The 21st Century has a Quarter-Life Crisis

My first words were 

“war” and “terror.”

I’m eager to acquire 

new vocabulary.

I wanted to be different 

from my parents

and my parents’ parents. 

It’s not looking good.

Maybe if I was less ambitious.

Maybe if I could just settle 

down. I’m willing to settle.

If only the right

person would come along. 

If only I could be left

alone with my poems. 

Maybe I'll get a tattoo. 

I'm losing the thread

of the metaphor

which is in keeping 

with the thread

of the metaphor. 

For now I'm going to cross 

my fingers and hope

I make it to forty.

Thanks everyone! This was rewarding and challenging. Hang in there for the rest of 2025

A Centurion Wakes Up in Tennessee

Don’t ask me how it happened. 

Something to do with the sulfur 

in the baths or the strange plants 

the locals had been eating. 

What matters is that the next thing 

the Centurion knew, he’d woken up 

in an entirely unfamiliar land. 

The air smelled like a smoldering foundry 

or the sulfur pits of Sicily. 

It sounded like a thousand smiths 

had brought their work to watch 

while some strange war was waged. 

The chariots were covered in glass 

and jewels and flew by without horses. 

Somehow he knew he wasn't dreaming. 

He had a terrible headache.

He couldn't remember why. 

He looked around at the chaos

and confusion, the strangers 

dressed in the strangest clothes,

and found two reasons to hope.

The first was the writing: he knew

those letters, even if he couldn’t read.

The second adorned the jewelry he saw

and the tops of the strangers’ monuments:

as long as they so prominently displayed 

the crosses on which criminals were slowly killed

he could not have strayed all that far

from the heartland of Roman law.

 

Songs for Gay Dogs

At Mudam at the moment

there’s an exhibit called

Songs for Gay Dogs

by Cosima von Bonin.

Hard to think of better names

or ones more suited

to each other.

There’s a pair of pieces each

depicting Bambi in cloth:

textile tableaux with tartan

and the words “Love

Bombing” and “Gaslighting”

respectively. One German

magazine calls it Toxic

Cuteness. I asked the person

on the tour photographing

everything why they did it.

“To send to my sister back

in Kyiv.” Then I wait 

while they search for a photo

from their reel: a building back home

hit by a bomb, streaming gas

past the streetlights in a way

I can’t help but feel 

is rather quite artistic.

 

Troisvierges

We agreed to meet in Troisvierges 

Since it was roughly in the middle

The wind was a motherfucker 

It only rained when we went outside 

The Auberge wasn't serving Indian after all

Back on the bus we tried to imagine

Where the other animals had gone

What else could go wrong

And who we might nominate

To be the two other virgins --

Yet another hopeless cause

It was a question of age

As is always the case

The answers lay with Agnes Varda

As is always the case 

Winter Landscapes

The coffee smell of scrubbing pots

The carbonated pop of falling snow

The desiccated pepper like a mummified mouse

The chlorine scent after the broccoli’s been mown

The live coals of New York as seen from the air

The fresh semen smell off the stone-ground tortillas

The motel taste in your mouth the morning after

Is that a dead blackbird or a charred piece of wood?

The hunting shark shadow of a helicopter above

The craving for cake which sounds like your name

The weight of all that light on the tops of the trees

The enormous horned head of the moon on the ridge 

The way you hate the way you look in the photos I take

and how I feel the same (photos of me, taken by you)

and how it makes one wonder 

what numbers we become inside any given pair

and who gets to be the aftertaste

while the other seeps out with the angel’s share

 

The Snow Man

I like when poems write themselves,

or when Michelangelo does it for you.

That winter, for instance, in Florence 

when the city was covered in snow

and some Medici or other

commissioned the artist to sculpt 

a snowman for the courtyard.

Not three spheres and a carrot, this,

but something Greco-Roman:

moulded shoulders and thighs,

six-pack and a thoughtful jawline

above the little tufted geometry of cock.

It was, by all reports, as beautiful as you 

can imagine, which is probably more

beautiful than it actually was,

which is the point of the poem 

he shaped: yearning for yearning,

loss as achievement, learning

to spend all winter looking 

forward to the first glimpse of green 

when the weeds poke through the cobbles

in the courtyard, watered by the puddles 

where the statue once stood.

 

Gratitude

In the spring, the sparrows line their nests

with down they’ve found among the barberry,

blown there off the body of a hawk who starved 

that winter while searching for sparrows.

Their young will be raised inside a halo of heat

reflected back from the foraged feathers,

made by the hawk from the bodies of their ancestors.

