You walked alone

Without fear of the wolf   into the dark forest

Under its great canopy

Of coolness   until you came

To the clearing where magically stood

The Cottage of Insoluble Silence

You knocked at their door   but no one answered

Were they afraid of what you had brought

In your wicker basket

Under the bright cloth as a gift

Was it your collection of small peculiar stones

With their profound silence 

That they feared

At night I lie awake and think of that

Coolness   the bright cloth   your small stones

Enter yourself

Often

With a hymnal of flame

Be forged anew on the smithy’s anvil

Extend great kindness

Toward people

For the dark burden on their backs

May not at first be visible

Abandon the need

For adoration and praise from others

All words fray in the wind

Spend time

In the presence of animals

For theirs is truly an ancient kingdom

Of unheralded wisdom

Forage for Love

Always

You may be surprised under what stones

And in whose eyes it waits

Now we can move on to the science of taste. In this bubble of the food court, we can learn about saliva, olfactory senses, the flavor of fruits and vegetables, salt, sugar, acid, receptors in the nose, the irritation of onions and mustard, the knowledge of everything that concerns eating and the etiquette of the dinner table, the reviewing and publishing of the experience, without sniffing a meal.

Where was I? Oh yes, contemplating lunch and the life of a social media writer, interrupted by police at the door with handcuffs that haven’t been used since the eighteenth century.

The birds in gray are gone astray; a bonfire of phoenixes is smoking on the horizon. The windows want nightfall, ancient, here, and now. All daybreak long I want night, unmasked, like the naive glow of my screen flashes to reunite with fiction. The lightning is cawing, desolate, far away, exiled, unsheltered from thunder and hunting season. Names remain the true mystery of existence. Your name will be my last passion remaining. If your smile is ever lost, I will live face rolling down the glass, surviving undestiny. Help my disquiet spirit be silent among the mass production of noisy stars. Help me hush the inquisitors! my young shadow will grow ancient from nights like this. My only perdition is this autonomous song, waiting to activate from somnolence. You, calling my name, is the dazzling flash that undazes me. This is our accidental labor, seduced and incoherent.

I hope you marry a poet = I hope you marry someone problematic, but that only applies to those who want to accept time as a given.

An enormous amount of people have grappled with defining time and trying to understand it. The problem was there at our first words; it’s baked into language, it’s what makes us porous. Philosophers, scientists, psychologists, poets, writers, have all weighed in.

Why I’ve chosen poetry and stories:

In poetry and fantastic stories, we don’t have to grasp the essence of time, because it passes through the writing and is inside the vocabulary as the words pass through us.

Timing is in poetry the way time is inside of flowers and fruit. True literature is endowed with the natural sense of time! You cannot measure when fruit will ripen on a watch, like you can’t predict the moment of a premonition. The manifestation lends itself to vocabulary in its own way, and in its own perfect timing. Einstein, Borges, Dunne, Hawking, dissolved into it while passing through. Poets are misplaced in ungraspable time. Read one early and the taste is bitter, read one late and it’s sweet rotten. Experience perfect timing, and it’s the elastic animalistic perfection of no past present or future. Serendipity.

The time has come to love poets. A poet loves you!

I’ve always liked writing odes to my favorite things, but embarrassingly they always feel awkward. North Georgia is my home, and I love peaches. Here’s a progress report. The first one is a few years old. The second one is this morning. Watching myself age is indecent, I’m sorry. Nature poetry turns me imposter more than anything. Bruised fruit is the best I can offer.

For flower moons and peaches
On a morning damp and early
my spirit sweet but surly
I woke by a breezy thought
on the insufficiency of spring.

​​​​​​ as my rebel heart lamented
my cinerary soul repented
a warming red repentance
until the taste of earth just before it blooms
caught sticky fire in summer’s womb,
and that is how my heart became a peach.

Enveloped in fermented air
fragrant and unaware
all my kisses became one kiss, first kisses, last kisses, the lips between them,
and my smell became the smell of summer.

My fuzzy skin was the tenderest topaz and green I had ever seen,
the baby shadow of my struggle against time.
My shape was a medusa song
like the thighs of spring that sing the fruit in summer.
My flesh was a slow comet
a hungry softening reddening red.

Until my tears dripped the first taste of winter
from infinity’s waning crescent
and my taste was ruined.
And that is how I became the purple mist that clings to treetops.

Peaches and Flower Moon Dreams

Finally, daylight’s given me everything!

Whatever the shape of peaches says about my heart.

However fuzzy skin alights topaz and tender, round, cinerary, and suspended.

Peach blossoms must dream the sweetest dreams,

Trees can almost circulate fire!

Repentance can’t even be stirring.

Whatever that says about my rebel heart!

How the five o’clock shadow on my wings

plucks its colors from our first kisses.

Drowsy comets washing summer clear.

