The Mouth

26 Monday Jan 2026

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The century came with coastlines burning,
With markets gutted, ventilators churning.
And into this, a new mouth learned to speak—
Its words ripped from the mouths of the meek.

Once they spoke of giving fire to all,
Of light unchained, of knowledge without walls.
But something turned—a lock, a ledger, a throne—
And the mouth that would free us ate its own.

In Memphis, a grandmother tends her plot.
The server farm drinks what her well has not.
It swallows water, lithium, labor, ore—
And still it opens, hungry, wanting more.

A technician walks the humming rows at night.
He makes his rounds, adjusts the blinking light.
He never meets the mouth, just tends its shell—
A priest who serves a god he cannot tell.

In Texas, a billionaire builds his vault.
If something breaks, it will not be his fault.
His rocket’s ready. His bunker’s fully stocked.
He sold our future, and his door is locked.

A child swipes before she learns to write.
The algorithm studies her delight.
It knows what makes her pause, what makes her stay—
It’s shaping who she’ll be before she’ll say.

A river slows. No salmon make their run.
The current’s drawn to cool a distant hum.
No one explains it to the heron’s eye—
She waits on the bank and watches the waters die.

They promise still: the best is yet to come.
More speed, more scale, more everything for some.
The graph ascends. The shareholders applaud.
The future’s bright, they say. The mouth is god.

And when at last the century goes dark,
What will remain of us? A data mark.
A profile, a preference, a purchase catalogued—
Our lives reduced to what machines have logged.

Her Hands Already Knew

14 Wednesday Jan 2026

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Hello, fellow collapsitarians. I can’t think of a better way to spend my time than making art—whether in the garden, at the easel, or at the desk—as we prepare to dance on the graves of our oppressors. I’ve been revisiting my earlier poems and rewriting them, now that I’ve learned to abide by these primary rules:

  1. Rhyme must feel inevitable, not forced.
  2. Every line must earn its place.
  3. Verbs do the work; adjectives are guests.
  4. Specificity beats abstraction.
  5. The ear is the final judge.

Here is one of my earlier poems, “Ark of the Soil-Stained,” that Nan reblogged on his site. I’ve since rewritten it completely. The original had problems I couldn’t see at the time: the title was overwrought, reaching for importance instead of earning it. Rhymes were forced or abandoned mid-stanza. I told the reader what to feel instead of showing them a woman bending between the stalks. I wrote “produce” when I should have written “peppers.” I wrote “provisions” when I should have written “garlic, carrots, winter rye.”

The new version is called “Her Hands Already Knew.” Same woman, same garden, same collapse. But now the poem trusts its images. The verbs do the work. The rhymes land where they should. And the title comes from inside the poem, not above it.

The city dims behind its wall of sound.
She’s planting what she hopes will not be found—
A cache of garlic, carrots, winter rye,
Seeded for the day the city dies.

The blackberries don’t ask about the grid.
The beans climb their poles as they always did.
She walks the rows, pulls weeds, forgets the news—
The world can end. Her hands already knew.

The power died in April. Then the phones.
She heard the highways empty, songbirds flown.
By June the silence was the only news.
She kept the rows. The peppers came in twos.

The fence is where the world stops making sense.
Inside, the rows are thick, the green is dense.
She bends between the stalks like someone praying,
Her breath a hymn she doesn’t know she’s saying.

No manifesto. Just the turning year.
She plants by moon, by frost, by what’s still here.
She reads the leaves, the roots, the morning light.
She weighs the harvest. Eats alone tonight.

They said the end was coming. Maybe so.
She planted beans. She watched the peppers grow.
The soil doesn’t know the world is through.
It only knows her hands. Her hands already knew.

Widow’s Work

01 Thursday Jan 2026

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I came to tend the hives when I was young,
A widow’s daughter learning widow’s work.
My mother taught me how the smoker’s tongue
Could still a thousand furies with its murk.

She taught me how to read the waggle dance,
Whose urgent spirals chart where blooms still thrive,
How every forager’s ecstatic trance
Spun honey into being, hive by hive.

My mother died in August, stung too often.
Her body had grown weary of forgiveness.
I wrapped her in a sheet and built her coffin
From pine boards bleeding their slow golden witness.

The village cast me out beyond the fen.
They feared my bees, their hunger and their hum.
I walked through mist alone, spoke not to men.
The bees don’t ask. They know what I’ve become.

Decades pass. They still come for my honey.
They bring their coins, their hunger and their need,
Their children’s children, golden-haired and sunny.
I give them what they crave. I watch them feed.

I sell them what they came for—gold and thick,
The summer meadow simmered, bottled down.
I smile. They pay. The honey does the trick.
They carry home the darkness of my ground.

