Tag: visual poetry
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For My Older Brother
“For My Brother” came from a quiet moment my brother and I shared, shaped by past pain and recovery. The poem uses body and thought as symbols, with the slash mark showing how deep wounds can leave lasting marks. I wrote it to honor his survival and the work he had done to heal.
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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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Sightlines
Sightlines” emerged from a moment of ritual clarity—when my aging eyes, no longer tasked with precision, began to see through blur into beauty. The poem honors the body’s quiet adaptations and the mind’s compensatory grace. It’s a minimalist elegy for vision, a philosophical gesture toward perception as ritual. I wanted to write something that doesn’t…
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Ghosting
“Ghosting” emerged from the quiet aftermath of survival—after cancer, after loss, after the rituals that remain. It’s a poem about haunting not as horror, but as intimacy: the idea that love, memory, and consequence linger in objects, gestures, and the dog’s bark. I wrote it as a speculative elegy, imagining my own absence as a…
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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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Blue Mercy
“Blue Mercy” began as a quiet observation—a fly, a door, a gesture. But beneath its domestic stillness, I found a philosophical hinge: mercy as both restraint and release. The poem is an allegory of consequence, where the blue swatter becomes a symbol of ethical tension—between intervention and surrender, between light and disappearance. My wife’s presence,…
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Getting the Algorithm
Getting the Algorithm emerged from a period of recursive grief and speculative clarity. I wanted to write a poem that refused sentimentality while still honoring the emotional residue of illness, authorship, and identity. The mathematical symbols are not metaphors—they are hinges. Each glyph carries consequence: ∫ as funeral, ∅ as death, ≠¬ as refusal. The…
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In My Dreams
In My Dreams began with a letter—brief, bureaucratic, final. It marked the end of a five-year term of benefit payments from my ex-wife’s pension. That document, so stark in its language, carried more than financial closure. It was the formal end of any secular connection between us. I felt a wave of gratitude for her…
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Aural Shelf
Aural Shelf emerged from my evolving relationship with reading as both ritual and mutation. As my eyesight weakened, I began experiencing books through audio, digital, and tactile formats simultaneously. This poem is a speculative elegy for the decay of traditional literary forms—and a celebration of their metamorphosis into hybrid experiences. It’s also a personal archive:…
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Manual for grieving a house blowing away…
Manual for Grieving a House Blowing Away…” emerged from a moment of quiet devastation—watching my home unravel not in fire or flood, but in the slow erosion of memory and ritual. I wrote it as a guide for what cannot be saved, and what must. The poem resists sentimentality and instead offers a liturgy of…
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Soft Closure
Soft Closure” emerged from the quiet aftermath of loss—when grief no longer demands spectacle but settles into the architecture of daily life. The poem is built around a single domestic gesture: a door closing softly. It resists sentimentality and instead leans into restraint, letting silence and echo do the emotional work. I wanted to evoke…
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Love Redacted
Love Redacted is a visual and conceptual poem that explores how intimacy survives under censorship in a totalitarian regime. Through redacted language, classified documents, and restoration files, it reveals that the true emotional weight lies not in what is written, but in what is erased. The poem invites readers to decode longing through absence, transforming…
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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…