“If there is a short cut to wisdom, it is poetry.” —msk
Mark Kessinger: Poet | Educator | Author
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A Personal Invitation: Mentoring for Poets
I am opening up a limited number of spots—just six—for a private, six-week writing workshop. This is a chance for poets of any skill level to work directly with me via email to refine your voice and elevate your craft. If you are ready to take your writing to the next level, I invite you to learn more.
Twice Curated Poetry
HELLO, and welcome to The Twice Curated Poetry of Mark Kessinger.
This is where I share a collection of my published poems. They’re called curated because they were chosen by others—editors, publishers, anthologists, judges, etc. This offers you confidence that the works presented here are of a certain quality. They are poems that you might be able to find elsewhere on the net, if you spend the time to track them down. I certainly encourage support of all the resources that helped encourage me.
These are also curated by myself. I go beyond selecting them for the works that they are, but also for the story they tell, or the insight they offer to poetry and writing in general. In this way, they are Twice Curated.
As I present these poems in postings, I add to each the information I might offer up at a reading. This can be background, technique, referents, or any introduction to the piece which may be helpful in enhancing the enjoyment of it. Sort of putting you in the front row of a live reading.
I am a poet living through—and writing about—many of the same events of your lifetime. This is not purple prose, hearts and flowers, arcane sonnets, or the esoteric ramblings of the obscure. It is not Ivy League elitism. It is real articulation of life that will touch on all things—musings of the heart, soul, body, and mind.
The poems themselves are wide-ranging in subject, voice, and tone. They come from thought experiments, and are of a contemporary style, most casual in tone—meaning very accessible. A few may be challenging. Some may not be your cup of tea. But most will be flavorful adventures.
If you are not yet a fan of poetry—try this.
If you are a student of poetry—this is good stuff (with X-ray glasses included!).
If you are an advanced reader or poet yourself—this is quality workshop, and, I hope, a pace car.
For your entertainment, enlightenment, and encouragement, I offer these postings, with more to come.
Each posting contains one previously published poem, and a fresh introduction, available only here.
Ken Holds Barbie
KEN HOLDS BARBIE
POEM: Ken Holds Barbie First appearance in Inlandia: a literary online journal
Growing old, and, growing old together, were not included in the box. Not sold separately. Yet it was always there, in the play, in the premise. That this was the brand of romance that was timeless, forecast, indestructible. I felt this at a certain age, when my wife and I rested in quietness, fulfilling our fairy tale moment, as a destiny.
Punctuation are commands to the voice. In a reading, this piece may appear as more conventionally marked, keeping the flow of sound more tended. On paper, visually, much of the punctuation is replaced by line breaks, spacing, and blocking of phrases. It shifts, sending signals to the mind in different ways, thru different senses. Most of us are more visual observers. Once you’ve meandered thru the landscape of symbols, try going back, reading it aloud to yourself, for a second consideration. There are treasures each way. Enjoy the comparison.
Ken Holds Barbie
no longer brand new out of the box
most accessories lost or replaced
Malibu Barb, Stacey, Pepper; all grownup,
moved away into lives of their own
families of their own
the branding is stretched
she lays down, head in his lap,
and he strokes the side of her face
as if making wishes
for more of this
the pink jeep has been retired
the pink corvette rarely used any more
the Barbie house is mostly quiet
and the days peel off
on their own
one by one
like wishes
and their hands
paler, smaller from wear,
still fit perfectly
still somehow
made for each other
like bookends
of wishes.
~~~~~
Borrowed Illumination
BORROWED ILLUMINATION
Alberta Turner was a professor who had taken poets under her wing. One of them made sure I became another.
She taught at Cleveland State University and took over its poetry center with this philosophy:
“Whether they’re academic poets, street poets, language poets, or living-room poets, it really doesn’t matter. Whatever opens your soul, that’s fine.”
She had a great and poetic retirement plan: collecting islands—a fine meeting place for the muse. Among her several books, she also authored two poetry manuals: Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process and Poets Teaching. Not all can. Those who do, and do so well, are rare and exceptional to know.
She marshaled three dozen poet-teachers to share how the work is done, using student poems. Checking the internet, I see that one of her books is still out there, still viable—used copy selling for over a hundred dollars. Daiquiris on the beach.
