I look at the monstera growing by the front door and see it reaching to the light it is blooming outgrowing its pot with just weekly watering an amount of care so seldom that I have to set an alarm to remember to do it yet this bit of life it like...

I try to meditate for my mind feels like a storm I sit on the hardwood floor and look straight ahead at first it is quiet I can feel into my breath the rise and fall of it the endless tide of air through us all but then a car alarm goes...

I remember the whole town quiet and then bright and loud it was not the fireworks alone nor was it the concept of the holiday that made this something I looked forward to all year but the fact that so many people here took an evening to pause our...

I think about the number sixty million it is hard for me to understand it does a hillside of spring grass even contain sixty million individual leaves of grass I try something smaller there are one hundred thousand people in this city I live...

I get a bottle of water and I drink it down because I am thirsty I try to finish the whole thing because if I am to purchase water and create waste I want to at least use it up but there remains a bit left in the folds at the bottom of the...

it’s so strange to be somewhere without you because so much of me now is defined by us is defined by what we do by what you’ve taught me by how we’ve grown together what I want to eat how I sleep what I do when I wake how I walk it’s all been made...

in almost every conversation I’ve had with people around town over the last week there’s been mention of the rain everyone is complaining about the weather saying they wish for sun they wish for heat they are tired of the clouds and the...

there’s some program in which chosen poets have a chance to write a poem that is engraved on a rocket or some such space faring thing and is sent into the sky beyond our planet to float in the blackness and one day perhaps be read by alien eyes or...

there’s a crumpled tissue in the middle of the hiking trail flitting slightly in the wind like the petals of a false flower I see it from far away this bit of white breaking up the spring landscape colors this little litter left in the dirt I...

driving down the canyon is like fast forwarding time jumping through the ends of the long mountain winter and right into late spring where the tulips have already come and gone and the lawns are ankle high and shining green the mountains are...

maybe we’ve got ghosts all wrong because once somebody’s gone I’ve never seen them again but I am still here thinking on how everything’s different now haunting the same places we all used to go remember when we all went through the car wash twice...

I got a letter years ago from a man who said he liked the poetry I write that he hasn’t ever liked poetry because it always makes things more complicated than they are but that my poems about living in the mountains about working with my...

in the basement is the water heater it is new and is a dull grey and was just put in by my friend who is a plumber our old one was broken and for months we suffered short showers and shivering exits into cold air it is the end of the day now and I...

people are dying  in the hospital  next door to the quick stop but right now  we are alive  and I need gas  and so we stop  and get the snacks  that we know will kill us and the stuff  that makes...

I once read a paragraph in a book that’s stuck like splinter in the grey of my brain in essence it said that we look at fish in water we look at birds in the sky and see them as free but that they are not free for they are slaves to...

there is a box full of noise it is small enough to hold in my hand sometimes it feels like the box and its noise is all that matters I go to it when I am happy when I am sad when I want to be happy when I want to be sad when I...

so much that was plains grass when I was a kid is now townhouses highways strip malls and warehouses I have not been alive that long yet I remember this place so much emptier wilder wider than it is now how strange it is to see so much built in so...

I’m awake in the middle of the night I stare up at the dark trying not to move trying not to wake my lover beside me I cannot fall back to sleep and so I begin to go over my life there is so much I’m worried about work and writing and the...

driving by a construction vehicle rental place there are maybe twenty bucket crane trucks with their booms fully extended in the air by the highway side and some miracle happens for in the rusty suburban sunset the shadows of the cranes stretch...

I turn up an back road to try and get around some construction and suddenly I am lost in a place where I have lived for most of my life what a strange thing there are new houses new views of the mountains the trees seem bigger for a second I feel...