A student spoke of writing a sonnet, and I mentioned that I’d written some once, once upon a time. She sounded like she didn’t believe me, like this wasn’t something that she’d expect a math teacher to do. I said I’d written some villanelles, once, too. But I couldn’t tell her if I still had…
Category: Creative
White Dusk
fate’s fickle finger is cold gray steel filled with hot white pus angry and impotent: it is its impotence that makes it angry makes it flash across the sky makes it rain down blood like hot lava in the fading day this is the sunset tonight, the white man in the moon will gaze down…
Meandering
Mindful of the road, I Make my way forward, still Melancholy, still quiet… Muddied in still waters, Muddled with clarity. Might another false step Matter? I cannot say. — ptkh 06.03.18
i want to write my flesh
i want to write my flesh and stretch the words slowly out along the curls of vapor escaping my lungs i want to write my flesh and let it seize upon my sinews until they snap and scream and leave my muscles sore i want to write my flesh on leaves of slate and crystal…
This Voice
This voice says: Shut up. This voice says that nobody wants to hear from another broken white man. This voice says that there are people who suffer more than you, people who face obstacles so large that you can’t even imagine it. This voice says there have been enough white men talking. It’s time to…
Fragment of a dream
I woke, but the dream retained its tendrils in my heart. I had dreamed of a white house with no windows; I was standing outside of it, looking for the door. The sidewalk was cracked, and had heaved from the pressures of the frost and the roots of the tree that stood over my head….
sometimes words
sometimes words do not have the expanse to fit the truth they’re trying to hold i am an apostate i am not the first the streetlights that dimly guide my way are lit by the souls of those who went before the furtive glow and the long shadows belie the keening inside their bulbs behind…
the first time
the first time i saw a naked female breast i was ten years old or so i had thrown a dictionary at a girl’s head in third grade although i don’t remember that (a piece of paper i found years later said it so it must be true) i was labeled ‘emotionally impaired’ which nobody…
Songs of the Wolf #1
On my car stereo this morning was Rob Jungklas’s “John Doe“, one of the best songs you’ve never heard of. And I have the thought that there’s a small cadre of people that listen to Jungklas and are impressed with him, and they’re his audience. This evening, I’m thinking about how frustrating it is that…
I dreamed a car crash (Sketch)
i dreamed a car crash, and my fingers burned with the sensate nothing that seared over me i could not scream because i had lost the right, and as the world melted around me torn and shorn in glass, metal, rubber burning in black flame and circling overhead then into my lungs i thought for…