Now, I understand what’s happening.

Language is not a sacred cow. Like melody or artistic form, language can be broken, deconstructed, fragmented. Bold experimentation can exist in music and art, and it can also exist in literature, poetry, and language.

I understand this isn’t for everyone, especially folks who struggle without a narrative in place, with something tangible to center on and hold on to. When words and even letters and syllables are diffused like particles across the page, it’s bewildering and daunting to have nothing to grab onto. It’s like you’re untethered and adrift in deep space. I felt this when I first read Factura. In fact, I gave it a not-so-kind review.

Now, I get it. Now, I crave it.

As my own poetry ventures more into abstraction and deconstruction, frankly, I consider Factura a bold masterpiece. Language isn’t exempt from dissection and chaos. In fact, such a thing so bound up in rules as language demands a crowbar be taken to it.

Go Jackson Pollack on it.

Burroughs did it with narrative and scene with his cut-up trilogy. But Andrews does it with words the words and syllables themselves.

Factura is brave and singular work. I’ll be exploring its senseless secrets for years.

The amount of gratitude I have toward Azarão and its EIC is immeasurable. As my poetry has become more strange, deconstructed, fragmented, and abstract the last couple years, I’ve found a lot of literary journals I’ve had good luck with in the past to be unwilling to make space for my current stranger work. As I play with the boundaries and parameters of what is traditionally accepted as poetry, I’ve found the poetry community to be quite a bit lonelier than before.

I’m not going to pretend that poems like mine don’t get a lot criticism. It’s a risk for journals to share them with their readers. Just look at the drama that ensued when Daedalus published Anne Carson’s astounding (in my opinion) poem “How Pants”, with other well-known literary journals and EIC’s displaying their gatekeeping prowess in the poetry community by saying that Carson’s masterpiece wasn’t poetry, or wasn’t good poetry at the very least. As for my own poetry preferences, I’d prefer Carson’s rebellious and exciting “How Pants” to most of the work I’ve ever read in Rattle (oops, I named names 😉).

Like Anne Carson apparently, I also don’t care what the highbrow gatekeepers of contemporary poetics think. I write what feels satisfying and essential to me in a given creative moment.

That’s why I’m sharing my favorite of my three poems published this morning in Azarão with you this morning, “5-Hydroxytryptamine”. A person can see the definite influence “How Pants” had on “5-Hydroxytryptamine”.

“5-Hydroxytryptamine” and my other poems published today (“Qatari Gradient” and “Raspberry Astrophysics”) may not be what you’re used to in the poetry community. I’m well aware that they are an acquired taste. I only ask that you try to give them an initial read without judgement. Don’t try to discover what the poems are about. It’s a different answer for everyone. Instead, try to notice what the poems make you feel.

An Astronaut/ male, athletic form, military haircut, middle-aged, nude

The Voice of the Nebula/ disembodied, female, precise, authoritative

/////////////////////////////////////////

Alone, an unnamed traveler through space with no recollection of who he is or why he’s here observes a yellow nebula through the viewing port of his vessel, the Argo. Following his stream-of-consciousness thoughts, with interjections by a disembodied or internal feminine voice he interprets as the nebula’s voice, his monologue questions identity, place, existence, solitude, and time. By the end of the scene, the lonely astronaut accepts his fate and his interconnection with all things.

/////////////////////////////////////////

1st Scene

A nude man is bathed in rich yellow light, almost as though he’s encased in bright amber. He stands alone before a large floor-to-ceiling window, gazing out at a golden-yellow nebula adrift beside his spacecraft. His muscular arms hang at his sides, hands empty.

The Voice in the Nebula/ OH 231.84 +422.

The Astronaut/ This place. This nebula. I’ll never forget the name.

The Voice in the Nebula/ OH 231.84 +422.

The Astronaut/ OH 231.84 +422. OH 231.84 +422.

The Voice in the Nebula/ OH 231.84 +422.

The Astronaut/ OH 231.84 +422. How can someone name God? Still, I always refer to this nebula as OH 231.84 +422. Never could I have imagined that a series of numbers could come to mean so much to me. Too much.

The Voice in the Nebula/ O-H. O-H.

The Astronaut/ Bright yellow; 1.4 light-years in length. That’s 8.23 trillion miles. Mathematical equations are the only way the human mind can comprehend such a distance. It’s almost meaningless, isn’t it? It almost means nothing. Almost …

The Voice in the Nebula/ Meaningless. OH 231.84 +422222.

The Astronaut/ QX Puppis is the binary star system associated with this incomprehensibly vast banner of lemony nebulous light. I think it’s dying. Maybe it’s dying.

The Voice in the Nebula/ 22222. Meaningless. Meaningless. O-H. Meaningless.

The Astronaut/ Sometimes, it’s hard to remember who I am, what I am. What I’m doing here … here. This place. Maybe it’s beyond that now.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Meaningless. Now meaningless.

The Astronaut/ I don’t know how long I’ve looked deep into these yellowed mists of chemical processes, dust, radiation, and time. It’s like I’ve been consumed. I am made to devour.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Time. Devour … time.

The Astronaut/ Time?

The Voice in the Nebula/ Time. 22222. Time. 22222. Meaningless time. O-H. 231. O-H. Meaningless. H. Time + Meaningless time. 22222.

