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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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In this poem I replaced the chords with verses.

I was interested in how that structure might hold domestic experience the same way: duration without drama, pressure without explanation, and an ending that doesn’t fix anything but still lands. The rain, the news, the body, and the marriage move through that arc, returning not to harmony, but to something familiar.

II.

For twenty-three days straight
it has been raining here in the blue.
It feels like a lifetime.

Not the kind that arrives gently.
Translucent droplets marble your face,
accompanying morning rituals
as cuffs darken
and gravel shines.

This deluge announces itself rambunctiously
drumming the roof in Art Blakey rhythms, without pause,
finding its way through the walls.

I lie awake, counting nothing in particular,
waiting for you to return from the theatre,
the place you say is work
that feels more like home.

I take magnesium and L-theanine,
still my legs refuse rest, paradiddling beneath the sheet
as if they’re practicing a great escape,
though I fear it’s a heist.

Outside, the bruised buddleia leans under its own weight,
ungainly, rooted, syncopated to the earth.

The garden resembles our life:
things collected without plan, placed close together,
hoping proximity might become intention.

White roses mildewing beside whatever survived last winter.

I try not to draw conclusions.

V.

On the news, a man in North Seattle
drove into a flooded road.
Thirty-three.

That detail repeated, as if age alone
might explain it.

They say there were warnings,
signs posted, ignored.

He was discovered in a Honda Civic,
the kind of car people have stopped noticing.
They found him floating inside
and had to prise him from the rusted frame.

The report lingers where it shouldn’t,
on his job, the age of the car, license plates from Wisconsin,
old misdemeanors, a citation from years ago,
a question of why he was in Washington at all.

Small, domestic humiliations.
The rain continues.

I.

At night, the house holds its breath,
drenched in a turbulence that moves from hours
to days
to months.

Yesterday, I said we won’t touch again.
There is calmness in the inevitable.

At forty-eight,
I renounce my sexuality.

I don’t raise my voice.

I don’t need to, anymore.

The rain sings
for me.

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Inspired by the spirit of e. e. cummings and the artistic lens of Cubism, my poem A Cubist Christmas plays with structure and perspective to explore love, memory, and transformation. It reflects on those fractured yet cohesive moments that define our lives, moments where time collapses, belief shifts, and love persists.

In A Cubist Christmas, the holiday is seen through the fragmented lens of memory and perception: the first Christmas without childhood belief, the relentless growth of bamboo, and the surreal clarity of mushroom-induced introspection.

Through these moments, the poem examines the abstract shapes of love and time and how they twist, shift, and yet always remain present.

If you’re curious about how a tree becomes an eye or how mushrooms inspire lucidity, keep reading.

A Cubist Christmas

For Christmas, 
she bought a collection of cubist poems
titled Don’t Forget To Love Me. 
How could I?
In all the rain
I loved her - constant
In all our changes
I loved her - always
In the bamboo -
surprising <exclamation mark>,
their voracious growth
each morning demonstrating
an opportunity to be reborn.

It was our first 
(Christ)mas 
where the children didn’t believe

It was our best

In the recent summer, 
I’d grown mushrooms
To find a lucidity I’d missed
Fractal illusions miraged (degarim) on the 	horizon
						horizon
TimeandDistanceBecame 
A - B - S - T - R - A - C - T

The a l l 
		Seeing 

				E (Y) E 

paraded proudly on top of our T
					R
						E
							E

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But when you died,
grief didn’t descend with the weather.
It lifted.
A thin brightness rose in me
unexpected as the way fog dissolves
to make way for morning.

I didn’t understand it then.
Only now, standing in the doorway
of that small, stale room,
where the bedsheets held your stillborn shape,
do I feel what opened.

It embarrasses me to say it— relief.

I skipped stones across the shore that week,
each one arcing,
a little prayer for distance.
Before I let them go
I pressed their cold abrasive mineral
against my bearded cheek—
a brief reminder of weight.
They touched water lightly.

And afterward,
the house grew quiet again,
light settling on the kitchen table
as if it had waited years
to be let in.

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The Errant Larynx of Sir Anthony Hopkins

At readings, flushed, incandescent with rage,
my iridescent voice betrayed its age.
A single, slow clap from the ninety-three
Some corrective measures beckoned to me.

“How fine,” I thought, “to stand before them all
With Hopkins’ velvet tones in my call.”
For who could doubt me then? My future shone
If I could claim Sir Anthony’s baritone.

Through hill and dale I travelled, grim but sure,
a vocal-crippled rogue in search of cure.
At last I found the man who’d set me free,
and dragged him home through valley, shrub, and tree.

His muffled pleas were lost beneath the pine;
My carpet burned his knees, but soon were mine.
The operation simple in my mind
removed his larynx with a cut refined.

I swallowed down the fruit of stolen heart,
Believing voice could graft itself to art.
Thus bound, the two of us, my captive and me
Fused in fate, from here on in and eternity

Bloodied, bruised, I strode to Kitsap’s stage
And let loose Shakespearean tones from their cage.
I raised my chin with oratory pride
The howling gasps that met me — petrified

For all my effort, all my grisly gain,
My voice emerged from a strangled, lifeless strain.
The horror on their faces told me plain
that Hopkins was the wrong man to obtain.

Defeated, wheezing, drenched in Welsh gore,
I croaked, “Well… that did not go as before.”
Then sighed, “Dear God, what tragic fools we be—
I should have mugged Sir Patrick Stewart, not he.”

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In the evening
she sets the air conditioning to seventy.
I can’t sleep
when it’s over sixty-seven.

What chance did we ever have?

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