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Had I become crooked,

or was I always this way?

The lightning tree bares

its frozen branches

a brittle-limbed memorial,

taut arms veining a clouded sky.

We don’t remember the fruit it bore,

the shade it offered,

the life it held.

Only the beauty of what is broken.

Had I become crooked,

or was I always this way?

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In that moment,
I watched the rain crash down and caress tarmac
leaving musky remnants of clouds and
You were beautiful then.

Draped off the edge of the curb, drenched,
I was astounded.
This love was ever so young and
You were beautiful then.

Now, in time, I look back
to find a stillness in regret
but what lingers is that day and
You were beautiful then.

And you're beautiful now.
Buried between flowers and earth
where the roots arc over bone
and vines climb imaginary tombs

And you’re beautiful now.
Silent in your prose
as sepulchral dreams
repeat themselves over and over.

And you’re beautiful now.
Gone and gone, forever gone.
As you’ll always be, 
beautiful now.

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When my son returned
	he threw his school bag
angrily against the wall
	ran headlong upstairs
red-faced slamming doors.
	There was not much to say
as I picked up his rucksack
	to empty his half eaten lunch
the paper fell on the floor
	handscrawled 8 year-old cursive.

‘the snowy peaks’

i see a hiker
i feel snow
i hear whistling wind
i smell flowers
i regret my life choices
i keep on going
when i get back down
i skip rocks at the beach

folding his poem
I slide it under the door.

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I’ve never been particularly interested in mastering the sonnet in its traditional sense. The certainty of rhyme, the inevitability of closure, for me, it can feel too resolved for the kind of emotional terrain I’m trying to explore - and I rebel against constraints or structured. My work tends to lean toward something more provisional: moments that hover, that resist conclusion, that remain slightly unfinished.

Out of that tension, this new poetry form began to emerge.

The Triptych Sonnet is a fourteen-line poem composed of three haiku followed by a five-line closing movement in iambic pentameter. The haiku operate as discrete image-fields—compressed, sensory, and often unconnected on the surface. Each one captures a moment in time: memory, dream, observation. Together, they build pressure without explanation.

The final five lines shift register. This is where the poem turns, where reflection, relation, or meaning begins to cohere. In most cases, not as resolution.

If the traditional sonnet is an argument, the Triptych Sonnet is accumulation followed by reckoning.

In many ways, this form feels aligned with the questions I am asking myself in my practice around how memory fragments, how domestic life accrues meaning over time, and how we attempt, often imperfectly, to bind experience into something that resembles coherence.

This is one of the poems in that form.

Domestic Sonnet III - Triptych Sonnet Form

Wolf moon above us.
Tying thread around your wrist—
memory thins out.

Winter nights wrestling
alligators in my sleep.
Coyotes break dawn light.

Ferry horn carries
commuters across gray sound.
A small migration.

Today, I shelved poems along worn wood.
O’Hara leans toward Merwin’s tempered hush.
Gilbert stands near Olds in measured light.
Their spines hold what the night would pull far
and what we tie to keep from drifting apart.

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Does the bird of paradise know what he gives up when his mate succumbs to the dance, we only ever see the ritual, never the long lived after.

It’s true even his feathers leave marks upon her body.

I used to count the moles on your body, and our smells would fill the basement. We’d plant apple trees beside reservoirs, where we wondered how the fish ever made it there.

Now we sleep apart, dreaming of different meadows where autumn springs eternal and tired hands are comforted by touch, and touch alone.

By touch we are alone.

In the morning, when you asked if I loved you, I left this poem on your desk and danced out into the field, headed to the coast.

The horizon blistered the skyline, starlings undulated by the burnt pier.

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The mail arrives from the local council
there’s arsenic in our water, it’s fine, so they say.
It’s 13:52, my daughter calls 
pick up from Wingpoint
Laser tag 	birthday spoils 	squirter guns 	sugar high
We talk about London, the first visit in seven years
green card 		permanent resident 		US citizen 
They do not know the name of their grandmother
“Nigel,” my son quips, “Robin, perhaps?”
We laugh.
Their surname is my step-father’s mother’s maiden name 
we all agree it’s better than Smith. 
I recount a full complement of sisters 
biological		half				step
and I do not love any.
Paul Simon hums too low to decipher, 
he’s bouncing through tenements.
We buy discounted zero-calorie water, read the ingredients 
Calcium disodium EDTA, Potassium Benzoate
We drink anyway.
It’s 14:43 and a war rages on.

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Her body wakes and with it a hum.
I sit, elbow–knee bent
writing against paper grain
stink bugs emerge this time of year
in tawny marmorations
leaving romance knuckle balling.
If I craft a sonnet will persistent
chemicals end with a simple refrain?
There’s a poem by Brautigan
about a catfish he loved so dear
moving blind at the bottom of a mere
and if I were to live life in stink bug forms
I’d stay in walls releasing small alarms
and your loneliness would eventually fade.

