city bound

click here for my latest essay, in runner's world, on making the switch from country roads to city pavement.

water

the waters have grown so shallow,
that all may walk across them,
all of us now worthy of worship.

far enough

a sound in the sun,
my footprints on the wing.
across the river
i watch the night city button up,
eyeholes of light snuffed out
by blind thumbs and fingers.
all that's left is morning
dashed upon the rocks.
i've run from the crime,
but not far enough.

low grade

low grade fever,
fists with the pinkies extended,
the smell of urine,
my mother's frown.

the death of outrage was followed
by the demise of celebrity
which was followed by the end of social ruin.
experience never had a chance.

when anger and sorrow go,
there won't be but six of us left
to prop up the remains,
and i'll be bouncing from the back bumper.

rain

in a foreign rain,
another boss in a green duster,
hiding from him my perfect accent.

charles river run #3

over the bridge, wounds deep in the water,
i chase my shadow toward a box of stars,
feeling for the switch before the sun comes up.

you

all them pretty words and nothing for sale --
you thought you was a hammer, but you was only a nail.

grim sunshine

clouds and veins beneath a grim sunshine,
waiting on the wind to part the scabs.
the only thing missing is you.

benzol

kolya, kot and i used to sneak
over the concrete wall to the local dry cleaners
and puncture with a nail or screwdriver
one of the steel benzol barrels in the corner
releasing a translucent arc of
chemical solvent
into our empty fanta bottles.

then we gathered between floors
in a slushy, wool-stinking stairwell,
soaked our rags
and put them to our cracked lips
and chapped noses
til one by one we slipped beneath a pin-pricked haze.
nothing but snow dripping into pools of light
and cigarette spit.
kot and kolya were running from moscow's government-issued air,
me from my blood and ears and crooked toes.
but we were in it together.
it was that simple.

this is how we spent our loose hours
before i left the country for good.
by the end, i got pretty good at figuring where the nail should go in.
meanwhile, the benzol ate away at different parts of my brain –
the part that computes complex mathematical equations,
that remembers people’s names,
that distinguishes love from degradation,
that sees what's so great about ginsberg and kerouac,
that separates truth from defiance.

all that the benzol left alone was a vague desire
to see letters appear on a page,
and the need
to please bad people.
but the bad people,
they've pretty much disappeared, too.

things air

ok, i'm back; click here to find my last regular vermont public radio commentary; now, i'm gone, i mean it this time...

gone

coda

I had a growth cut from my lower eyelid, a bump I've had since I was a teen. A freckle had appeared and testing urged. So my eyeball was numbed, the lids clamped open and the bottom rim pierced twice with Novocaine. A real Clockwork Orange scene. The opthamologist went to work. Slicing through the growth, scissoring down a flap and cauterizing the wound. I watched a thin ribbon of smoke curl toward the ceiling and disappear. Then he undid the clamp, dripped antibiotic in my eye and rubbed ointment on the lid. He held up a mirror. Puffy and red as if I'd been sucker-punched. But the bump was gone. Riding my lower left eyelid for more than twenty years, changing the shape of my horizon -- gone, off to the pathologist's lab. You’re good to go, the doctor said.

A few minutes later, I stepped into the sunlit parking lot, one eyeball without feeling, vision smeared like Vaseline on a windshield. But I looked forward to being temporarily half-affected by the world around me – the homeless woman I drove past at the interchange would perhaps only strike me half as sad, the father berating his kid in the next car half as harsh, television reports on government abuses half as depressing. Passing disturbances. Instead, my good eye wept twice as hard. A flow of tears I tissued while steering through mid-morning traffic on Shelburne Road. And I couldn't have been more glad for it.

lost dog air

click here to find this morning's vpr commentary -- on losing our 8-pound chihuahua in middlebury's battell woods.

trent pic no. 12

the latest from trent campbell, a silo in weybridge

numb

His suicide vest was armed with golf-ball-sized hail.
In the woods, I watched them load their rifles
with the-good-and-the-just.
Outside the post office, she left a parcel
packed with 24-7 beneath a mailbox.
While her husband doused Main Street with patriotism
and tossed a match.
My mouth stuck with shame,
I strapped my poems into car seats and drove us all into the lake.

dirt road run no. 2

I lifted my head
and breathed in the dust,
the sky was scabbed over with clouds.
I lowered my head
and joined the cremated remains,
burrowing past the ancient stones,
into the silt beneath
the drowned clocks.