Gobbledygook

When I wake up, none of my words are a sentence,
and so I don’t wake up. The words are souled and dreamful,
and they slide like loose planets, and I don’t wake up.
When you look at them they get more distant, you know?
So you don’t look at them, and they swell like swallowed tongues,
crowded around the low dull heat of almost-language,
a commotion of connotation. This could mean something,
probably, if I could say it, if you could say it.

Written October 11, 2024, a random Friday morning at home in Providence

Better sorry than safe

You come home with pictures
of everything but yourself.

My father, in the present tense

I think about my father’s eulogy as often as I think about my own,
which is to say: always and never.

Death poem

When I boil you down, cousin,
this is what comes out:
I did not know you.
I do not know what is lost,
only that it is lost,
and that now we are carving the statue
that commemorates the losing.
It will sit in a place of horror
on your mother’s dresser
and in your father’s garage
and by your brother’s bedside,
and when they discard the excess marble,
I will slip a shard into my jacket pocket,
where I will promptly forget about it
until the day it cuts my hand.

For Jack Enright
Drafted December 19, 2023
Edited June 3, 2025

Catnap

The small darkness finds its way to me,
nestling into the crook of one arm,
the littlest of spoons.

🦑 Riptide

Or: experiencing fandom in your 30s

Earlier this month, I spent a weekend at:

• My first-ever LAN competition
• The largest in-person Splatoon competition ever held in the Western Hemisphere
• Also, the largest indoor waterpark in the American Midwest, with a non-specific “African” theme that has not aged particularly gracefully since its opening in 2005

Heyo, world

Finally ported my site to Jekyll. Let’s see if this convinces me to actually blog!

Selfless

That beautiful menace:
the desire for no desire,
the virtue of starvation.
Patron saint of annihilation,
they will use every part
of the animal that is you—
hot and wet and red,
marrow spilling into the soup,
bones into glue,
flowers sprouting from a carcass.
A feast for the senseless.
Your skull above their fireplace.
Go. Bleed out with love.