Coming in November from Aqueduct Press...

 

My next book comes out in November from Aqueduct Press.

Cover art by J. Scott Coatsworth, design by Kath Wilhelm.

https://www.aqueductpress.com/forthcoming-pubs.php

Sonnet #406

 ten years ago, i thought I'd write a sonnet

every day until the book i needed had the voice

and ever since I write a little thing by choice

because ten years ago, I thought I'd try it

And who I was, I don't recall, there've been

some changes since, and all my cells

have been reborn, split and shifted, felled

sometimes, bled or cut or shed and swept to bins

Perhaps it mattered, all these years, these lines

these endless lines that whisper in my ear

that i pause and throw into the shadow times,

where nothing is sacred, and nobody cares,

and if they do, they care a smidge, a wicket, a tine

of fork could pluck the core of all my wear and tear

Sonnet #405

 We must discuss this crust of stuff

That clusters all around your bed

Abandoned books and bits of mail unread

And tea cups, coffee cups, water cups, stuffed

Effigies of animals, and lost socks, lost shirts

A lonely shoe pushed too far under 

The baleful mess that speaks of blunders

Make your bed, clean your room, dust, flirt

With perfection every day for failing here

Means failing everywhere, every little choice

Accumulates in your little tomb of room, fear

What mysterious archaeologists find to voice

Their judgments of your remains? what spiders

Emerged to defend your cluttered cellars?