The Astronaut/ Distance?

The Voice in the Nebula/ Distance. Devour. Distance. Distance.

The Astronaut/ Yes. About 5,000 light years. That’s how far this place is from home. I think. From home …

The Voice in the Nebula/ Home.

The Astronaut/ Home?

The Voice in the Nebula/ OH 231.84 +422. Time. Home. Meaningless. 22222. Meaningless. Devour. Meaningless home + time.

The Astronaut/ Home. Another meaningless construct.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Time construct. Meaningless home. OH 231.84 +422. +422. +422 + devour + + + …

The Astronaut/ Argo. A name comes to me. Argo. Argo. This vessel. This hulk, its metallic flesh ridden with synthetic tributaries. Argo. How did I come to be here in the artificial belly of the Argo? Why? When?

The Voice in the Nebula/ Argo. Argo. Argo. Argo. Home. Meaningless home. Argo. Time. OH 231.84 +422. OH 2222231.84 +422. 22222. 22222. O-H. Argo. Meaningless Argo. Devour Argo.

The Astronaut/ Why am I alone?

The Voice in the Nebula/ Alone. OH 2231.84 +422. Argo alone. O-H. Alone home time. 22222. Devour. Devour. Devour.

The Astronaut/ Where is everyone else?

The Voice in the Nebula/ Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone.

The man falls to his knees before the yellow radiance of the window, his head hanging in defeat. He brings his hands to his face and silently weeps into his palms. As he weeps, the voice continues.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone.

The man slowly lifts his face from his hands and looks forward, extending his hands to the glass. He is still washed in yellow light.

The Astronaut/ Something golden. A womb. Something treasured. Golden light. Yellow light. Yellow sacred light.

The Voice in the Nebula/ OH 231.84 +422.

The Astronaut/ The others. Something. Something. Golden light. The others. I am here now. I suppose I am here.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Here?

The Astronaut/ Here.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Here.

The Astronaut/ Where?

The Voice in the Nebula/ OH 231.84 +422.

The Astronaut/ I am here, in the yellow . I am here. OH 231.84 +422. OH 231.84 +422. I am 29.4 quadrillion miles from my home.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Home?

The Astronaut/ Home.The Voice in the Nebula/ Home. OH 231.84 +422. Alone?

The Astronaut/ No.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Alone?

The Astronaut/ No.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Alone?

The Astronaut (slamming a fist against the glass of the window)/ No! I am not alone! I am not alone. I am not alone. I am not alone. I am not alone. I am not alone. I am … not …

The astronaut weeps very softly for a moment, his forehead leaning against the glass of the window. A silent moment passes. The man relaxes, his fist falling from the window . Still on his knees in the yellow glow, he holds a single hand against the glass.

The Astronaut/ I am home. I am 2.939 × 10¹⁶ miles from home. I am home. I am nowhere. I am home. I am home. I am eternity. I am all there is. I am nothing. I am subatomic particles. I am stardust. I am energy. I am God. I am nothing. I am decay. I am growth. I am the beginning. I am the end.

The Voice in the Nebula/ End. End. End.

The Astronaut/ Parameters are meaningless. Systems are meaningless. Processes are meaningless. These same particles will continue at the end of everything. In my breath are numberless epochs, numberless souls, numberless stories, numberless births and deaths back into the beginning, forward into the next beginning.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Beginning. Beginning. Beginning.

The Astronaut/ Something golden. Something golden. The others. Golden. Golden others. Others, above me, eyes burning like fire. The others, in the gold. Myself. Myself, in gold. Myself, burning in the gold.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Burning. Burning. Burning.

The astronaut remains on his knees before the glass, but his hand falls from the pane. His face is emotionless, vacant.

The Voice in the Nebula (spoken in a hush, as though nervous)/ Jason?

The Astronaut/ Jason. Yes?

The Voice in the Nebula/ Home?

The Astronaut/ Yes, OH 231.84 +422. Yes. I am home.

The Voice in the Nebula/ Alone?

The Astronaut/ Meaningless.

The man, Jason, remains on his knees before the window as the yellow radiance fades to black.

(BLACKOUT)

/////////////////////////////////////////

THE END

For me, it’s hard to smile.

It wasn’t always like this. There’s plenty of photographic evidence of mirth or pleasure in my history.

These days though? It’s like lifting weights with my facial muscles.

Years of people-pleasing and a piss-poor ability at saying “no” have landed me in a position I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. To quote Bilbo Baggins, I feel like butter spread over too much bread.

The life I always wanted (husband/girldad/writer) is being suffocated by serving as the mayor of my community; serving on the leadership team of a county suicide and substance abuse prevention coalition; serving as chairman of a two-county early childhood education and special needs nonprofit; my longtime career as a political journalist in a country increasingly fraught with rupture and authoritarianism; dealing with chronic physical and mental health issues from my time as an active duty soldier in the Middle East; struggling through intense bi-weekly EMDR trauma therapy sessions (finally trying to process suicide attempts, drug overdoses, and attempted sexual assault while I was a soldier on the far side of the world); struggling through anxiety medications and all the glorious side effects which go with them; writing community commitments from conferences to collaborations; imposter syndrome; my once very-publishable outdoorsy narrative poetry transforming into the current very weird experimental writing I currently write which publishers have been rejecting left and right; body dysmorphia; PTSD; complete exhaustion; and service-connected diagnosis’s of major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, and severe agoraphobia (all of which seems to be worsening over the last several months).

