Select Your Avatar

Can you solve this puzzle? Try again!
Can you build this train? Good job! Awesome!
Put the toy back together. Uh oh!

You're superior! Pick a sticker.
Can you tell what time it is? Correct.
Put the dirty clothes in the basket.

Touch your surprise egg.  Pick a letter!
Learn to imagine all your choices
Real, risky, and limited. The same!

A Tube of Toothpaste and a Tuba

"To enter upon such a description is like trying to capture the uncapturable. Its only purpose can be to flatter the vanity of the describer."

We were camped in the heat in the wash.
I was taking our daughter to pee
When a woman appeared in the trees,

Tall, thin, freckled, wearing pink glasses
And white slacks, feet vanishing in sand.
She asked if I was part of the band

And pointed to a car in the scrub
Behind us, bottomed out on bald tires,
A tuba tied to the top by wires,

Gray, overloaded with guitars, drums,
One tube of toothpaste, no empty seats
Save for the gone driver's. A slight breeze,

Fluffed the woman's sweat-drenched hair. I said,
No, there's no band. That car's just stuck there.
Her head dropped with despair like a tree's.

The Picture I Wish I Had

Is of Sukha near sunset
Off the Kolob Terrace Road
Hunkered down the sandy slope
Among the ants and lizards
Above the purely purling
Creek where we camped for Lord knows
How long, trying to breathe free.

Life of a Flotilla of Ducks

There's never no wave. The trough

Is a part of the preceding,
Receding crest and also
Part of the gathering rush.
The wave hits and it passes.
Afterwards, they say, just ducks.
No after, just between us.

Beer and Bananas

The serious subjects that shift lives
Have a habit of seeming silly.
Take beer or bananas, for instance.

Suds and slippers for comedians,
Billions of lives removed or added
To indifferent Earth as a result,

Nobody takes them seriously.
The silly subjects that mean nothing,
(Apocalypse, Truth) seem serious.

While

I assembled this pattern
Of letters in pre-fab words
And learned English conventions,
The same old boring language,
The world was changing within
And without me for a space
Of time. The dictionary

Confirms that use of the phrase,
"A space of time": Old English,
Old Frisian, Gothic for "while."
Go back further and find "rest"
Was an earlier sense of the word,
While I resist both senses.
No rest left, no space in time.

The Text as Message

Sometimes I just feel better when
I write dumb things down that won't fly
With anyone, not even me.
The world's enough to make me cry,

Read that however you damn please.
The hours that crumble in my bones
That crumble under me insist

There's more to names than sticks and stones,

But they're wrong. There's no more to names
Than scaffolding for commonsense,
Nothing that pain resists or stains,
Nothing that wasn't, even then.