Selected Poems From A Collection HAND-ME-DOWNS I'm made of hand-me-downs Bloody-knuckled lessons Quick glances of pure love Stripped-out lug bolts Fallen hickory leaves And grease-stained leather gloves I'm made of mom and dad Their births and deaths Every moment in my lineage that was Those hopes and dreams Rest in faith-marrowed bones As crude instincts in my twisted guts I am Jack Daniels shots I am kisses kind I am rosebush roots Bound up in binder twine I am made of mem

A short, dystopian story about a future we're all being sold. Alone, the last salesman sits. The revolver’s weight more noticeable than any sample case he’d ever hauled across the American expanse. After fifty years of roads, millions of miles woven into the fiber of his being, it is here, in this dead hilltown motel where his thread will be cut and the weaving will end. Fuzzy mildew crawls up the walls in reaching, black tendrils, branching off like the poisoned veins of all

A poem about a confluence of events He was twenty-five, a messed-up kid in man-sized Doc Martens thudding the splintered sidewalks of East Carson Street, back when July nights in Pittsburgh still smelled faintly like steel mills and catfish piss and not yuppie money, his Polo shirt half-unbuttoned, two steady streams of sweat dribbling down his neck and meeting at a confluence that ran down his chest. The first stop, like always, Jack’s, his favorite dive where the doorman n

A poem and the story behind it The airport terminal smelled of body odor and stale breath, a liminal place where time drags and people drift like half-finished thoughts who’d rather be anywhere but here. I was early for my flight to Houston, nursing a lukewarm black coffee and scribbling in a small notebook to pass the minutes, when he sat down across from me on the row of hard plastic chairs. He was lean in the way hard labor makes a man lean—not gym-cut, but pared down by y

Overcoming fear and loathing in an ancient place of healing Monday. Late March, the first real, warm breath of spring morning licking the Ouachita ridges like a lover who might still turn cold by nightfall. I sputtered into Hot Springs, Arkansas, in my dented Chevy pickup smelling like cigarettes and a decade of regret, my joints stiff from the long haul out of the frozen Midwest where my life had finally shit the bed for good. Thirty-eight years old. A thousand rejected poem

Walden Pond — Concord, Massachusetts – April 20th 2026 The afternoon air carried that sharp, clean bite of New England spring, the kind that allows a man to inhale fully and feel the ground soften under his feet. I came here for a brief respite from modernity with nothing but what I could carry on my back, just as the first poem I’d written a day before—and brought with me to leave as tribute—demanded. I left the car and the cares of hard days behind me at the lot, slipped of