As you can see, I’m in the shit. The only thing which has kept me from being crushed by all this, is the agoraphobic fear of people seeing all this crushing me. But Substack is my safe space, so I’m sharing it with all you strangers.

Reprieves from the overwhelming stress had always been hiking and backpacking in the wilderness and mountains, but chronic respiratory issues the last couple years have largely put a stop to that. Books and writing had been a reprieve, but now it takes at least a month to finish a book and my writing comes much arduously and less often than it used to as my form has changed to experimentalism and abstraction.

Sex was a marvelous reprieve, but my medications have sure dried up the urge and desire.

The desire to drink alcohol, however, is steadily increasing as a way to dull the anxiety and terror day-to-day life has settled on my tired shoulders like a cloak made of chains.

So yeah, no smiles here as of late. If they happen, they’re forced and fake. They hurt to do, emotionally. When I have to smile, I feel a sob swelling up in my torso like an chestburster from the Aliens movies growing inside me.

I was recently on vacation with my wife and a couple of my daughters. Instead of the rest I hoped it would provide, it was frantic and triggered an overstimulation and agoraphobia-induced panic attack. But I did buy a little book for myself at a bookstore during our getaway, Thich Nhat Hanh’s How to Smile. I’m not a believer in self-help literature (aside from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations), but desperate times call for desperate measures.

I started reading How to Smile yesterday evening on my front porch, my dogs sleeping on the weathered wooden boards at my feet, sunset burning through the pines and green leaves on the west side of my house. I haven’t smiled yet, but I have been highlighting passages like a maniac in the hope that something catches, that something hooks into the chaotic tangle of my flawed synapses.

I have the overwhelming urge to read William Burroughs “Cut-Up Trilogy” instead or to reread Naked Lunch, but I don’t think that would do my anxiety and exhaustion any favors.

I’m going to stick with How to Smile until I finish it, for better or worse.

Tomorrow, my family and I are going to veterans camping experience at a nearby state park. I am terrified. The biggest success in my recent memory is that I haven’t pulled the plug and canceled our attendance. Because of my own personal military experience of isolation, violence, sexual assault, and mishandling of mental health crises, my fellow veterans aren’t a trusted band of brothers they seem to be with other veterans. Since getting out of the Army almost 17-tears ago, I have largely avoided my fellow veterans like the plague. The few times I have tried veteran groups and such have been failures. So, we will see what tomorrow brings. I’m trying not to be pessimistic, but I sure am not hopeful either.

I guess I’m just scared. Like usual.

I’m not sure what this post is necessarily. Is this a rant? Is this an exposé? Am I venting? Is this an attempt at purification? Am I confessing? Am I using you as the priests of my Catholic youth?

Why am I telling those of you who are reading this the things I have only told three or four other people on the planet?

I almost feel like I should apologize.

I suppose now, at the end of this word-vomit, I want to tell you that I will try to smile this weekend.

I will try to smile, and I hope it will be authentic.

Lastly, I might as well shoot my shot and say if you are a small poetry press unafraid of bizarre experimental trauma-based poems, please hit me up. I have a little chapbook I’ve been meticulously crafting the past two years that I need to get the hell off my back.

Thanks for making it to the end of this. In the words of Pauly Shore, don’t judge me too hardcore, Cruster.

A couple more rejections arrived in the inbox today for my some of my experimental poems. I’m a little bit discouraged. I’m losing some confidence in my work.

I’ve had seven poetry collections published, numerous nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and I even received a state poetry award. My book sales have (almost) paid my mortgage on two separate months. When one of my US Senators came to my town for an event and I introduced myself to him and shook his hand, he responded, “Oh, the poet!”

Despite all these accolades, rejection still stings.

It stings all the more because I don’t submit work too often these days. Not like when I was a younger hungry poet. I’ve grown comfortable, complacent, and perhaps I’ve taken my readership for granted. As my readership grew over the years, I egotistically assumed they’d follow my poetry and I anywhere.

Will my readers follow me along the strange new trails my poetry is wandering? As I leave narrative and normalcy in the well-worn trails I’ve been on for years, and follow my compass through deep woods of deconstruction and fragmentation and travel over ridges of repetition into dim rugged valleys surrealism, I can already see the crowd I hiked with on this literary world is diminishing. There are less footsteps around me.

The experimental poetic work I’ve been crafted these days isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, especially the literary journals I’d grown comfortable getting acceptances from. Self-doubt and imposter syndrome is heavy right now, like an improperly-packed ruck.

I wonder if these are things poets have always worried about, especially avant garde poets. Did Michael McClure question his path when he was embracing his inner beast writing Ghost Tantras? What about when Bruce Andrews disintegrated language to its base elements when he wrote Factura or Susan Howe rewrote a new strange history with Singularities, or when Kerouac ventured into a spontaneous stream-of-consciousness wilderness with Old Angel Midnight? Did they ask what the hell they were doing?

Well, I am.

So, tonight I opened an $80 bottle of red I’d been saving optimistically for good publishing news. It tastes just as good in a sea of rejection letters.