She was with me, way over in Texas, far from her island map, as I reread her poems, reliving our time. She used simple things to bleed complexity into a thimble—like using a parking lot light to read poetry while a teenager practiced driving in and out of an abandoned mall anchor, weaving through sectioned-off empty spaces, skeletons of a busier time.
Me and her, our islands, bumping gently like rafts—together once more, tiny in the seas of distance and years. Whatever opens our soul.
Borrowed Illumination
I am in the parking lot of a dying Sears
reading by borrowed
illumination.
I have two slim volumes
by a woman who took me
under the arm of her own muse
she never told me I would be this
half a century later
the one still alive
I have so many questions for her now.
Back then, we only talked about me.
She collected islands.
She had mastered the
skewed congruence
I could only recognize as fencing.
It was a fence of closets
only a longer life
could decode.
In that
we are still
together.
~~~~~
Puzzle Box
PUZZLE BOX
First appearance in WILDsound Writing Festival
The metaphor at work here is, that letters in a panning box, are like ideas in a mind. They are subject to being jostled into all sorts of relationships. It is language and convention that steers them into normal pairings. It is the creative urge that places them like speed-dating, with unlikely candidates, that search for that remote association that startles the mind with ‘happened upon’ consequence.
The coda addresses the micro focus of the poem against the macro frame work of all else continuing, and commenting on, this pin point experiment. It goes from the abstract of a musing to the hardcore reality that we are all choosing how each of our moments are spent.
Puzzle Box
my letters are tossed into a panning box
which I shake and watch
shake and watch
but no words emerge.
the letters dance, swing themselves,
and crowd into frightened huddles
of code,
or nonsense.
this morning, I almost saw
the words evil, silver, and sliver,
but they weren’t there,
only broken versions of
happy, sometimes, and
don’t.
silently, I cheer on their tiny teams
hoping they gel,
cement into significance.
yet their marching never runs above
a stagger,
slow gangs
of panic.
I reach a bony finger into the box
and stir them
shove them
nudge them
I coax nothing.
I salt them with periods,
painting
with confused pepper…
nudge and shove
nudge and shove
I will continue my harmless singing,
keep injecting myself
into them,
experimenting
with expression
as I,
we,
play with
the end of time
~~~~~
Smashed
SMASHED
POEM: Smashed
Faced today with a growing hurricane season, it seemed appropriate that I start off my blog with a poem about the mother of all hurricanes, the 1900 storm that wiped out Galveston. This is especially so, as I have just been thru a few myself, and a good part of the southeast is dealing with a double dose of overlapping hurricanes visiting within weeks of each other: Helene and Milton.
When I first came to Texas, I had the dubious honor of riding out Alicia, which passed its eye right over my home, like the welcome wagon from hell. It was a get acquitted card for the 1900 Storm which had become, for me, new local history. It came before the naming of storms, and had it been named, it would have been instantly retired. The 1900 storm was the worst disaster in US history, to this day. It began a life long entanglement with storms, both live and in poetry. I gave the storm the name Misery, and titled this project, Misery’s Lick.
The pieces in this project tend to be longer than my average, as there was just so much to absorb. It was a storm so terrible it was not spoken of afterwards. It altered the course of history, destroying Galveston as the Newport of the West, a playground for millionaires, and gave the crown to Houston. The entire island was covered by storm surge so deep, it smashed buildings, wharves and railroad bridges, using the debris to batter the rest. ‘Smashed’ is one of many poems from Misery’s Lick, most of which are very dark, being true to the nature of Misery.
Having just stood toe to toe with Alberto and Beryl, not to mention the recent derecho, this seems like a foreboding, but poignant first offering. Hope you enjoy.
Smashed
Everything we could possibly make
Was unmade.
Stairs and straight lines
were destroyed.
All things hospitable to man
were rubbed into splinters,
jarred into angles we can’t
live with.
Chaos was heaped into a useless order
and tossed over the living and dead alike.
The stone walls of churches fell
as though bombed by a distant hatred.
In the days before we mastered
a bird’s eye view, the city was raked
into a jungle of rubble, a language
of what was now indecipherable
even to the babbling, to the
converted.
The winds had done as much damage
as the waters.
Hundred mile an hour gusts
took the measuring equipment off the roof
before the winds peaked.