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These poems sit at the heart of the book. They explore the architecture of shared family life: kitchens, gardens, stairwells, small gestures, silences. I’m interested in the tension between proximity and distance — how people can stand under the same roof and still feel time shifting between them.

The sonnet, with its contained space and inevitable turn, feels suited to domestic life: fourteen lines, a compression, a reckoning.

Domestic Sonnet I

Sitting on the sofa with my son
scattered artefacts, a halfway home
yarn, jam jar, a thousand puzzled pieces
an orphaned sock in the room
edges frayed, no-one claims or tidies away
a plant he bought my wife, his mother,
we don’t know the name
acaulescent stemmed malachite
expressing itself by unfurling arms over
the evening shifts, unnoticed at first
clay splits on the floor, soil spreading wide
my son’s breath, quickening, against my side.
tanner’s brown pot, cracked, revealing
a thinning charm of rooted tendrils and rot.

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ever since
	I was a boy
these details were

often overlooked
         intimate years
in rearview becoming

effervescent popcorn
	bursting pubescent
calcifying twine

an awkward adolescence
	heat-marked scars
chaffed palms

lead the procession
	spine uneven
to the wolf’s bosom

is she abrasive
	through desire
on our day of reckoning

interrogated lines
	in freefall
under primrose skies

distant confessions
	between stone-cold walls
resemble absolution

here
         the impenetrable light
in the city

when the night softens
	I am forgiven
and we are set free

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there is no mathematical resolve in the simplicity of this equation fractal edges fray when i tell you this marriage is over
								it is over																	
scraping bronchial sediment from my lung spitting crimson reprimands once unfurled they uncage themselves and release a stream of violent gestures	
								i did not mean it to be this way
reaching into oblivion death lurks by the side of the road dressed up with nowhere to go and i succumb to sunlight Daedalus watches longingly
								i wish i could abandon this world
tie wings to an embryo and escape into eschaton carry her across salt paths take hold of me deep under a reticent sky pouring down acidic bubbles
								i swell into erasure

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After the winter rain falls
does the moss wrap around the stone,
holding close, keeping warm,
a careful blanketing, as if to say
I will never let you go.

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Bleak little hollow
a dismal niche
land pressing briefly
into water

Above it a bald eagle
and gull
entangle release
reform repeat

Feather unravels
then closes again
i cannot tell
if this is pursuit
or play.

The road bends
i drift
correct myself
continue then drift

Dismal Nitch
a slow patient goodbye
awaited
beside one impossible cape

i am disappointed
by the sea
as it yearns
to swallow us

we drove
to a place
only letters could leave
and still stay

the bay
does not answer
i use
the same sound
again

and 
again

and
again

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here,
the awful voices
flatten

the chinese
hieroglyphs
turn

i leave
mouthing
seeds

Maigret
has a lot to answer for

bastardized son
belligerent father

sowing acrylic light
into clouds

the dense fog
illuminates 

as Oregon rain
cleanses God’s scorched earth

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Today, I read after 13 years of searching
a researcher finally reached his mecca.
In the tiger-filled rainforests of Western Sumatrat
the botanist broke down in tears
as he spotted the Rafflesia Hasseltii—
a parasitic bloom. A pilgrimage complete.

And I simply go out to the backyard
to rake common leaves from our common trees,
to avoid our all-too-common argument.

Today, after 13 years of belonging,
a married man finally reaches his conclusion.
On the unfertilised lawn of Western Washington,
he breaks down in tears
amongst aphids and whiteflies—
parasitic signs he can no longer ignore.

From the window, a neighbour looks down:
a rusted rake discarded,
a lawn overgrown,
the autumn leaves blowing gently in the wind.

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Fifty-two weeks later, this space has grown into something I could not have predicted: more than 6,000 of you reading alongside me; a body of work taking shape in public; the founding of Ink & Ribbon Press as a nonprofit press devoted to poetry and permanence; a year marked by risk, discipline, generosity, and the slow, quiet accumulation of trust.

Looking back, that first poem already contained the questions that have carried me through this year - about success, doubt, mortality, and the strange relief of admitting we don’t have answers.

So today, rather than rush forward, I want to return to the beginning. To reread that first poem not as an origin myth, but as a mirror. Because in many ways, I am still asking the same questions. The difference now is that I’m asking them in company.

I’ve Been Out Drinking With Bukowski, Again.

I’m uncertain
if success
really means all that much
whether
the removal of doubt
would change
me.

Consciousness dilated:
white, white,
pure white.

I’m uncertain
if death
really means all that much
whether
the removal of thought
would change
me.

Consciousness dilated:
white, white,
pure white.

I’ve been out drinking with Bukowski, again.
It’s been a while old friend.

There is one certainty we agreed upon:
success and death,
my love,
are nothing more
than pretty words.

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