Category Archives: Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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.

The Last Librarian

23 Tuesday Dec 2025

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They burned the books in 2043,
Prescribed the past as lesion on the brain.
The cure would calibrate what we could see—
Obedient, curated, cleansed of pain.

I was a boy when grandmother went blind,
Not from disease but from her quiet will.
She’d watched them cure the last dissenting mind
And chose the night to keep what they would kill.

She whispered poems to me in the dark,
Her fingers tracing letters on my skin.
I learned that verses burn a tender mark
That outlives every page they’re written in.

I grew into a technician of the state,
Compliant hands maintaining the stream.
But after dark these hands would desecrate—
Threading forbidden verses through the seam.

I hid them in the code like contraband,
A library buried in the machine.
Each algorithm held a stanza, planned
To surface on some secret, waiting screen.

For forty years, they never spotted me.
I rose through ranks, a model citizen.
The verses traveled, fevered, flowing free
Through every circuit, back to me again.

Last Tuesday, soldiers came to take me in.
A girl had printed poems from her device
And passed them on to hungry eyes—mortal sin.
They traced the source. I’d pay the traitor’s price.

But in the courtroom, something strange occurred.
The judge, the guards, the prosecutor too—
Each rose and whispered one forbidden word,
A line of verse my grandmother once knew.

These were the children of the code I’d sown,
Now grown to power, threaded through the years.
The trial will satisfy the watchful drone—
But they’ll set me free behind their practiced tears.

Here is the twist that breaks me as I wake:
My grandmother was never truly blind.
She saw the future burning, watched it break,
And chose to close her eyes to be more kind.

She knew I’d need the dark to learn to see.
She built the night so I could set words free.

The Gilded Calf of Fifth Avenue

22 Monday Dec 2025

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A stable genius perched on throne of gold,
His nuclear brain the brightest ever seen,
While doctors watch the frontal lobes unfold
Like petals dropping from a tangerine.

He spoke in words of kindergarten grace,
“Tremendous,” “huge,” and “winning” filled the air,
The spray-tanned king with his ever-scowling face,
Topped by a wisp of engineered hair.

The Saudi princes lick their pens with glee,
The Russians raise their vodka, cold and neat,
While sovereignty drips from the carving tree—
A nation hung and bled like butchered meat.

“They’re bringing drugs,” he snarled of those with skin
A shade too dark for Mar-a-Lago’s taste,
Then built his cages, locked the children in—
Good Christians cheered this mercy, pure and chaste.

He cannot spell the countries that he’s banned,
Nor parse the Constitution’s simplest clause,
But hatred needs no literacy to stand—
Just fear enough to make men break their laws.

In predawn raids, the jackboots find their mark:
A father pulled from children still in bed,
The modern Gestapo moves like sharks in dark,
While shareholders reap dividends overhead.

He grabbed the nation by its weary soul,
And cooed a lullaby of endless winning,
While every tower slid into the sinkhole—
Evil spray-painted gold from the beginning.

What irony that those who wore the flag
Around their lifted trucks and MAGA caps,
Now genuflect before a gilded calf
While liberty is auctioned off in scraps.

They’d stormed the Capitol with flags and rope,
And hunted through the halls for Pence’s neck,
Their king reclined and blessed the coup he spoke—
The nation dangling, a slow-motion wreck.

They begged him back. He rose, in vengeance crowned,
The institutions gutted, hollowed, sold,
Each enemy indicted, allies unbound—
A republic reforged to kneel and behold.

And when this history is finally penned,
They’ll marvel how the leopards ate each face—
A nation courting ruin as a friend,
Its tattered flag now dragged into disgrace.