They do not know I’ve learned to love the sting,
The venom threading fire through all my blood.
They do not know what certain pollens bring
With clover, thyme, and winter’s patient mud.

I give them everything they asked me for.
She made me in her image, stung and still.
The hive crowned me its queen of keeping score.
The sweetest things are always slow to kill.

The Long Goodbyes

01 Thursday Jan 2026

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The champagne caught the light of our denial,
We raised our glasses to a year unnamed,
While snow outside rehearsed its slow burial
Of everything we’d loved and left unclaimed.

You whispered all the selves we’d soon become,
The maps we’d fold, the mornings we would steal,
Your voice gone soft with some persistent hum—
As if a calendar could make us heal.

The countdown started, mouths thrown wide to cheer,
Ten seconds left to shed our former skin.
You turned to me with something close to fear
At what we’d wished for, threatening to begin.

At midnight, strangers pressed their mouths to strangers,
The bells broke open like a wound of sound.
We stood among the beautiful, brief dangers
Of wanting what we’d never really found.

We wove through streetlights drunk on their own flicker,
Your hand in mine, the high-rises gone mute,
The century beneath us growing sicker,
Our eyes closed tight to rot engulfing root.

Now here I stand, another New Year falling,
Same champagne raised to consecrate our lies.
We swore we’d answer something in us calling—
We just got better at the long goodbyes.

The Last Set at Laveau’s

31 Wednesday Dec 2025

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They gathered in the violet dark to play,
A band of souls who’d sold themselves to song,
Their instruments like lovers who betray—
The only place the damned and blessed belong.

The banjo man caressed his silver strings,
His glasses thick as all the years he’d spent
In smoke-filled bars where fading spirits ring,
The ghost who played and never would repent.

The trumpeter raised his horn to graze the sky,
A prayer of brass that pierced the velvet air,
While ivory keys bled soft a lullaby
For dancers who had drifted into prayer.

She struck the drum, her silhouette ablaze,
A heartbeat lent to those who’d lost their own,
While guitars wept through veils of amber haze
For wanderers who’d never dare atone.

The music rose like wildfire through their veins,
Each note a needle suturing the wound,
And strangers wailed those nameless, ancient pains
That only ghosts and instruments have crooned.

They played until the darkness knelt, implored,
Until the dawn came bleeding, half-afraid,
A hymn for every soul that life ignored—
The last true light before the world decayed.

The papers told of tragedy next day:
The club burned down—no music, no goodbyes.
But those who passed still heard them start to play,
Their requiem a flame that never dies.

Where Beauty Hides

30 Tuesday Dec 2025

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Beneath the bridge where needles hold the pain—
Where someone chased the numbness through their vein—
A dandelion shoulders through the stone,
Yellow as a bruise, and holding on.

In alleyways where shadows feast,
The rats compose their masterpiece—
Their scrabbling paws, their savage art,
The squirming at the city’s heart.

The homeless man’s calloused palm
Holds more weight than any psalm—
A rune the wealthy cannot read,
A tongue the fed will never heed.

Beauty blossoms where it’s banned,
In shattered glass and broken hand,
Where polished shoes refuse to tread—
The dandelion crowns the dead.

So mock the rose that costs a fortune—
Wild beauty shuns its measured portion
Of praise or frame or gallery wall,
Needs only dirt to rise—and grace to fall.

The Idling Heart

29 Monday Dec 2025

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The garage door opens to cathedral dust,
Where wrenches hang like relics on the wall,
I strip the engine down to chrome and rust,
And feel my hands remembering the call.

There’s scripture in the service manual,
A liturgy of torque specs, gaps, and shims,
My hands grow fluent in the mechanical,
And learn to speak in camshafts, valves, and pins.

She came to me a heap of scattered parts,
A basket case the seller couldn’t name,
Such stillness lives inside these iron arts—
And in my dream, I am the iron frame.

My wife says I smell different now, like fuel,
That I don’t blink as often as I should,
I kiss her cheek—my lips are dry and cool—
And promise her that everything is good.

I haven’t left the garage in thirteen nights,
My wife leaves dinner at the door, meanwhile,
I eat it cold beneath the fluorescent lights,
And something in my chest has learned to idle.

Once I woke up weeping on the floor,
My hands still wrapped around a crankshaft case,
I crawled halfway to the kitchen door—
Then turned around to find my proper place.

I notice oil is beading on my skin,
A faithful engine idles somewhere near,
My blood is slowly cooling from within,
And I am becoming chrome and gear.

My wrists have locked to handlebars of steel,
My vertebrae are clicking into chain,
My heart has traded blood for something real,
And I have never felt so free of pain.

