I wear a flower in my lapel.
I like the sweetness of its lie in my nose.
A carnation, the fool’s flower,
its heart a wilting empire.
In late-night editing sessions,
I imagine I’m planting flowers
in the sockets of eyes. Whatever helps
me reach our rigor mortis,
bound behind the wheel,
a little Bowie on the radio, maybe,
at six frames per second,
headlights plowing the dark’s divided road.
Cities grow to calcified castles.
Fish groom the coral brains
anchored in a tank’s purple volume.
I love the scratch of celluloid
and a low-register noise,
the hair of heat burning in a lit bulb.
Sometimes I swap my carnation
for an orchid or rose.
On-screen, there’s every hint
a man-child built the night.
I read it once, by flashlight, as a kid—
that Sleep and Death are brothers,
and they send our dreams through two gates,
one made of horn, for the true dreams,
and one made of tusk, for the false.
2014
Regular
Contemporary
2025
Death & Loss
Faith & Hope
Persona Poems
Pop Culture
Allusion
an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference
Imagery
visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work
Internal Rhyme
A rhyme involving a word in the middle of a line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next.
Metaphor
a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic
Surrealism
a style of art and literature in which ideas, images, and objects are combined in a strange, dreamlike way.
Tercet
A stanza of three lines of verse that rhyme together or are connected by rhyme with an adjacent stanza.