I filled my cup and sat outside. I drank as I watched the neighborhood mule deer herd graze beside my house.

I’m inside now, and very deliberately putting my poems in a pile, and I’m putting them in a drawer in my desk. I’m going to take a break from fiddling with my manuscript and handing these experimental poems over to bewildered literary journals for a while.

It’s consumed me for the last six to eight months, exploring poetic abstractions and experiments.

My brain has been cataloging phrases, pulling them apart, reforming them, and looking for patterns in chaos. I have been dissecting language and piecing I back together.

I’m exhausted.

I’m sore.

I’m depleted (defeated).

Do you mind if I tuck in for a nap?

Wait!! One of my daughters just said the phrase “nebula candy”! That would be perfect in a poem …

I’ve got loads of pics in this post from yesterday’s summiting of Deadman Mountain, but first I’m going to talk (again) about the increasingly heavy link between trauma recovery of my current experimental poetry.

I recently finished my chapbook manuscript, and the majority of the chapbook is the 24-page poem “Cinnamon Bear”. A cinnamon bear (a common black bear with a genetic mutation giving it reddish-blonde fur) was recently spotted in the pinewoods on the edge of my town, and the symbolism of it consumed me until this poem poured out of me. Last week this poem was going to be called “Subatlantic in Decline”, but the cinnamon bear sighting changed everything in a sudden tsunami of inspiration.

A lot of veterans talk about the “black dog” following them around, an avatar for depression. My black dog has quickly become this cinnamon bear trying desperately to find me, so it can devour me. Consume me. My poem “Cinnamon Bear” (I’m sharing a handful of sections at the end of this article) plays with repetition and form to show that the cinnamon bear comes for me even in the best and tranquil of moments (in the poem that moment is eating fruit early on a Sunday morning as I listen to Alice Coltrane).

Almost the entirety of my chapbook manuscript (tentatively also entitled Cinnamon Bear) is comprised of these poems digging into my struggles with trauma and mental illness.

The cinnamon bear was heavy in my thoughts as I ascended the pine-shrouded slopes of Deadman Mountain yesterday afternoon. On the dangerous wind-scoured summit, I sat near the edge, a vertical drop of hundreds of feet, and ate a meal of jerky, pistachios, candy, and water as I tried to empty my mind of anything else but the senses. The sound and feel of the wind. The scent of the air and sun-baked stone. The fragrance of juniper. The ruggedness of the stone beneath me.

And I realized I’m tired. I’m so very tired.

I’m tired of healing. I’m tired of processing my long-buried trauma from my days as a soldier and afterward. In my healing journey, I isolate. I feel so exposed, vulnerable, and raw. I sit at my writing desk for hours in empty silence, or I go deep into the wild alone, uncaring of the dangers. I become a ghost to those who love me.

Healing is messy. It’s not linear. Trauma recovery is scary. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have poetry to express what I’m going through and feeling.

Thank you for coming along with me.

I’m working on “Subatlantic in Decline” very slowly and deliberately. Maybe a line or two scribbled in my journal each day (some days nothing, but that’s okay/ I’m a busy guy). Sometimes the lines are related to the lines which came before, but oftentimes night. I refer to this form of disjointed and unexpected poetry as sedimentary poetry. Like sedimentary rock, my poems often are composed of minuscule fragments of different passages, images, themes, art, music, etc. cemented together in a single poem. My poems are more comparable to collages or abstract expressionist paintings than they are to traditional poetry.

The lines are scribble and arrange in my journal are just the beginning. When I began type the first sections of the poem up on my laptop, I had a strong desire to experiment with form of and visual presentation of the poem. I don’t want “Subatlantic in Decline” to be a poem the reader devours vertically down the page. I want it to require attention and looking at my poetry in a different way.

When I finally arranged the first section of “Subatlantic in Decline” in the form it currently is, it was sort of a eureka moment.

and then the second …

and especially the third …

and don’t even get me started on the fourth 😍 …

and here’s the next three for good measure …

I go to sleep thinking about this poetic experiment-in-progress, and I wake up thinking about it. Right now, this poem “Subatlantic in Decline” is a huge part of my time, not necessarily in action (though when I’m home I do find myself sitting at my writing desk now) but in thought. This poem is ALWAYS on my mind.

I can’t remember having so much fun writing a poem as I do right now with “Subatlantic in Decline”. For me, that’s kind of the most important part of being a poet. I want to enjoy writing poems. It’s that simple.

I also want to present poetry in a new way that engages my readers, that makes them say, “I didn’t know poetry could be like that, or look like that!”

There’s no manual for poetry (actually there’s tons of them, but I digress). Poetry is what we poets say it is. It’s become more important than ever for us to play with our poetry. Be unpredictable. Be unexpected. Be weird.

As my poetic form has leaned hard into the avant garde and abstract these days, I’ve discovered the literary journals I’ve grown comfortable submitting to with a certainty of acceptance in the past are turning their nose up at my poems now. I’ve gotten more rejections in the last couple months than I have in the last couple years combined. There’s been a couple acceptances too, however, from journals that aren’t afraid of the experimental and subversive writing.

Also, as the poetry editor of a literary and arts journal, I’ve noticed the poems that pull me and that I accept for publication are leaning more toward the postmodern and surrealist.

