The ocean within walking distance. Hum of freezer and the smog of clock. I walked to the library with thin fingers wind slipped through. Three white birches lined a path through grass in the city of brick. Blue and red clad fans whooped in the street for the DRC tying the Portuguese team. Laptops die and become slabs of metal. I look at honey. Cone of cloud. Tones of color slip and catch on octaves. Drumbeat of the flat light. Soul is not inside me; there is no inside. What’s always there and is the soul is space to make becoming. What’s always there and is the soul is pure unsung awareness. What’s always there and is: the soul: my ear lets in the knowing. I ate a bag of chips and now my mouth has cuts and sores. I forewent water, in the search of Real, and Beautiful, I am on the edge, of what I am, about to learn, I cannot eat, the gathered light, but there is more, to this. Then we. Make. Leaves.

On Being Simple

Charlie Pike — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:58:02 GMT

Language might trumpet itself (in syllabic disguise, leotard-spangled-legs of syntax) right past the armed guard (who at the time globed out snores from the dugouts of his nostrils.). But now I've felt the turn. Toward clarity. The sky was blue. We spoke this into microphones. Hawk took a rat off the highway guardrail. Daughter measured heaps in the rain. Unsold blouses creased in dumpsters. He came and drove the trash to be lit on fire later while a paid man watched. There were no magnifying glasses. This was the deep past, which is now, me legs crossed on the bed because when twice a week one says they’ll write a poem, they do it.

On Saying Goodbye at the Station

Charlie Pike — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 02:03:05 GMT

I will make guacamole and grow my hair. Venues want Instagram videos. Youngest Sister graduates this weekend. My birthday present was an early book of poems almost out of print. At Trundy Point I saw waves rise, they were not rolling, as waves like to do, these waves ballooned up from the water and reached the sunlight silver. My screen is what stands in for this. I will make tacos, and I will add guacamole. Most runs get good two miles in. Today I learned from a man about trees. How the mouths in their leaves gather carbon dioxide, and in doing so they give up water. I will read my poems on the porch with guacamole and tacos and my hair rooting into my shoulders. I will watch the waves rise where they do.

On 18 Hours without Screentime

Charlie Pike — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:29:35 GMT

Sounds arranged are the unspoken. To sit here and write for a minute or two, that is the gift. To not wish it last longer. To thank the wet rain green for being and to let it drench blouses of deet and sunscreen that shakes off in currents of creek. To have my toes flossed by lake bottom. Frog song: keep asleep me. Let each patient present thing be plucked like piano string. I am quiverable. I consider and dispatch such hooked winks of mind into heat lightning bugs and slick moose awake in their folded limbs. All the also living things are just as sore as my left shoulder. Upon waking. The kettle not yet sung. The coffee in the jar are grains awaiting. My mouth tongue glazed with sugars of sleep. To sit and watch how this goes on forever; to realize shapes of all that is are looping new and never once repeated and to pay attention to these passes—sneeze from the one I love.

On Domestic Animal Encounters

Charlie Pike — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:14:33 GMT

I played guitar for a squirrel. Off the roof it came toward a pool of berries and water mashed into our deck table by rain. It, let’s say she, drank from the pool, and I picked G to play, and played it. She drank and lifted her head and her black eye thick with night. Like permission. Like remember what we are, together? I pulled the frayed couch cushion from my back and put it flat in front of me. She and her friends had ripped into it before winter, to make homes, or stow dinners, and I wondered maybe that’s what she would like to have, access to my broken seatback. She left. A bird came next and singing droplets. I stood to come and write this down.

On Blue Skies

Charlie Pike — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:00:27 GMT

Songbird drank a puddle of oil in the rest stop parking lot. A man in a Titleist hat walked past en route to the bathroom. Sagged clouds, evening storm, blood vessel eyes, 12-hour drive. My elbow bruised from center console leaning. Earlier I stood in heat like wilted stalks awaiting change not knowing it had looped around my ankles and was rising toward the patch of scalp most perfect for the sun. No one’s cleaned the Macy’s brick facade. Asphalt gardens clunked of produce. White lines faded. Park anywhere. We look up to sky. Rather than infinity, we see blue, this is another way the atmosphere attends us, a visual protection from the possibility of constantly considering the scales. The blue makes black night furnaces of light an object of imagination, and when it fades, we draw the shutters of our eyes, and rest, and I wonder what raccoons, and bats—the nocturnals—know about their place on Earth that we diurnals might be missing.