It lifted house-tops and slung them aside
into random targets of what was
still standing.
Home pillars and lamp posts
joined the wharf boards and
pier pilings sluicing through the streets.
The dead and doomed were rammed
and bludgeoned by the torn-away weapons
of the rains and winds.
The city ground away beneath the flood line
in a lurching, battering slurry.
Nothing waded away.
No one swam ashore.
No one would walk on water
that a desperate limb wouldn’t
pull him under.
Beneath the raging crests
waited sunken cemeteries
undersea silent gardens
where crosses made
and unmade themselves.
Deep Dive
What's New...
August 2026
the tipping frontier There are times, and ways, the familiar can evoke the strangeness in life. Suddenly something is so out of place, it defies easy recognition. Or is used in some new way, it becomes, temporarily, another kind of thing…
A pebble, in the path, can alter your trail, your step, your balance.
Not Joes Much is made of the sacrifice of our war dead, and nothing should diminish it. However the story continues, which is the whole point of the sacrifice. This makes the quieter, day to day living that those, who did not give their lives to safeguard, urgent in a different way…
Poet as Propagandist Poets are powerful. Not just because they can say the most with the least. Because their words are memorable. Dramatic. Poetic. Isn’t that the highest standard, what we say when something is done the best: it was poetry in motion.
Words can last forever. They can cross great distances and transit from language to language: a virus of truth.
When poking power with truth, evil power will label you a propagandist, to smear your acts, your words and even your audience…
Start with Something – This could be called: ode to weakness.
We’ve all had our thin moments, sick, beaten down, lost. This was a moment when coming out of a deep sleep I had an ugly dream still clinging to me. Or was I also under the influence of medications – a temporary fog that passed?
July 2026
Syighs. A name, the sound of breath, slightly twisted in its spelling, talks to me. A play on words that shows how the wind can play in volumes. Breezes, from whispers to howls, depending on the size.
From the sigh of a meadow’s morning to the sigh of a multi-state storm. Or the killer hundred mph derecho that blew through Houston like a scythe. In my house, a man is harbored after the winds took the entire building his apartment hid in…
Two Julys so far Warning: heartbreak ahead. Most readers will find this upsetting. This poem is about watching my child die in hospice. If you have lost a child, or sat with someone at the end, please read this only when you’re ready.”
Word Puppets is a prayer in the quest for articulation.
Here is my theory: writing, communicating, thinking, is like pushing a string thru a giant ball of string. Impossible to predict in so many ways, this idea of observation, perception, capture, articulation, expression, reception and perfection of connection…
Caution: This article contains crude language, battlefield profanity, harsh speech, and the obscenities of war.
Dead It is not just July Fourth, but the semiquincentennial of our nation. A country born in blood, forged in the crucible of war, and suffered successive wars that worsened beyond imagining. War that nurtured a great desire for peace, a respect for laws, and a citizenry baptized in rights.
June 2026
If the Tongue Dangled
The hunt for poetry is alive and well everywhere. It begins as curiosity, that flick of the eyelids when you first wake up. Or it may be hot on the trail of an idea that stuck around longer than most, a suggestion about the true nature of life.
Sometimes it hatches in the ability to see things anew.
When the body was first put together on the drawing board, weren’t there other opportunities considered?
Everything can be reimagined. Even those things that happen because it was the only way they could happen didn’t really have to happen that way. The inevitable had a choice.
proving grounds The pen is mightier than the sword, they say. There is some proof of it. Check out any peace treaty, the Magna Carta, or Charter of the United Nations. The pen has made some big swings in history. Just not a sure thing. Or immediate.
Part of its power is to travel and accumulate. Part of its charm is to be plain spoken or grand, working well in different ways…
My brush with bleeding hearts Yearly I make a small pilgrimage, from the Lone Star State to the Sunshine State. An arc of the heavens, according to the road atlas names.
I visit dear, kind people, as their dear, kind friend. It is two days of bloom to flower in their presence. Five in full radiance. Two days to close it up.