Like I said, I like poems that surprise me and engage me. I want dynamic poetry. I want to create dynamic poetry.

And I feel like these days I’m getting closer.

Closer and closer.

“Argonaut” is a pretty avant garde work, very similar to my poetry. Stream-of-consciousness, deconstruction, surrealism, and repetition rule the scene. On its surface level, it’s psychological science-fiction playing around with the Ancient Greek myth of Jason & the Golden Fleece, but it explores themes of solitude, time, distance, place, reality, and acceptance.

“Argonaut” began years ago as a short story I kept starting to write but stalling out on. Apparently, it needed to be a play, because I wrote it last night in such a frenzy that I typed it up over three hours or so, beginning to end, in a single spontaneous flood. My higher self did all the work on this I think.

I can feel heavy influences of Solaris, Sunshine, and The Spaceman seeping through this play.

I don’t know what to do with a highly-experimental short play. This is all new ground for this old poet. Are there literary journals which publish one-act experimental plays? Should I just publish it on Substack? Emerging and experienced playwrights, help me. 😂

Thank you to for the inspiration and encouragement to trudge forward and do this. I didn’t know I had it in me.

Deja’s play was, of course, brilliant. And it inspired me to create something new and unfamiliar (to me). I’m not becoming a playwright. I don’t have the chops and talent for that. But it inspired me to write spontaneous prose, in the way I do my poetry—just letting the words and imagery flow in stream-of-consciousness surrealism.

This two-part experimental prose piece (short story? flash fiction? nonfiction? essay?) kept returning to the theme of God, divinity, and holiness, despite my best efforts to stay away from any well-worn trails.

My higher self always knows what’s battering around inside me.

Anyway, here’s both parts of “Pink Lemonade”. Thanks for the inspiration,

1.

I am chemical & matter. Pink light falls, & I hold it deep in the bones of my cage. Can you hear this?

Can you feel this?

A mouth full of sweet melon. Her curves in dim light.

I desire.

There is death on the television. The program ends. There is more death on the television. Ouroboros swallows itself.

I knew that was going to happen.

Silence.

Yeah, I’ll tell her.

A melody in the east. Her hands are full of shoes & arrangements. What she does is generous.

I am a benefactor. I am a recipient.

Yellow light.

Lemon meringue curtains hold back stars by the trillions. Void slips through gaps. I swallow her darkness like fruit.

Arcturus. Andromeda. I want to know places I can never know.

Pulse of window fat, quartz-like & buttery in the hollow soft after rain, but not enough. Never enough. I tell her to ask God for fluid tomorrow, because I know my words have always fallen on deaf ears.

Beliefs crowd the front of the cherrywood sleigh. I press my eyelids together so I can’t witness any of it. They move closer (& closer).

Name your trouble. We have too many. I too want to gnaw on the belly of the night.

I want you to know the things I enjoy. I want you to pay attention.

In the morning, will you make coffee? I don’t want any, but I like the aroma.

Please, babe.

Please.

Please.

Babe, please.

Please, babe.

I think about my lungs. I think about Precambrian stones under uplifted earth, still pushing up (maybe), breaking into new climates.

I want to fill up like I used to.

Iron-enriched sugar. P.O. Box 750. That bag on the left is suspect.

I have neglected all the cool colors. I mix my hours like pink-lemonade powders & don’t (ever) come up for air.

I don’t want to dance, but I want my heart to throb to jazztronica. This is a springtime mixtape after red grass appears. New leaves shiver out of cellular miracles.

Be beside me.

White trees blacken w/ pain. There is no moon. I can pretend everything out there is so beautiful.

Dark blue mountains paint her breasts.

I don’t want any of this to end.

2.

A flash of nightmare, even in escapism. Even my digital feet have muscle memory to guide me like a junkie toward an artificial sanctuary. I startle @ code illusions.

Let me hold you.

I can’t remember. I can’t. I can’t [remember].

I can’t remember soft flesh against the heat of my lap.

Wake up in an ocean of pink warmth.

Bioengineered strawberries vitalize the mind & body. Dandelions rise w/ the sun like burning matchsticks. There’s the one dove in the honey locust which the world is certainly sick of.

Deja vu hands me Hibiscus in cherry-red, all signed up & seasoned w/ digits. I am considered (I think). I am a member of something horrifically larger than myself.

There was a lion w/ a golden-yellow mane pacing up & down the corridors of the maternity ward on a summer evening in 1984. Flames flicker from the claws.

O, Sun King!

But it was all an intangible mistake.

I shiver w/ fever in an ocean of eyeballs … following.

The clock strikes twelve noon.

Gentlemen, start your engines.

The hiss & crack of the first cold one of the day peeling open, a yeasty effervescence of raspberry, strawberry, mango, lemon, or wheat. I want to be numbed. I want to be brave.

I want to earn the fire of my birth.

Ponderosa roots grapple w/ continuity.

The table we inherit is consumed by the earth, brambles curling up Persephone’s legs like the Underworld. There’s still time to call it ours. There’s still time to break bread.

Wildfire webinars bloom into being every evening like Venus, but I don’t believe a soul can die. Everything we are unfolds into ethereal stardust slippage.

We aren’t going to solve Pandora’s Box tonight.

But I am ready to escape again. An old woman w/ tweezers pulls light from my sinuses, & she is not a city in Australia. She isn’t alive anymore.