She’s finished now, immaculate and still,
I mount her in the driveway, turn the key,
And ride out past the highway, past the hill—
The wind tears through us both—at last, set free.

They found the bike alone. Still running. Warm.

Each Ordinary Morning

28 Sunday Dec 2025

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He felt forever ripening in the distance,
A harvest just beyond the years he gave—
Not knowing he had buried his existence
In the dirt of hours he never thought to save.

He counted nows like coins within his palm—
The coffee rings she left on unread books,
Her humming, unaware it was a balm,
The crooked way she hung their coats on hooks.

But he was saving forevers for someday,
When what had pressed him finally came to rest,
When they could finally afford to stay
In bed past seven, gently dispossessed.

She pressed each now like flowers in a book:
His mispronouncing her mother’s name, twice,
The half-asleep, unguarded, helpless look—
A glance across the room that would suffice.

The envelope from oncology was white.
So ordinary. Just a little late.
She tucked it in her pocket out of sight
And made him dinner. Fed him. Then the wait.

He wept for all the forevers he had planned,
The trips still folded into maps unwalked,
The thousand times he’d dropped her offered hand
To finish what, exactly? He forgot.

She held him in the hospice’s rented chair,
And whispered, I got my forever—every bit.
Each ordinary morning you were there.
I held it as it passed. That’s all. That’s it.

He kissed the wrist where time had worn her thin,
And felt her pulse drift homeward with the tide.
The room grew still. Her breath drew slowly in—
She’d kept no count. She’d nothing left to hide.

He found her flowers pressed in unread books,
Each now she’d saved and saved and finally spent.
He’d wasted years perfecting how to look
Ahead. She’d worn each year out as it went.

The Fluorescent Hours

27 Saturday Dec 2025

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Each morning broke a mirror of the last:
The alarm, the silk knot tightening at my throat.
I moved as if what lived in me had passed—
A ghost entombed in code the systems wrote.

My cubicle intoned its electric prayer,
The spreadsheets multiplied like cells gone wrong.
I breathed what the building recycled as air—
Another cell dividing to belong.

At noon I chewed but could not taste the bread,
At one, I fed my body to the shrine.
We bent like candles, waiting to be dead,
Our small flames tilting toward a single line.

At night the television preached its creed,
Bright phantoms selling salves for my malaise.
I bought the salve. I let it name my need.
The ache replied with gratitude, yet stays.

They found me barefoot, dancing on the desk,
My mouth a hymn that made the fluorescent flicker.
They called it breakdown, watched me turn grotesque—
I called it mercy. I should have broken quicker.

I Wished For You

25 Thursday Dec 2025

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My daughter asked me by the fire’s glow,
“If granted just one wish this Christmas night,
What would you ask for?” And I said, “To know
The ache in me that never heals quite right.”

She laughed at me, still flushed from evening prayers,
“That’s not a proper wish! You’re wasting it!
Ask for a kingdom free of grown-up cares,
Or endless gold to spend as you see fit!”

I smiled and watched the embers twist and fade,
“I’ve had those wishes, child. I’ve begged before.
The gold went cold; the kingdom I had raised
Collapsed to ash. I don’t chase those anymore.”

She frowned and pulled her blanket to her chin,
“Then wish for love that never goes away,
For someone’s arms to always hold you in,
For words that mean exactly what they say.”

“I wished for that,” I told her, “long ago.
It came unbidden, warm and slow as rain.
I couldn’t simply let it be, and so
I held too tight, and turned it into pain.”

The fire sputtered. Shadows climbed the wall.
She whispered, “Wish for time to start anew,
To mend the cracks before the pieces fall,
To be the one you were before you grew.”

“I’ve had that wish. I got my fresh-swept slate.
But I was still just me—I walked the same
Worn roads back to the same old rusted gate.
A second chance can’t save you from your name.”

She paused. The logs shifted. Sparks rose and died.
“I wished for you once, did you know?” she said.
“I wished for you at breakfast. When I cried.
I wished for you to tuck me into bed.

To sit with me instead of pacing slow,
To hear me when I spoke, not just move on.
I didn’t wish for kingdoms, gold, or snow.
I wished for you. And you were always gone.”

I couldn’t speak. The frost crept up the glass.
“So what’s the point of wanting if you’ve tried
For everything, and watched it break or pass?
What’s left to want?” she asked. My throat went tight.

“That’s why I’d wish to know what I am missing—
The blind spot in my heart I cannot see,
The reason I’ve spent all these decades wishing
For everything except what’s here with me.”

Her eyes grew heavy. Soon she was asleep.
I watched her breathe. The fire asked nothing of me.
No wish could grant what only presence keeps.
I touched her hair. She was the gift. Just she.