wednesday, november 30, 2022

the blazing light at the edges of the ice on the sidewalk
wakes up something in my mind, some sense of the real
and i tell myself it doesn't mean anything at all
except for snow and sun and everything that entails
but then i guess that's a lot, maybe that's most of it

it's hard to find the world beautiful when it's dying
it's hard to love what you're going to lose
but then if you can't find beauty in what's dying
what else would you find it in at all?

tags: topics/poem

p1k3 / 2022 / 11 / 30

tuesday, november 1, 2022

some days i think
you're only ever
talking to yourself

other days it seems like
we dwell in the
warmth of some
shared understanding

(like there's a we,
all told, lit with the light
of other souls)

it's always fleeting,
too brief, an unstable
configuration

except when it seems
bigger than the whole world

the way a mountain
in the distance
is part of the landscape
while one underfoot
is the whole of it

we're left i guess
unable to agree
what it all meant or
should mean

but i still find myself
reaching for the idea
that it meant
that it means
something

tags: topics/poem

p1k3 / 2022 / 11 / 1

monday, october 17, 2022

there was one i was trying to write
i had the pieces in my mind
and then the most of them
rattled out to nothing in the
juttering motion of the year

the bit i can remember, it's been
a theme of late, this little mysticism
i'm carrying in my pocket and taking
out now and then to turn over in the light:

an idea of the past
looping back into my life
20 years since i first left home
half a life-so-far ago
cycles and rhymes in the shape of the days
distant lights through the trees

i'm a natural sucker for these minor pareidolias
born to a people who still read the hand of god
in passing birds and the placement of telephone poles

or maybe i just have eyes, once in a while, for
drifts and currents in the way of things
even if i can't say what rocks and channels
give them a shape

either/or i guess

tags: topics/poem

p1k3 / 2022 / 10 / 17

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

It’s late September, and we’re back from the big burn, back from bluegrass in Kansas. Outside the open window of my mud-room office, a light rain is falling and the temperature drifts towards the 50s. Camping gear and festival stuff is everywhere. My desk and the adjacent workbench are covered in the detritus of a month’s traveling and unpacking.

(My immediate field of view just below the monitors: 2 Altoids tins (1x actual mints; 1x weed), a vintage Leatherman tool, a chapstick, 2 lighters, a pile of dusty stickers, six pens & 2 pencils, $1.42 in change, some ink cartridges, matchbox, coffee mug, 2 festival wristbands, plastic Snoopy pencil sharpener dated 1958, microfiber glasses cloth, 2 pill bottles, some washers, 3 packing checklists, button that says “God Bless John Prine”, necklace with a tiny pewter guitar that says “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS”, index card that just says “Shit.” in large underlined letters, T25 driver bit, some screws, empty nitrous cartridge, beercan pop tabs, RockyGrass stage schedule.)

I can’t find anything. Every time I locate something like a pair of glasses, a wallet or a keychain goes missing. My phone’s been absent since Sunday at the latest. I think it’s probably in a pocket, a plastic tub, the corner of a rolled-up tent. Odds are decent I’ll see it again but I don’t know when. I admitted defeat a few minutes ago and ordered a new one.

Out in the yard, a good-sized buck is sitting under the neighbor’s tree. We made eye contact for a while after I stepped out the back door to watch the rain. He didn’t seem inclined to leave. Later, he’ll probably eat more of my garden.

p1k3 / 2022 / 9 / 21

Friday, August 5, 2022

It’s pushing midnight. It’s hot and the air is thick. I’m sitting on the bed in my childhood bedroom, eating cold roast beef with Miracle Whip on a hamburger bun, drinking a Bud Light.

This room has changed since I lived here. The worn-out carpet and the twin mattress and the computer desk that used to house my Gateway 2000 are long gone. The shelves are still full of science fiction novels and comic strip anthologies though, and they’ve never painted over all the places I drew on the walls. The paint is peeling now, water damage from a leak a dozen years ago.

The house here has, in defiance of strict necessity or practicality, grown substantially since my siblings and I lived here. A series of DIY additions and renovations have added a window seat here, a family room there, expanded roof lines, an entire covered walkway. It’s excessive, but it’s hard to say it’s unjustified. I think the effort keeps them going. It’s something like an art project at this point. Decades of salvage materials and a lifetime of know-how going back into something, even if it’s not strictly the most necessary thing. You have to keep it moving. You can’t just accumulate 2×6s and daydream, you’ve got to build.

A place like this, like anywhere people live, isn’t a static fact. It’s something people keep doing.

p1k3 / 2022 / 8 / 5