Lilac buds, dark violet, pressure building.

That sound is either the ocean or it’s something in butter, but I think we would enjoy either. I held your ass as we floated in butter, boiled stone crabs reaching for our feet. My fingers were in you even though the world watched us, hungry.

I wonder if that Iranian woman living in NYC is deported now.

Next week is a yoke made of gold. I crawl on my knees toward a dawn they whisper about in absence of terms.

We’ll go get flowers.

The sun drips in a luminous bleed.

I am tired of giving & giving & giving & giving, & there is nothing left to give. So, I swallow in secret, place a glade of chemical calm in the hollow of my core.

I want to fish @ a harbor of psychedelia, pulling in fistfuls of green moon on a day flickering warm & rich & vibrant like the beginning of The Garden of Eden when you can imagine things could be alright. I want to hear Alice Coltrane jam w/ Bachir Attar in the vault of my peridot skull, yellow-green crystal structures too delicate but chiming w/ harp & goatskin lute. I want to feel different.

She owns the name of a tree. She holds the sun in her mouth. She holds the sun (screaming) in her mouth.

She sleeps.

She gets ready for church.

She is already @ church.

She is far away.

I move in thick amber (alone). God is here. God is here.

I couldn’t stop messing with the manuscript and poems almost daily, so it was a relief to finally let it go. I’ll be on pins and needles waiting to hear if it’s accepted on not, so send some positive vibes, friends! 🩷✨💛

With these poems I’ve gotten to know so well through constant reading and editing as well as sharing with audiences at various open mics set loose out into the wilderness, the first thing I did was work on the opening breath of a new poem, “Subatlantic in Decline”.

I’m intended “Subatlantic in Decline” as a massive poem project, much like my poem “Migration”, a primal surrealist work which imagined a gradual transformation from a man into a wild mountain goat, which was written over several months last year and published in its entirety by Broad Shoulder Press.

For me, a poetic project is extremely important. Readers and reviewers of my work cite my long poems as my most impactful, poems written as unintentionally or intentionally as a project—an ongoing record of of place or era or idea I explore along with my readers. I write these poems over a period of time, bit by bit. They’ve become much more common in my writing as I’ve gotten older and more patient.

Examples of poem projects from my published poetry collections include “Cabin Sketches”, “El Paso Angel”, “Advent”, “Utah Sketches”, “Oklahoma Sketches”, “Teton Sketches”, “Nebraska Detour”, “The Chapel”, “Cairn”, “The Serenity of Decay”, “Two Crows Quest”, “Raking the Leaves”, “Monroe County Pilgrimage”, “Pure Land (Where I’ll Be)”, and “Horse Thief Lake”. A few others, like the recent “Migration”, have appeared in journals or are forthcoming in my chapbook.

“Subatlantic in Decline” is going to a be a meaty spontaneous and found poetry work, and I’m letting a line or two come as needed. Nothing forced. Nothing intentional or predetermined.

Our planet is currently in the Subatlantic climatic age of the Holocene epoch, and I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling like some sort of age is coming to an end and we’re in some tumultuous period of transition.

This poem “Subatlantic in Decline” will be comprised of clastic fragments and deconstructed imagery of this terminal collapse, forming a chaotic record of sorts of the end of an era. Ever since my first published poem in 2011, the common touchstone in my writing has been the natural world, and I’m sure themes of climate change, ecological trauma, and environmental imagery will seep into the spontaneous writing of “Subatlantic in Decline”, especially as I undertake roadtrips and adventures this summer throughout the Mountain West and eastward across the Mississippi River into the Midwest. Such travels and what I see and feel during them are more than likely going to end up in the fragmented surrealist passages of “Subatlantic in Decline”.

Just as with last year’s construction of “Migration”, I’m sure other poems will bubble to the surface as little side quests, but my writing focus for the next several months will primarily be directed toward “Subatlantic in Decline”. I’ll be sure to share occasional fragments with you all, so you can join me as I catalogue the surrealism and abstraction of this mess which is 2026.

The annual Black Hills Jazz Fest is taking place in Rapid City, South Dakota currently, and I left my cozy Wyoming home this morning to make it to Lost Cabin Beer Company by noon. My extremely talented friend and musician Jon Bakken was performing an hour-long jazz set with trumpeter Alex Massa’s improvisational collective of jazz musicians (some joining from as far away as New Orleans, Chicago, and South Carolina). Alex Massa is one hell of a bandleader.

I have performed my poetry on an opera stage alongside Jon Bakken accompanying on his cello, and I was in absolute awe of the man’s intensity and skill at improvisation. If he’s ever remotely close to my neck of the woods, I won’t miss his playing. He’s like a jazz viking or giant, stomping and growling as he shreds the bow across the strings of his instrument. Truly, his intensity is haunting and inspiring. When you read about the “hurricane giant” in my new poem, that’s about Jon Bakken.

The drive back home from Rapid City back into northern Wyoming was snowy, mountainous, and grim (just how I like it).

Needless to say, I’ve got the bones of a gnarly and primal poem rough draft (all spontaneous composition which flooded out of me before, during, and after the live jazz set) finished up. And I’m going to be fine tuning this wild piece throughout the rest of this weekend. I’ll most likely share it with you all next week!

