Tag: poetic ambiguity
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Dream Thinking
Cloud Thinking began as a meditation on my dog Cane’s dream logic, but quickly unraveled into a recursive elegy—one that ritualizes grief, football loss, and the surreal grammar of domestic life. The poem leans into speculative consequence: how a bowl of chicken concentrate, a twitching leg, or a cloud formation can become mythic gestures. I…
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Roadside Cross
Roadside Cross began as a walk with my dog past a forgotten memorial near a Waffle House and Food Lion. What struck me wasn’t just the decay of the cross, but the quiet choreography of grief—how strangers, puddles, rap lyrics, and rain all participated in a ritual of exposure and forgetting. I wanted to write…
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When the Boys Go Marching Away
When the Boys Go Marching Away began as a meditation on the quiet rituals of departure—how war, faith, and memory braid themselves into the domestic fabric. I wanted to write a poem that resists heroism and sentimentality, that instead lingers in the aftermath: the porches, the ribbons, the daughters named Hope.
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Leaving Vancouver
Leaving Vancouver emerged from a moment of sensory disorientation—salt, tar, and ocean air mingling with dread. I was struck by how travel, especially cruise travel, promises escape but often delivers confrontation. The poem explores the tension between ritual and unease, between what we hope to leave behind and what insists on following us. Russell’s suitcase…
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When the city leaves you—
When the City Leaves You is a poem about the aftermath of abandonment—personal, civic, and emotional. It unfolds in fragments, each stanza a vignette of silence, gesture, or failed connection. The speaker moves through a landscape of urban decay and quiet witnessing, encountering figures who reflect their own disorientation. The poem resists resolution, instead dignifying…