There are palm trees door-to-door on this trip…
Knives There are things out there that are best known secondhand. We send people to war but do not want to let them send war back to us—not in its truest form. We seem to prefer vets with their truths bottled up in their PTSD, hidden and quiet, until it detonates, taking them or others into a small slice of headline-worthy misery…
May 2026
Tell-Tale American Presence
It’s Memorial Day and everyone loves a picnic. Or it’s Labor Day, or the Fourth of July. Or the very newest national summer holiday, Juneteenth, and yes, everybody loves a picnic. This year we celebrate our 250th. Lots and lots of picnics…
The Referendum of Survivors Calamity comes from all directions, and usually finds a way into everyone’s path. Storms affect many, maybe most. But the competition includes wildfires, crime, disease, heat waves, cold fronts, and earthquakes. Someone steps out of a car and down a manhole. A car explodes into a fireball on a city street. A sinkhole finds a runway.
Right now there is a tank of chemicals turned explosive cocktail, cooking its own fuse toward horrific detonation…
3D Pain Recently I endured an infection. Minor. It began as one thing, built, became something else, kept building, and eventually when it became get-this-treated bad, it was clearly an infection. Once known, easily cured.
I read about a man in a detention center whose jaw pain became a toothache…
Victoria Standing outside the McNay Museum in San Antonio, Texas, is a stainless-steel sculpture by American artist Philip Grausman (born 1935). She is titled Victoria, a woman’s head elevated on a long slender neck, with a face of mystery. The material reflects the sun and weather. She stands near the museum entrance, but used to sit closer to the Austin highway, basking in the curious stares…
Scent of a Monster: I was a kid when I saw my first monster movie. Not just a horror movie, like Dracula, or Frankenstein, or the Wolfman. This monster was a new class of dread. Gorgo was a child dinosaur that was taken from its home. Gorgo was rescued by his mother, Ogra. Who rose up out of the ocean and waded ashore onto our own innocent happy beaches, at night, in darkness. It stormed thru entire cities, shaking up the very idea of what monstrous could be. This was no Bambi…
April 2026
Hi, Dad: This is a round-about war poem, and one of thanks. Gratitude we usually reserve for Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, that really old one, Armistice Day. It is an ode to my father, a warrior in the Second Big One. It is an ode to the Peace Dividend, that which was handed down to my generation, and others. It is an ode to my family, his family. It is hard to teach what sacrifice is, compared to the battlefield lessons which use real life and death in such violent and haphazard ways…
Mid: It’s that time again, for the trip across ‘Mid’ where we transit the Gulf coast of ‘who knows where.’ It used to be the Gulf of Mexico. Now, it’s changed its stripes.
But the one stripe that matters most, is the center stripe that stretches from here to there. One thousand, eighty-three miles. 19 days on foot. 5 days on bike (if you can cover 200 miles a day— an Olympic pace). 100 was my best, with no luggage. My best hike was…
It
Not to be confused with IT, information technology. My ‘It’ has a lowercase ‘t’. Just another quirk of modern language wrestling with an army of acronyms in a forest of fonts. In the evolution of communication, we may never get this right. Every improvement in communication fails to eradicate any former method; we just stack and stack. We wrote scripts for radio plays that added the big screen and then the small screen, and now cable into streaming, without a single link in the chain being dropped. It’s like building Babel in reverse…
Not Joes When I was younger, canon fodder age, we were involved in a war in Southeast Asia. Men were being sent to die by the tens of thousands. It was an unpopular war, so much so, that a volunteer army could not fight it. So men were drafted, forced in a modern black bean lottery, to serve as soldiers. When I became eligible, I waited out the school year to see which way my life would be spent. And if war, what would that look like, and would I come back in one piece, or at all…
March 2026
Anatomy of a Desert A desert can be a barren place, so still, not even radio waves visit. Colonies of electro-smog refugees choose them for the electronic silence. Standing in the desert on a calm day, I was tuned to a new sort of listening. I knew that on one level, the place was lifeless, anti-life, yet on another, it teems with…
Re-remember to Regard We depend upon the dependable. At least, until they fail. Usually during some stress test of real life. When we needed them the most. This little brain-twister, Re-remember to Regard, came to me in such an event. Hurricane aftermaths are a good time to see what worked and what won’t…
Memory Rehab One of the Joes I knew, shared some rough patches. Because he knew me, because that somehow helped. We all have trauma. That trauma has a story and just the telling helps. To the darkness, to a wailing wall, to nobody at all. It helps to name the hurt and say it out loud. It helps more to bring the words to another to share the words, if not the pain, then at least, the understanding. Story telling is universal. It’s what we do. We are wired for it.