Stay tuned! 🩷💛

Often used to treat PTSD, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy uses guided bilateral stimulation to reprocess trauma. I discovered that for at least a day after a particularly arduous session of EMDR, I was moody, vulnerable, and in a foggy state. My therapist told me that was because the processing of those memories continues on after the session.

As a poet, I decided to explore that reprocessing at home between sessions with ink and paper. I wrote down specific phrases or quotes my therapist would tell me immediately following our sessions, and in one case I even wrote down the calming phrase my therapist uses during our EMDR sessions if things are getting too dark and wild.

With these phrases, and sometimes a little more of my own thoughts, I set to work creating experimental poetry. Using deconstruction, fragmentation, and repetition, I created poems exploring and analyzing that therapeutic phraseology from all angles. In doing so, I noticed that writing these therapy-based poems further aided the reprocessing of traumatic events.

So far, I have finished three of these poems. Two of them, “Arabia” and “Alkali Creek, Yesterday”, were recently published by Azarão Lit Journal (read here), and my most recent “Qatari Gradient” has yet to be published.

Over the years, I’ve touched on several experiences of my time as a soldier, but these three poems are something different entirely. They feel like an extension of my therapy. These poems feel like the act of reprocessing continuing.

I’m sure more of these trauma therapy poems are coming. And I welcome them. They’re a part of my healing journey, as I finally process the trauma I lived through during that darker period of my life.

Feel free to give these poems a read! 🩷💛

Someone I follow here on Substack recently posted Willem de Kooning’s 1945 painting “Pink Angels”, and I was instantly flooded with inspiration.

So I put on my vast and sprawling “Pink Lemonade” jazz playlist (listen on Apple Music here), set up a pic of de Kooning’s painting on my desk, and went to work on a surrealist ekphrastic poem, which I also entitled “Pink Angels”. I wrote it with pure unfiltered spontaneous composition, each word flowing from the painting and the music without judgement or context.

The resulting poem I wrote “Pink Angels” may be my favorite poem I’ve written in the last couple years. Absolutely primal spontaneity.

As I’ve leaned more in postmodern and abstract writing the last couple years, I’ve been experiencing an excitement about writing which I can’t remember ever feeling. I’ve never been more thrilled to write poetry than I am now, now that I’ve wandered far from any rules, guidelines, guardrails, safety, expectations, or narratives. For me, poetry has become fun again! And I’ve never been more thrilled to read experimental or abstract poetry—John Coletti, Edmund Berrigan, Susan Howe, Aase Berg, Zach Savich, and my friend Sandrine Letellier. Check out these poets immediately.

I used to aim to take my readers with me with my poems, to take them with me up the mountain through description and attention to detail. I used to point out the moose or constellations or the sunlight, and tell my readers to look at that. My goal used to be for me poems to tell a story. First, let me say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Now, however, I like to ask my readers what they take away from my poems, what impressions they’re left with, what they feel, what my poem is about to them. My poetry is now raw emotion, devoid of a set narrative or theme. I want my readers to feel, not to see.

I completely understand my brand of poetry isn’t preferred by all in the poetry community. Just take a look at the recent controversy over Anne Carson’s brilliant 2025 poem “How Pants” the criticism it generated from a well-respected literary journal (read “How Pants” here). That brand of poetry wasn’t preferred by me once upon a time either. I expected a direct answer to “what is the poem about”. But, like abstract or surrealist art or experimental jazz, sometimes the question isn’t “what is this about” but instead “what does this make me feel”.

Enjoy my poem “Pink Angels” and the painting which inspired it.

Lazy sloppy generative AI is guzzling our dwindling water resources as it supplants human imagination and creativity. Climate solutions have been staring us in the face for decades and even worked back in the 80s and 90s, but we’re just so greedy and shortsighted to slow down anymore. We’ve entered a strange era where ecological survival is a controversial and political notion. We worship politicians as rockstars or messiahs, as godlike figures, even as we vote against not just our own personal interests, but against the interests of humankind as a species.

The Founding Fathers of these United States devoured literature. They learned things. They were farmers, inventors, philosophers and statesmen. Their hands were dirty, not in a nefarious mobster way, but in the literal way. There was actually dirt under their nails, callouses on their palms, and papercuts on their fingers. They were sometimes driven insane by disease and sickness, but at least they had an excuse for their madness. And they often accepted death and died with dignity.

What our Founding Fathers would not do is muse with other billionaire oligarchs and tyrants about how to live forever while houseless veterans and single mothers in the same city can’t afford to feed their families nutritious food or put gas in their car.

Because of technology, we have the ability to be more connected than ever with one another and especially other cultures. We have the universal archive of all known discoveries and information at our fingertips, but instead of truly using it in way which is truly beneficial to ourselves and others, technocrats and their AI programs and algorithms keep us in increasingly isolated in impenetrable bubbles which corrode not only our critical thinking skills and analytical processes, but decay our individuality, curiosity, and capacity for wonder. Instead of connection, understanding, and genuine discourse, the powers that be cultivate distrust in our cores. They cultivate meanness and ignorance and contempt for different worldviews, beliefs, and values. They’re rotting us from the inside.