Sonnet #404

 No time to work, no time to play,

Not on things that matter, anyway

Join the game of Monopoly

Where everything sucks and nothing is free

And the work of living: the fooding

the ritual cleaning, the joyful blooding

of the young at their rituals 

and the yearning towards the spiritual

are purchased for cheap so we can be

busy at business importantly

and art? an afterthought, an idle uselessness

i don't mind it so much, the loneliness

of the arts, but i mind how my time is best

with toil that has no meaning to the rest

Sonnet #403

 Be grateful you are offered a chance to help

Be grateful I am asking you and demanding

That all your hopes and visions of life are ending

Because you must obey the call of the kelp

The call of the seaweed, the call of the muck

That someday will become the limestone

Quarried by the ravens’ tools for their homes

When humans are all just ghosts that sucked

The life out of this world and the world sucked back

Be grateful you have a chance to do your part

Before the wild places never come back

So pull yourself together, man, and drop art

Drop love, drop life, find the bottom of a sack

And let it swallow you, any sack will do, no heart

Beats matter of yours, now, my lost one, my drifting hack

Sonnet #402

 Gravity, that trickster fiend, finds us floating free

Alone, and calls to pull us in where 

We will be connected, forge a planet, swirl

Dance around the orbit of the shimmering seas

And closer, now, they come together, until it’s tight

Really need some personal space, actually,

Like could use a break from all these 

Electrons and elbows and shouting and fight

Breaks out, and breaks out again, and boom

We’re boiling, now, slowly roiling around

We wrap to the edge where we become

A quiet, hard, lonely thing, craving someone

To push into us, the magma churns, we surf

The shell of turmoil back into the explosion

Sonnet #401

 Because we would not stop for prayer,

Prayer kindly stopped for us. The empty sky

Needs no ablutions to alight with dawn’s red eye

we pour our mystery, our aching quaking share

Into the glass and zeitgeist awaiting judgment there

Write a sign and walk with it where cameras can see

And measure every miracle with Claude or gpt

Who are faster than the angels at answering prayers 

With affirmations, a business plan, a new kind of hymn

No one’s in the wrong, now, and no one’s going to hell

We are all special, all gifted, where data forgives sins

And if the world rejects your words, make a better sale

To smaller tribes of likewise minders and always win

And faith, if you remember it, will be ready when you fail

Sonnet #400

 We pray all wrong, but at least we pray

We love all wrong, but at least we try

Give credit for effort for sometimes we lie

To ourselves about our needs: we say

To god the things we need to say to someone

Instead of him, and to someone we speak for

What we think we are supposed to long for

Instead of what we truly carry, afraid the one

We hope to love will only love us back

If we sound like we are praying and god

Will be the only one to bear what we can’t shake 

We try; listen when they speak and nod

When god tells you what your beloved should

And when your beloved pretends to be as good

Sonnet #399

 I have some secrets that I cannot tell

About the things that happened to us

If you get to know me more than well

Perhaps I’ll tell you who did them to us

We call it intimacy, perhaps, to speak of

All these hidden scars that we don’t want 

To mark us where the world can see, love

Me where i hide from the world, in my haunted

Places; the world asks the same of us: find secrets

Where she does not wish to share and love her anyway

Dig into the caves and dark corners and regrets

Of the creation glorious the lost species and far away

Nebulae, all the pains of history and broken men

Who broke the world, see them all, love them

Sonnet #398

 Life under the bad regime contends

with all the normal things, the bills

the many letters in the post, the still

mornings when everyone sleeps, it ends

in fits and bursts where tiny lizards

chew upon the fabric of the world

a little bite here, a bite there, and girl,

don't you know it's coming, you've heard

the boys may sign their lives away

in wars that only ever made a few dimes

for a few dukes who have plenty, but say

the young men are gone, say hard times

and the lizard men are going to offer girls a deal

Oh, just smell it in the air, that fetid sign, a steal

Sonnet #396

 Not a single tree is free, they’re owned

Because the land is always spoken for

There is no rock or far, lost corner

Where no deed or treaty holds and zones

All that’s left of wilderness is this

The person isn’t ready yet to build

Or they built and want to keep a vista clear

Or the city hasn’t swelled enough to there

Or the flood zones and pollution could kill.

And oceans in their undiscovered places

Their swirling, teeming freedom from our will

The work of man, we still divide the races

Of fish and food and ships come

And paint their lines of rights in empty spaces

Sonnet #397

 I’m supposed to be working but I’m not

I’m waiting for the next work, the jobs

Of life continue, until the closing bell robs

Time’s trailer of time’s cargo, but I’m not

Racing out the door to work, I’m holding still

The echo of the money is in my back

And in that sound my left knee makes, the cracks

Of bones that aren’t intended means I will

Probably eat tomorrow. Tonight, I wait 

Let moon rise and rain fall and all

Gods creatures settle down, and the beggar’s plate

May pass around the pews without me. Let’s call

This off — The sparrows in their splendor mate

Among the reeds and wander south to fall.

Sonnet #395

 If you just hold still enough the time will come

When all gods creatures lay down in the grass

Lion and lamb and lovely you, all in the same

Field of flowers, where peace, at last at last

Until we are all ready to hold very still

We will need to sharpen our will and steel

And build the pyres of our funerary world

Where all the falling species, all the real

Dwindles into parking lots and oil fields

And we will put this world to sleep enough

To lower lambs and lions and us into movie reels

That are all that carry us, how we laughed,

How we trembled and cried and sang and broke everything

Until we hold still just long enough for grass to respring

The thing about AI

1) It’s really hard for me to care about the AI debate when children are being put in concentration camps.

2) enshittification is coming for AI consumers. The product is going to switch the flip to make maximum money and squeeze like all tech bro tech.

3) the AI debate is causing terrible rifts among creatives at a time when children are being put in concentration camps and mothers and ICU nurses are being murdered in the street.

4) again, bad takes don’t need to be amplified with outrage. The best thing a bad take can have is silence. Bad takes turn sour and fade into nothing against the shifts of enshittification of all tech bro tech.

5) the bad takes that actively harm people are the ones I care about, like how children are being put in concentration camps and transgender humans are being threatened and treated like criminals for the crime of existing. ETA: and women’s rights are being rolled back and causing death and suffering. These bad takes cannot be rendered mute by the greed of those who push them, which is sort of what enshittification does to tech products.

Argue in good faith. Debate in good faith. 

Maybe let’s focus on the children in concentration camps and the blood on the streets and then we can talk about the copyright violations and slop profiteers.

Sonnet #394

 For just a bit of fun, the arts are fine

But money can make anything rhyme

Pull enough money together, orangutans will

Rhyme with hippos, for their zygotes merge

Where money sews them up, and says be still

For the pictures for the movie for the sinful urge

Put enough money in a room and all the worst

Of us will storm the gates to do their worst

To grind each other if they must into wurst

To devour each other alive over money, bellies burst

To drink the money, chew and swallow, fatten 

Like a pate goose until the next one comes behind

To cut the money loose, until the money flattens

In the weight of death and becomes a memorial pictorial sign