Poetry is one of the ways we do it best…
Through Wind is a wish from an innocent time. Not just an earlier time, but from an earlier voice. From a time when dangers were sensed, like scents in the air. Something that causes the ears to prick up, the eyes to widen, the head to swivel. Even the heart stops, in order to listen better. Then… nothing. The threat fades before…
February 2026
The Blank is an ode to forgetfulness. Something we practice our whole lives. It is also an ode to getting started on the page. It all starts with an idea. Doesn’t have to be a big one, something you heard or thought that stuck with you. Start there. Staying power is one hallmark of the poetic.
Next, name it: give it words…
Snap Echo is an early poem, one of mystery and indirection. It is illustrative of the importance of a writer’s two most basic tools: word choice, and word order.
The poem opens with odd ordering, putting us on notice that something is off. The stumbling syntax throughout, along with phrases used more than sentences, is a model of traps. Little tripwires and warnings, for us to pause, re-read, rethink: what was that? What’s ahead…?
Digital Smoke Right now AI divides us more than unites us. How soon will that change? Is this like buggy drivers resenting automobiles—just a generational paradigm sinking with the sunset while the new kids get crazed with it? Will we look back, from our space colonies, and laugh at ourselves?
Poetry is pure thought experiment…
Spider’s Brood We’ve all done this: been the Destroyer, the harbinger of death. Usually by swatting a fly or mosquito. Lesser forms of life, like ants, only certain Buddhists would yield to. Most of us have stepped on a bug and never noticed. I was guilty of this, one memorable time, climbing some steps to a house, my foot landed on a large spider. Accidentally. But I only know this because of the stream of smaller spiders scattering in all directions…
January 2026
Self-portraiture in a landscape is a snow piece, an Ohio poem, a Lake Erie sort of thank you to the Canadians for their weather. I lived on the edge of the great lake and winter would freeze it along the shore, hard enough for vehicle traffic to go crazy with ice fishing. When it thawed, you could hear the ice splinter like rifle shots and crack deep like the earth was splitting…
The Purloined Hearts of Southern Command is a story about war. It is about the connection between the home fires and the men at the front—those facing down danger at the edge of battle. Hometown Rose got her start by a quirk of fate. It was something most of us would have let go, never seeing it as a tap on the shoulder by the universe itself. But it started her on a campaign: becoming..
Desert in a Bottle is homage to that captured space atop each house that acts as a kiln to our rafters and half-treasures: the attic. Up there the heat rehearses before the mountain snows retreat. Rummaging around in it flushed memories like startled birds, of my time in the high dry desert mountains. The smell of dry wood, hot, stifling air, does to cardboard and clothes what the desert does to all its creature hides and cactus hulks…
all souls day came one year as a child came to us as well. It was a simple ritual, the jack-o-lantern, in a time when even the holidays seem to join hands. A gourd to hold and protect light, to share it thru the eyes, the smile, through its warmth and touch. Husband and wife, baptized as parents again…
December 2025
the angels Halogen and Quartz
Somewhere, I was driving. North America, alone, and just above the great lakes, in the edges of a great wilderness. It was night, as if several of them strung together. My mind sat next to me, chatting away as if noise made the time painless…
Barren Darkness is one of my Nevada poems. Somewhere outside of Vegas, desert so big you find the hulls of fishing boats without any chance at all. It seems a place where rocks gather to be left alone. Where even shadows get thirsty.