We must grow internally, and intellectually, and creatively. We’ve got to do these things en masse, as a society or even as a civilization. We must do these things even though growth is really hard. Change is essential, but change it’s also scary. It’s uncomfortable. These days we aren’t used to that discomfort. We’re not used to being challenged without perceiving it as an attack. It’s no wonder that mental illnesses seem to flourishing in western civilization. We’re in perpetual survival mode without even realizing it, and we’re not utilizing that heightened awareness and adrenaline to protect our offspring and loved ones from roving sabertooth tigers or encroaching winter darkness. We’re sitting in our offices or in traffic, in our churches or in meetings, in our beds at night staring into the artificial glow of our doomscrolling devices with bellyfuls of unnameable dread, fury, and a churning instinctive fight or flight response.

You and I are uncomfortable. We’re scared. The spontaneity and intuition deep in our brains which we’ve earned over millions of years of learning and generational experience, which hasn’t yet been ground into dust by algorithms, technology, and psy-op pseudo-political propaganda, is telling us that we are danger. Our instincts are telling us everything is wrong, that there’s a threat. The politicians, oligarchs, multimillionaire mega-pastors, and billionaire technocrats want us thinking the threat is one another, our literal neighbors or international neighbors, so that in our fear, we’re more easy to control and manipulate for their own ends. The truth is those very politicians, oligarchs, technocrats, and mega-pastors are the threat.

It goes so far beyond ourselves. Our civilization and the world at large is in terminal decline. It’s almost too big to imagine. I spent six years on city council and as mayor, so I’ll put this in municipal terms I can better understand. We’ve ignored maintaining or updated the infrastructure under our streets in favor of beautification projects. Soon, our toilets won’t flush and we won’t have water or light, but the downtown mural and flower pots are nice. They’ll still be nice and flourishing when we’ve turned our community into an uninhabitable ghost town and abandoned it for someplace else, until there finally isn’t someplace else to relocate too, because we’ve ignored the infrastructure of the entire planet, the worldwide community.

Some solutions are right there in our faces.

First, get off social media, or at least use it with intention or practicality. Pop out of that dense echo chamber the technocratic billionaires and politicians have put you into. Talk to people from different cultures, eat new cuisine. Listen to music or read writers from a different part of the world.

Second, eschew materialism and mass consumerism. Overproduction of goods and items and our western addiction to acquire more and more has created a whirlpool of doom in the fabric of our worldwide resources. Purchase an item with intention. Make acquiring each new shirt or book an action of intention, deliberation, and thought. And truly consider not buying a new item unless you give an equal one (or two) away. There is such power and satisfaction in minimalism and simplicity. Like Thoreau said, “Simplify, simplify!”

Third, don’t touch generative AI. Be creative. I’m not telling everyone to become an artist or poet or architect. But use your imagination. Cultivate the capacity for wonder in the universe and the people around you. Give in to wonder. Give in to creative spontaneity. Try a new layout for your living room furniture. Switch to a new bedspread in a color or pattern you wouldn’t otherwise have chosen. Try cooking a new recipe, and be a little heavy-handed with your favorite seasoning. Invest in a little pocket journal or notebook, and when you have an idea or interesting thought write it down by hand in its pages, not necessarily in the Notes app on your smartphone as I am doing here with this essay at four in the morning. I never said I wasn’t occasionally a hypocrite.

Fourth, make time for solitude. We’re so afraid of being alone, of being bored, of being still with our thoughts. This is especially true of western civilization. When we are alone and not distracted, that’s when the real hard internal work happens. When we meditate, when we ponder, when we spend alone time creating, when we pray to God (in solitude as Jesus recommended and showed by example several times in the Gospels), that’s when answers come, when we can best touch our capacity of growth and change. And solitude isn’t effective when you spend it on your smartphone. That’s not solitude. That’s you giving in to your addiction. Leave the phone, and don’t be afraid to be alone with yourself. It’s necessary.

Fifth, be generous. Give of yourself. I’m not recommending you donate to your political party of choice. Let the gluttonous political action committees tighten their belts a little. Let a politician win by values and ideas, instead of money and resources. No, I’m saying to donate to someone in need, a member of your community going through a rough patch, to a vetted and honest charitable fund, to a nonprofit organization for a (non-political party-affiliated) cause you are passionate about, such as the arts, environment, food security, your community church, social justice, substance abuse or suicide prevention, education, etc. I’m also talking about being generous with your time and yourself. Serve your community. Volunteer to sit on boards, coalitions, and committees actively working toward productive causes, definitive solutions, or providing community resources. Such public service can oftentimes be some of the most fulfilling in your life.

In conclusion, who am I to advise anyone?

No, seriously.

We’re all just mammals on this orbital rock creating arbitrary rules and systems. What I do have that’s worthwhile, however, is a little bit of logic, some creativity, open-mindedness, critical thinking skills, and experience volunteering and serving others (sometimes to my own detriment as I spread myself far too thin).

Am I a hypocrite?

Yes.

I am continuing to learn. I’m in the perpetual throes of growth and change, and I plan on being in this state of flux and learning until I draw in and release my last breath.

And when I take that last breath, whether it’s in fifty years or tomorrow, I want it to be with dignity, and with the knowledge that while I was alive I did my best to live a healthy life and I did my best to improve the lives of others.

And, God, I hope there isn’t anybody at my deathbed with a slide whistle.