On Something I Can't Speak To

Charlie Pike — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:55:54 GMT

Last night, on the sheets, in sweat logged drafts of fan stale breeze, I read two and a quarter essays. Mary Oliver on Emerson and Wordsworth and Whitman. Each one lunging to describe what lounged in them, on grape leaves, near rice, in wine red vinegar pools, where tooth-cut sailors sang, the hymnal of atrocious, bloodlet brilliant wind-sown seedling heartthrobs wandering toward the gatepost, carved by men of sight, seen gulping sawdust by the racks of evening heat, beneath cement cold crown-scraped navels, of celestial lunar lint. I saw elsewhere that what we read can only teach us that which we had known before, and I believe this, and it was not the three men’s job to replicate. It was their calling to remind. What curls of just shed skin, in corners we might keep, concerns the holy lot of self. In stamping streams of image, life arrives, and so with words, what other than divining thrush-pocked patches of the seen and heard and felt and sung and scented, in the dark mist caveside waterfall moss rope halo hovering, quivered by the beads of light-drenched water, really works? I mean to say that once a day the feeling passes through me, as it does to you, and it takes my words, and I cannot hold it, I can only watch its way.

On Walking in the Rain

Charlie Pike — Mon, 25 May 2026 03:31:43 GMT

Sidewalk rain spit over sneaker fabric toes. I reached the Turkish coffee sands inside my paper cup. Chihuahua barked at grown men by the Scrabble board. VEX. OATH. QI. Stella Artois at the five dollar canoe director retrospective microcinema showing. Outside, the sky looked up from screens. The ceiling kept me twice alive in see-through air and blocked the glimpsing through past clouds and blue and red-edged rise into the scale of what I am, an anchor of forevers, one within me, one outside, this my perspective: universal wet sock blessed up city sidewalk nestled in a range of swallowed sun horizons; to realize all of this is barking; all of this is unrealizing what I understand.

On Waiting for Your Car Where There's No Parks

Charlie Pike — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:38:03 GMT

I sat on a bench outside Sunny Rainbow (Gourmet Chinese Food) and read Neil Young’s biography. A yellow jacket crawled onto my foot. The mechanic took four hours to find the wrong parts. I ate: veggie burger, french fries, croissant sandwich (egg and cheese), hash browns. I drank: Iced Coffee, ginger lemon kombucha. In Hannaford I peed two times. I’ll return tomorrow, when the right parts arrive. There is an ice cream shop with Adirondack chairs off 77. The menu looked extensive. I couldn’t read. The 45 per hour cars were closer. Neil Young nearly left LA for San Francisco, but the friend he had hoped to find, in traffic, from another car, recognized his long black hearse, he’d driven it from Canada, so Neil Young stayed. Yellow jacket on my foot again, I kicked, it flew a moment through the air then landed on concrete.

On a Day Like Today

Charlie Pike — Mon, 18 May 2026 02:03:59 GMT

Night time air still warm from sun was in my eyes all afternoon in haze day pollen pushcart pedals flat cut flower stems, lilac smells like, smells, like, death, shall, knock, a day like today. I think, to ready one’s self for its knuckles, a lifelong learning; one’s self being what ate Goodles sharp white cheddar, what drove 8 miles to see alewives leap streams into talons of wingéd death, what dashed a half-drawn slant atop an e in echoes of old poets who when read by me are still alive, still wandering the lifelong learning, though now wherever Whitman sits he knows it. Knock a day like today when my hip joint ached from brake pedal depressions on gold light highway drives away from fountain birdbath love; what opened my mouth in laugh-clad-joy-lit glory for a fly to beat its living wings against the back of my throat, despite the, and into my stomach, despite the, to meet the knuckles my body has made, despite the hack-lung coughs I gave to save it.

On Plugging Myself

Charlie Pike — Thu, 14 May 2026 17:54:28 GMT

Today, an excerpt from my recently published short story, “Sasha & The Whale;” go read it on Chatterbox!

One day she would die. She understood this and relaxed. She graduated from “Unbreaking the Heart” and was deemed to be healed. Gutter and RatCliff threw her a party, and 34 other friends showed up, and they did ketamine off a BPA-free cutting board, drank all the beer, went and bought more beer and some lottery tickets, stumbled with the case of beer and the lottery tickets to the ocean, where someone pulled from a duffel a stack of logs, and they dug a hole in the beach and piled the logs and ripped a piece of cardboard from the box of beer and Gutter took his lighter to a lottery ticket and took the flaming ticket to his cigarette and lit the cigarette which glowed like brake light in the cold black night. She asked for the lighter and bent with her hand behind the flame and lit the cardboard. The flames swallowed the cardboard and the wood popped into smoke heat and light and her friends rolled cigarettes, their blue bags of loose leaf American Spirits tobacco sealed and dropped to the sand, six headdresses in various orientations, and waves drummed and the fire stretched and Sasha did not think of Brian until the morning when she woke up in Tommy Harrison’s bed, who wrote code for drones that specialized in “crypto-hygienic thermal recognition” and with his six figure salary had purchased a life-size bronze statue of Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz, who now stared at her from the corner of his room, glove on his hip, waiting on a signal for a fastball or change-up, retro-jersey draped across him like an emergency blanket on a marathon runner at the end of a race. She remembered the sex and that it was fine and stood and left the room with the door open and Tommy called, still drunk, “See ya!”