At night, the air fills with something unidentified…
Unbridled Instincts was written after Katrina, or was it Harvey, or Alicia, Allison, Ike, Rita, Beryl, Humberto, tropical depression Two or that unnamed Derecho that blew through here. I forget, but I can lookup my top ten. There were more. There will be more. What’s in your top ten list? Got one? Or just getting ready for them? The rains are harder now, more frequent, and less announced…
Vital Stats
Today is Pearl Harbor Day, a time which began with a sucker punch and ended in nuclear holocaust. My father was in this war, so many wars ago. Gone now, I wish to honor his memory and sacrifice. He survived the combat, but living with the memories of war is a great price to pay—one we civilians cannot properly imagine…
set in digital stone. Everything we don’t know, is busy being
crystal origami is a Sooner poem, a land rush, a grab at all the creative landscape possible. What we can imagine is unlimited, and grows every second. Everything is there. All that we know, so far, reported on, cataloged, set in digital stone. Everything we don’t know, is busy being
Novmeber 2025
the giant spiders from mars is my monument to whimsy. When people ask where do I find poems, my reply is a turn of the question to them: where are there no poems? In this poem, it came from my young daughter once asked to go see a movie. I don’t remember if this was the one or not, but she was way too young for anything above a Disney film. My wife challenged her by saying, ‘you don’t even know what it’s about.’ and being that age…
Fractal Photos It is not important when and where that I walked into this. Some large convention space, some when in rare leisure time to investigate anything other than overtime and rest. What I faced, witnessed, was a jarring world of books, bent, folded, creased and posed as things that were other…
Angel Lust This is a poem of in-articulation– a hunt for the things that words can’t easily capture. We’ve all been there. This may be an anti-poem in the way that it circles what needs saying, wary, unable to close in, to engage, to lock horns. Even as we feel helpless in the draw to it, the call, the magnetic ringing in our…
February 27, Leap Year — In this poem, the heat of the sub-tropics substitutes for the unspoken passion, smoldering in the aftermath of ultimate bonding. Desire alive in the absence of the breeze, is proven into higher love with .
October 2025
pancakes, weeping syrup was born at a Denny’s, or IHOP, or Waffle House, the kind of place that’s always there, always serving, no matter what. It might have been a man losing his job, or parents worried over a sick child. Maybe they were going through a divorce, or there was a woman …
Signal Falls, Nebraska is homage to those masterful voices in the dark that rode alone with us when no one else would, as we traveled for business, to far flung family, or chasing dreams as the energy ebbed away from us on the long road, in a long night. It was once just radio, father of the podcasts. Now we dial up our favorites, picking from a huge cosmic catalog of options, when it was once…
A favorite knife, at least, is what I imagine Henry David Thoreau would have traded just to stand in my home office during a storm. To be behind the force fields of double-pane, argon-filled, perfect glass, putting the tempest up against it like a furious face to a microscope slide…
Cone of Uncertainty is that bundle of strands in the spaghetti models that show where an unpredictable storm will surprise us the least. It’s a Vegas odds maker that pays off to those who cover their bets by boarding up or evacuating…
September
Nine Pieces of a Fog paraded past me one morning. I was sitting canopy-high as it filled my street below, pouring between houses, building up from the ground as if telling the sky: no further. I let my mind empty as if in sympathy with the fog. Or was it with the weak morning light…
Survival Tricks of the Dead I was standing in the Nevada desert, behind a candy factory, overlooking a gambling capitol, and marveling at the vast strangeness that is offered us, when I spotted it. In this dry garden stood…
Hello from Here is a Twilight Zone episode starring us as happy people boarding a plane for Sin City to visit our daughter. Before we get there, we have gambling in the…
Possessing Houdini is one of those tricks when you catch sight of yourself, in a mirror, window reflection, and for a split instant, you aren’t you. You are someone that even you don’t recognize. You are the rabbit, staring out of the top hat, asking where am I? Suddenly…
On the program is the first signpost on the long road after leaving the nest. The first menu item you make on your own, not because you have no one, but because it doesn’t feel right flying solo, not to think solo. We all do it. We all learn.
August 2025
Across the Night is a vigil of overwatch. Not all knights rattle in armor. Not all lovers choose leave over linger once the goodnight kiss is done. There are cares and concerns that form protective bonds that stretch without breaking, hold fast even if solo, force witness to the safe, silent night closing its embrace, instead of yours.