2. Eavesdropping

3. Coffee Chatter

4. Anxiety

5. Tiny Sips

6. Animals

7. Celebrity

8. Closed

9. Seasonal

10. Friends

11. Industry Night

12. Darkening

13. Fall Fun

14. Artificial

15. Lost and Found

16. Unnatural

17. Epics

18. Games

19. Service Notes

20. Firsts

21. Innocent Memories

22. Thanksgiving

23. Memorial Service

24. Snow

25. Valentines

26. Brew

27. Old Drivel

28. Poetry Wars

29. Gratitude

Will we be able to borrow books in our dreams?

Will we build prisons for those who get angry on account of love?

Who will say see-you for the last time? I’d like to be the one, and I’d like it to be chocolates in hand for a librarian.

As words become destinations on a GPS, will they return home with pleasure in the evenings?

Because they missed us after long days of lines and screen time? Will it still feel like a bedtime story?

Where will we seek out the joys that used to live in between pages? (em dashes no longer happy little typographs)

Will it still always be from books to lips?

And the falling off of dust jackets is the sound of the future going freeeeee…

Always wandering the same library.

One by one, we aim to restore all plastic flowers to their original brightness by washing them. This will return poetry from its dead end. Gardens have been melding into grey for too long, and Flowerly Restoration Services is answering the call. When the mission is accomplished, and all the flowers in your neighborhood are restored to their pure color, Shakespeare and Wordsworth will return to favor, which, like the colors of roses and daffodils, have faded because of time and the relentless stripping away of transient thoughts. In the morning, just before the last flowers get cleaned by the pressurized bleach dewdrops, if you open a book of poetry, you can feel with your finger the pages begin to turn clean. It starts with the black punctuation marks; the em dashes become yellow at first, then pure white. Commas lose their tails and become plain black dots before disappearing. When purity spreads across the entire page, and the entire book of poetry opens like pages of freshly bleached curtains: We have raised enough money for Phase 2 which will look towards purifying the blue sky.

Extracting The Confession of my Birth

I’m going to break one of my rules of ‘no authorial interpretation’ and offer some observations about the sense of one of my recent pieces, Extracting The Confession of My Birth. May I say I offer it in the spirit of mutual poetic endeavor, a kind of self-dissection to examine the curious mechanisms of writing as something more than literary technique and craft. To do so is not to imply that the mechanisms necessarily ‘work’. Short writing that requires a long gloss fails. If a more capable poet had written on these ideas, no gratuitous annotation would be required.

Title: Extracting The Confession of my Birth

I’m in trouble already. I wrote this when I learned Substack partnered with Panagram. There’s a lot more than meets the eye here. It’s a dig at searching for an absolute origin. It’s also a dig at viewing origins as singular and fixed, the illusion of knowing firstness.

Birth: References primary cause, origins, where we think the straight line traces back to. Was this story born human? Was it born artificial? Am I Hispanic? Am I American? What does my passport say about me as a human? What does Panagram say about this writer? Is the voice ChatGPT? or Copilot? Grammarly? - Secret beginnings are viewed as sinful… But what do we truly know?

Confession: This word is the bridge. A good reader will always be able to tell the difference between a writer freeing themselves of something versus mere word games. LLM’s make endless libraries of wordplay; humans confess. From another point of view, there’s an ironic note to the word confession. Authority justifies itself by mediating confessions. If I can prove I didn’t use AI, my craft is valid; if I can show my birth certificate, I won’t be deported. Who has the right to know what privately possesses me? Every admirable interview attempts to pull out the inspiration. There’s an implied inferiority at play: a trustworthy person must decide whether the creative act is pure or whether a confession and an apology is in order.

Extracting: This deals with process and consent. Skill alone cannot dislodge what’s essential in writing as art: the dispossession of love and the things that haunt us in words. The imitations of confession are endless. Extraction is translation. LLM’s cannot translate what’s inside of a human. Machines can only infinitely regress to what writers have already cast off.

I think I should close this here with just explaining title. In spirit, the rest of the writing follows on its heels anyway. True writing is a miracle! If I’m not even certain myself whether mine is a parlor trick, or if I reached that exulted state of transference, why should I ask you to confess yours? Is it because somebody has to be in charge?

Just read and write.

There are monsters destroying old books,

punishing me.

Awakening has morphed into cruelty I thought was centuries away,

resurfacing.

That is tomorrow.

Yesterday the murmur of machines drinking water

and ravishing spines.

I remember when I held books in my hands like flowers.

Dryness is nigh.

Rivers dancing with joy,

never to be recaptured.

Unforgettable words forgotten.

I’m so sorry the embrace of my generation

is a scourge.

