I have lived enough to knife
through precious indifference:
time to say goodbye, sang
Andrea Bocelli through my
childhood’s echoing eardrums,
banging through the baseball
game of stressful situations.
How I overcame my fear
of public speaking was when
I was believed in, once,
to deliver Wayne’s wedding
from obliteration (green
in the cleaved landscapes
I scampered fully across)
and the contentment rings
high in vibrato today.
(originally published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Fall 2023)
musician
Schizotrope
Finale was the first program I used to
compose music, in eighth grade, back
when my concern was to score colorful,
simple role-playing games I had created
with RPG Maker 2000. A couple years
later, I used new software, hunched
in the dark of my mom’s living
room, toying with FL Studio’s virtual
equalizers, knobs, and keyboard to craft
Schizotrope, the name of the album
I wrote to process a breakup,
an attempt to conjure you through
some combination of melody
and soundfont. When I listen
now, I hear us both a kind
of cacophonous ghost. Back
then, it was simple to slip on
cheap earbuds and recede into
my childhood bedroom, where we
did what I thought– when growing
up– was growing up. So shifted the
trajectory of my songs. And speaking
again of early sex, I sang off-key into my
coffee-stained Hewlett-Packard’s built-in
microphone, made a MIDI sound
marginally authentic to gift myself, in
the future, reverberations of my coping.
(originally published in Artvilla: Poetry Life & Times, Fall 2019)
Al Jarreau
In Spain I did love and adore you. I did.
But in Spain, it is easy to love and adore anything–
the paella, her rabbit flesh and beans;
even the sidewalk– acera.
With her language an aphrodisiac,
you do not wonder why you fall, or sustain, in love.
We spoke our ugly language around beautiful tongues
which filled the air with matrimonial vows.
In the beginning, we were the sound of stars, the language
of kisses. I can fall in love with anything skybound
and I do.
Those moon-colored nights were our yesterdays,
and tomorrow we return to our familiar,
where love is not wordless
nor as easily presumed.
(originally published in Memoryhouse, Spring 2016)