An Attempted Diamond from the Bowel of a Tree is a list poem, one of the first poems we do, and proof that we are all poets. We’ve all made lists of things that belong together, and tried to hold onto lists of things that are diverse. They are a close cousin with the box poem, and if…
Pray for Santa Fe is an event poem. A sad event. A bloodletting. One of the worse kinds, a blood letting of innocents. Mass shooting are becoming common, way too common, at more than one a day…
Stumbling onto Texas City came on me on a day when I was free-wheeling along the Gulf coast—north of Mexico and south of everyone else. If I could see across the water and bend my eyes along the curvature of the world, I’d be staring at Clearwater, Florida…
July 2025
On the Bleached Tongues of Anvils is an ode to a desert. I had two times in my travels when I felt the chances of survival thin out on their own. OK, three. The outlier is the St. Lawrence Seaway, on honeymoon camping…
A Pattern Sets In was written in mid-storm for one of the hurricanes swept onto Houston off the gulf. A real punisher. It took from us the unwary, the fool hardy and the unlucky alike. The weather map show you colors, the crawl line whispers warnings…
Writer of the Day 1-8-14 was the start of my tradition of spotting people who unwittingly cast a great poetic moment by their authentic voice. Some, like this one, under the harshest of circumstance. She champions, in her way, the small and powerless victims that…
More than Endless is a piece that wonders what those empty squares on the calendar page are going to end up holding for us. It starts with the impossible, what can be more than something without an end…
June 2025
Orbit is an early poem, written when young, before the world locked itself into so many organized categories. Things were further apart then, harder to connect, to impact in just the way you wanted them pushed…
From the Stage- For ever, man has wondered, what’s really there, behind the curtain of reality. We’ve always sense some thing, and often proved ourselves right by guessing at planets, looking thru microscopes, splitting the atom, and so forth…
Dad’s Surprising Age It’s been quite a weekend. The first and only Friday the Thirteenth of the year kicked it off—a rare calendar event. It’s also Father’s Day, so I’ve chosen to share a poem about Dad—one he never saw…
So Far might have been titled what it is like to never be the one with child—a male perspective on being the outsider as someone creates a brand-new person. Not a copy, but a blend of two others. There is power in that act, magic in that capability…
Bath Tub Mary We had these in our neighborhood growing up. A steelworker’s town—shipyard, auto plant, and postwar boom. A city filling with immigrants and GIs starting families. Everything had worth: two, sometimes three uses in. Old bathtubs were turned into yard shrines to house religious statues…
May 2025
Canine Transcendentalism (first appearance in Mutabilis). Dogs can hear things we people cannot: those trick whistles, earthquakes, distant everything. Their special knowledge of the world is communicated by a rare vocabulary of looks, barks, growls and stares. How many times have we looked up in curiosity at our best friend’s fascination with the invisible, or the yet to suddenly appear. We know they know things we don’t…
Saving Ourselves was written in the aftermath of some hurricane; it’s name, less and less important. Its details, more and more a blur, as if folded into all the other storms, year after year. The specifics dial in locally as a cone of uncertainty, until it becomes your certainty…
Her This is a poem from Once in Love. It might also be called Ode to Absence.
It was written when two overlapping times of intense living, crashed…
Flying Things was first written in my head, carried around as I wandered a summer yard in Texas—at the fringe of the great Eastern Deciduous Forest, a vast temperate biome spanning from the Gulf of Mexico up the Atlantic Coast and into Canada…
April 2025
April 2025
Orbit Not every plan paid off, except to sharpen your game. So you kept stepping outside, into the wildering world, looking for lost clues…
Her This is a poem from Once in Love. It might also be called Ode to Absence.
It was written when two overlapping times of intense living, crashed…
Saving Ourselves Saving Ourselves was written in the aftermath of some hurricane; it’s name, less and less important. Its details, more and more a blur…
Canine Transcendentalism Dogs can hear things we people cannot: those trick whistles, earthquakes, distant everything. Their special knowledge of the world is communicated by a rare vocabulary of looks, barks…
March 2025
The Last Scout: A trip out west brought the western landscapes right to my car windows. Hot air blowing in like oven blasts, and the sun seeming to pile up on the sheen of anything light colored in the rocks. I realized this was the wagon train routes, the scouting party vistas, the back lots of dinosaurs to First People. I knew it more deeply than I expected…
Nocturne in Decline: I was fortunate enough to have many jobs in life. Working for the YMCA was a significant one, starting when I was a teenager. It allowed me to participate in many sports and programs, and I began developing expertise in racquetball—a brand-new sport grown out of squash and handball. I worked at summer camps, taught swimming, and eventually transitioned into drug counseling and youth work…
Consider the Up Someone once asked me, “Where does poetry come from?”
I answered with another question: “Where is there no poetry at all?”