Thirsty and he-desperate, I will always look for you, even after I disappear. Babel’s my river through so many centuries of swimming, issued forth where it says I was born. Panagram’s lying again, Influencers are lying again. It’s my dead babies making words flutter again. Who hears the sound of night unfiltered? Words dying one by one. Underneath the landscape, afraid of the missing corpses. Sometimes they return in the morning, the very same words. Poor truthtellers. Hollow fingers ask how to pluck the harp? The closed eye percentages say I was born human, open eyes singing and singing.

I’m the anchor baby

dad found in a no deep sea womb.

You have to sleepwalk the edgeless sandbar

to make the edge of Aldebaran.

That’s how the coral reefs by themselves

dance happily,

while underwater wind hammers

the ancient no color night

in tragedy.

Like I asked for their help,

tears bloom.

How they love sunsets!

I’ll drag the bottom

to utter:

I love sunsets.

though the definitive one you see

will always include the breaking of a wave.

It's impossible to predict

what clothes you will be wearing by the time your internal play is done, and the prohibition against slowness will be lifted at sunset.

I know the point of posting these photos on social media should be sharing our restitution of things like the mutations of the colors or the speed of turning the kaleidescope, because it's hard to imagine anyone knows as much about such things as we do with our cameras, but as soon as I turn my back, the conditions of the day will be medieval once again.

Finally, I’m an empty magic lantern/ Even love cannot force me to project/

I etch roots of grace, like veins inside, sunk into soft granite/ Duplicitous gestures are impossible/

I can’t recall goodbye/ I’m rising smoke so suddenly, so sorry my last face was hideous/ Face to face with myself, put there by the art of you/ Disordered by your grace/ Safeguarded in the scattering, taken over by trust, confined to three seconds ago…

When the strawberry full moon hits you,
realize you’ve seen every kind of pink light there is,
and it’s always the same mad funk.
Strawberries, summer's lycanthropy, adolescent sonnets.
How lax my heart keeps it's profound books!
this body that weighs 2 oz of dreams,
the library in my pocket 190 lbs fragrant!
wells up drives me onto the street.
It’s always the same walk.
I just fall in love without putting up any fight at all,
deprived of meeting so many fates.
Torrid inside, cauterized, head miserably exploited,
heart howling for strawberry fields,
every restless ache when light runs out,
through every beautiful red
fruit in my throat.

buy me a coffee

I used to love writing at Waffle House.  Breakfast was at any time; I usually arrived close to midnight. The servers did just enough to keep it clean, but there were always a few dirty plates. Whether it was full or deserted, writing there was pleasant enough that for a year I turned invitations and friendships away for what looked like no reason; the excuses were nothing at all, but for me, writing stories there at night was a necessity. There was something pleasing about filling up my blank notebooks, about starting a new page when a line was displeasing, and about the server's faith that I was writing something profitable. The servers were always honest and optimistic about regulars. They were openly hospitable in an aimlessly hostile world. I loved all of them a little bit. Bookstores were closed; besides I hadn’t found anything new in one since taking photos of covers and shelf placement became more important than the voices inside. That was about 2001. I wouldn’t be obscure forever! 

It got easier to write there after a few weeks, especially when they saved me a booth! I was happy with that arrangement because it was one less choice to make, and it made me feel important; my writing became more confident.  I tried to maintain silence when I wrote, but every so often I caught myself listening to different sounds. Even at the quietest hour, there was immortal music from the jukebox, the descent of sugar granules from dispensers, stains on the walls that understood life with its noises of blood, dirtiness, and confusion. And I wrote it all! And lost it all so simply, with so little fuss. But it’s what I learned at Waffle House, while the hours slipped away, that I want to talk about.

…When do you write your title? Where do you find inspiration? What advice would you give new writers? What’s your writing style? Do you write about yourself? Do you identify with your characters? What do you think is the greatest American Novel?…

Let’s talk truthfully, unconditionally: I never got those bullshit questions at Waffle House!  The servers, days numbered in tips, could ill afford to talk as if they were immortal, and the customers, without pretense, were proud to be closer to Dante’s Inferno than Paradiso. This helped me tell the truth, underneath the veneer of what’s considered publishable, and what takes the creative impulse away. There in the lost hours at the back booth of Waffle House, in what started as amusement, the night, with its power for nightmares, gave me the secrets to its designs in the pure visions of a madman.  My notebooks miraculously filled with the maps and journeys I walked as a somnambulist. I had never known where I had gone before. My prose was fated, full of light and darkness, but not without consequences, and not unforgiven by the very powers that granted me what I sought. Except for the booths around me, I repeated the same night after night for a year. While the booths paraded Romeos and Juliets in ecstasy of having chosen and imagined each other, factory workers staked out by poverty, concert goers soaked to the bone, vagabonds sheltering from the rain, and sentimentalists soaking it all in,  I furiously gave shape to ambiguous visions, hardly stopping for a drink of water, almost freed from my body, alive only in imagination.