I Feel Like A Million Bucks

like I’m fresh off the mint

like I’m flush with power

like I can do anything I want

like I can get anyone to do anything I want

like I make men’s hearts beat hard

and turn the heads of women on the street

like I’m utterly unattainable

like if you answered all the questions correctly 

I would give myself to you

like I could sit in a dark room and make myself 

grow and grow and grow

like cancer or an amoeba

like I’ve just spent the last three hours

stuffed inside a duffel bag 

in the trunk of an SUV 

driving south on the Turnpike

like I’ve changed hands more times than I can count

but the IRS can count

and does

like a drop in the bucket

like I could vanish without a trace

like if only you could find me

make me

have me

keep me

everything would be all right

like I’m all things to all people

and only worth what they say I am

At Night All Cats Are Grey

Except for the ones who live in New Mexico

and light up the sage with a nuclear glow,

warning of dangers long-buried below.

Who created these creatures so long ago?

All they will tell me is: if you know, you know.

Holiday Spirit

In this town, too, the heaps of trees 

are appearing in the squares,

getting ready for their final glow-up

in the great fir grove in the sky.

Each house has its ritual

and ours is no different:

first we remove the frosted balls 

the cats weren’t able to reach,

then the strands of twinkling lights

before we unstring the popcorn.

(I wish there was popcorn; 

I wish there were cats.)

Then, when the tree is bare 

and the house is dark,

we fetch down the long,

narrow boxes we save

for our little angels, lined 

with shrouds of yielding tissue. 

It’s best to do it when they’re still 

asleep: into the boxes, lids on tight, 

then gently, gently lift them up 

the creaking stairs to the attic.

The house is ours again, at last.

Eleven months of peace await.

Time enough for us to gather strength

before we face another year

of holidays spent with our little angels.

Parallel Lives

Oysters are the pistachios of the sea.

Kind of like your favorite pair of jeans 

demoted to garden duty as soon as

the new ones are on the clothes tree.

I like dirty half-finished bathrooms 

in boiler rooms. It’s just the way

I was raised. Please take time 

to praise the (real, living) trees:

finishing nails of the Earth, keeping 

the crust from sliding free on other tides.

Speaking of which, I watched 

our neighbor dump a bag 

of store-bought ice cubes 

across the icy sidewalk.

What, exactly, are we doing here?

 

An Ex-President Downloads Duolingo

He’d planned on learning Italian in retirement

The honeymoon in Florence

Those state visits to Rome, his jokes

going over the head of the Pope

But when he downloaded Duolingo

there was some kind of glitch 

--or maybe more user error--

and the only option left was Arabic

He found it to be an unforgiving language

He’d never been one for grammar

His throat resisted the fruitless torture

of medieval sense and sound:

mother, baby, widow, orphan

cold, hungry, shelter, corpse

arms, legs, siren, crater

oil, water, blood, burst

There’s more to life, he thought, than self-

improvement. He, who always slept

untroubled, now found himself waking

out of unfair dreams each night:

Oily arms

Bloody water

Hungry craters

Sirens sounding 

Like orphans 

With a sense of relief he resigned

himself to quitting after just two weeks

His golf game needed work

The Pope’s English was pretty good

He had no use for Arabic; no plans

to return to those ungrateful lands 

which had turned a deaf collective ear

on all his efforts at teaching them 

a better way of life

Fort Saint-Jean

Fort Saint-Jean stands at the end of the Vieux-Port.

Inside the fort there are gardens and a tower.

Inside the tower is a tight spiral of a staircase

which gives onto a roof with views 

of where you just were.

Inside the staircase there’s a rope which runs

all the way to the top. From the oils 

and pressing of thousands of hands the rope

is now like iron. That’s not poetic license.

You, too, would mistake the hemp for metal.

I don’t know which way to take the image:

Are we all soft things, made sturdy and secure

by those who’ve turned to us in need?

Or are we all soft things, made hard and stiff

against the passage through our lives

of one more set of thoughtlessly grasping hands?

I recommend the gardens if you have a chance to go.

Preferably at a time when there aren’t so many tourists.

That is to say: when has the answer never been ‘both’?

Judith

The article is entitled 

Judith and Holofernes 

(Donatello) and it’s about

the same length as the statue itself.

I was scrolling for inspiration

since I knew I wanted to do 

something with the gilding, how while

it had once covered the whole of the bronze 

widow-assassin and her quarry,

it now remained only on the blade.

It felt like a layup: something about gold

in the place where the blood would’ve run.

Violence, power, lust, karma.

But I was soon derailed by a misreading

of the final word of the opening bit,

‘topos’ not being part of my everyday

vocabulary, of course, meaning

the story was now a representation

of “The Power of Women tops.”

“Yeah,” I could hear the hero say.

“I guess things got kinda carried away.”

What to do with the gold in that case?

The sword’s too obvious a metaphor.

Something about the gleam of arousal,

a priceless performance, true love

and karma, power, violence, lust.