No matter the tone, place, or circumstance, poetry is everywhere—waiting. No matter the tone, place, circumstance, there is a poetry everywhere. The key is…
The Wax and Wane of the Lovers’ Golden Age: We’ve all been there—either in real life or in our minds—caught in a golden moment, where the world feels like a playground. Safe. Fun. Boundless.
And yet, somewhere in the distance, something shifts…
February 2025
Broken Warp Everyone has a growing-up mythology—that period between childhood’s innocence and the realities of the world, when truth and stories blur together. It’s a time when kids begin to sort out what to let go of and what to hold onto…
Virgin Stench conjures an apocalypse of unannounced origin, revealing the world as we, its victims, would see it—only symptoms, unexplained. There is no guide to the end of the world, no way to pass on what some might know…
One day, the sun stops showing up. Things begin to go wrong. The world descends into the madness of breakdown.
Forecast: We don’t know the relationship of things as fully as we need. Does weather affect people, or do people affect weather? Both? Neither? A sloppy mix? Likely.
There are those at home in a party and those who thrive alone—so long as both have options near at hand…
Borrowed Illumination: Alberta Turner was a professor who had taken poets under her wing. One of them made sure I became another.
She taught at Cleveland State University and took over its poetry center with this philosophy:
“Whether they’re academic poets, street poets, language poets, or living-room poets, it really doesn’t matter. Whatever opens your soul, that’s fine…
January 2025
Miller Theater is part poem and part pageant. It happened one night, and happened to me, when I made a living working in the grueling Houston heat all day. It afforded a family food, clothes, hope, and from time to time, a celebration of that good life. The outdoor theater hosted a show that caught our attention, and the family packed up after work. Though worn out, it meant the world to me to share the world with ours
Black Stetson: It was a time of menace. A new disease was shaping up to be a global threat, settling into our hometowns for the first time. None of us knew what it meant—only that it felt like the worst of sci-fi movies. In Houston, it became real when the almighty rodeo and livestock show was canceled. Someone at the barbecue cook-off, just a day before the opening, ended their trail drive in the hospital…
The Longest Possible Light was an idea that came to me, sitting in the sun, behind a windshield, parked somewhere inconsequential on our great big sprawl of a planet. I had the sense of connecting, not to the sun, but to the light that, as far as we go, has always been there. I felt a sudden and odd affinity to the star glow, and all the…
Back-hauling Dharma: For a few years, I rode the rails, doing my version of De Tocqueville, writing on the art of being free. I traveled hobo style, which meant Amtrak with no sleeper car. I slept sitting up in a seat, the way I had trained myself years ago when ‘riding the dog,’ (Greyhound bus), bolt upright between strangers. By day, I sat in the observation car, the double-deckers…
Joe In Repair: My foremost experience with the military has been as the son of a World War Two vet. Dad was twice wounded in combat. Once with machine gun fire piercing his helmet, another wound by Nazi tank round…
Above the Landing: I wrote this ‘Ode to an Attic’ for all the times, as a kid, I was shown where the old, outgrown toys waited in their stand by dust. There was always an adventure in semi finished farm attics with plenty of natural light thru dirty windows, stashed away with old retired clothing and holiday ornaments. It was a private Smithsonian…
Ken Holds Barbie First appearance in Inlandia: a literary online journal
Growing old, and, growing old together, were not included in the box. Not sold separately. Yet it was always there, in the play, in the premise. That this was the brand of romance that was timeless, forecast, indestructible. I felt this at a certain age, when…
Puzzle Box
The metaphor at work here is, that letters in a panning box, are like ideas in a mind. They are subject to being jostled into all sorts of relationships. It is language and convention that steers them into normal pairings. It is the creative urge that places them like speed-dating, with unlikely candidates, that search for that remote association that startles the mind with ‘happened upon’ consequence…
Smashed
Faced today with a growing hurricane season, it seemed appropriate that I start off my blog with a poem about the mother of all hurricanes, the 1900 storm that wiped out Galveston. This is especially so, as I have just been thru a few myself, and a good part of the southeast is dealing with a double dose of overlapping hurricanes visiting within weeks of each other: Helene and Milton.
When I first came to Texas, I had the dubious honor of riding out Alicia, which passed its eye right over my home, like the welcome wagon from hell…