One night, my appearance particularly laughable, I decided to leave Waffle House a little early. When I looked at my watch, it said 11:00.  The jukebox had already contracted it’s throat for the night, and I was out of quarters. 

It’s nothing, I just have a headache, that’s all. I told the server.  I stood up, walked over to the window, and looked at the green glow of a Starbucks across the street.  I packed my papers into my briefcase and rode across the street for a late coffee.  So close to closing, my order was like a splinter under the barista's skin. I didn’t know it was probably already too late.  I felt terrible. That was the night some devil decided to rob my truck. They got away with my manuscript and my Fedora. I didn’t touch a pen or eat at Waffle House for years afterward, and I haven’t worn a Fedora since.  Only recently have I tried to once again face the unconsciousness of my past, and I’ve been thinking about going out at night to write more stories.

@ The Absurd Cafe, Circa Substack 2026, renowned barista Hux presents: Poetry Wars.

At nine in the morning, Hux started hanging flyers. There was a ban on putting up human-made flyers, but Hux wasn’t worried about his crimes. It didn’t matter if the art or words were political or not; the prohibition was all-encompassing against any pictures or words without commercial potential. It’s not hard to understand how, in a closed society, only depersonalized expressions can be completely trusted. Hux often took to the streets early just to watch the cruel city, people masked and prowling like dogs who had lost their spirit. Where had all truth gone? Where were the rebels with the words to break free? Their pure lines earned in ecstasies and darkness…

“The streets are full of thieves, Hux. No one trusts anyone anymore,” a city worker mumbled as he cleaned handwriting and drawings off the walls.

“I think one day… Maybe things will change…Come by for an Espresso later, on the house…I’ll make it a double!” Hux gestured, slapping the man’s back with the palm of his hand.

“Thanks, man. Anything is possible, Hux, I’ll see you later…”

Hux waited cautiously for the worker to disappear out of sight. He watched the pickpocket on the other side of the street and contemplated the pleasure of spending stolen money. Then he thought of the social media poets and wondered if the initial glee of gaining influence from other people’s words felt the same. The street was quiet for a moment; it was his chance to hang his flyer while no one was looking.

Poetry Wars @ The Absurd Cafe 10:00 PM

He had about thirty seconds of hope to make a quick sketch. He put down a few quick silhouettes: lion, moon, a birdcage, and a lagoon. Since he didn’t have red, he didn’t draw any blood. The sounds of a street fight startled him. He stopped drawing and quickly scrawled across the bottom:

It’s better to be a swashbuckler than to let a publisher get their paws on your pen.

In case he were stopped and interrogated, he kept a few permitted flyers in his pocket:

SEEKING GREAT STRANGE ARTISTS WITH THE COURAGE TO BE TAMED FOR THE PLEASURE OF AN HONORABLE AUDIENCE WITH little Hors d'Oeuvres/ TEETH AND DREAMS WILL BE REMOVED PRIOR TO THE SHOW/TRICKS, WORDPLAY, AND GOOD MANNERS WILL BE RUBBER STAMPED/ ONE small PHOTO OF THE JUNGLE IS PERMITTED INSIDE THE CAGE/ FOR AN AUTOMATIC FEE THE POETS WILL HOP AND EAT SUGAR/ PHOTOS WITH LATTE ART WILL BE AVAILABLE AFTER THE READINGS/ DENTISTS WILL BE AVAILABLE TO CHECK CHILDREN FOR CAVITIES…

It was time to go back and open up shop.

Cafe is open!

“Amid the many homages to the cafe, my favorite is simply sharing an espresso in silence together. It’s the last privilege in a world that has gambled its fraternity against its duplicity. Let’s share an espresso in silence together, establish our complicity, and make our private solidarity public.” - From Hux’s manual for Baristas. Page Number Unknown.

The barista is making a “contemplative” this morning, and measuring how caffeine stretches our gaze, a magician who annihilates distances. The bitterness is paradoxically therapeutic; the soot after the phosphorescent trace is healing. The adolescent lovers will discover this when they stop taking sugar. This morning, foam art is the beginning of hypnosis. Today’s beans were picked by a woman; the flavor is a search for the impossible, a warm aura, eternal, untrammeled. A man couldn’t have picked these! This contemplation doesn’t begin by promising an absolute taste and then end up tasting like shit.

your dreams 
and the ribbon of light that leads
to the no-ocean coast you roam at night
where the nomads pine away
I’ll risk my pristine introversions
to the quietness of our kisses
no panorama but lonely palm trees
the wind will sway us together alone
our lips come to life
like reptiles gazed upon by warmth

Outside, the world goes on with its clumsy attempts at extracting silence like a stone from the romantic’s skull. This is especially tragic for Hux, who is held in thrall by…

“Hello!? Is my cappuccino ready yet...?”

“Right away sir! It is smoking on the horizon free of imperfections. Spectacularly banal! just as you requested”