Hearthwork I

February's Poems

Week I

UNALIGNED

The cuckoo is both a bird and a clock, and “UNALIGNED” holds both without choosing. The cuckoo clock was built in the Black Forest of Germany in the 18th century as a timekeeping device. The bird was chosen because its two-note call could be faithfully reproduced in wood. The clock hides it behind a door. On the hour it emerges, performs, and disappears. The cuckoo is a creature whose entire visible existence is the announcement of time passing. This is the creature the near sky calls to rest.

In numerology, 4 is the number of foundations. In “UNALIGNED,” the speaker holds two knowings simultaneously at 4:44 AM; certain that something is wrong alongside complete uncertainty about its nature. A self that has outgrown its explanations asks the only thing larger than itself for an answer before the liminal hour closes.

why is my spirit upset? 

UNALIGNED

The Thneed

Everybody needs a Thneed
A fine thing that all people need
The Thneed is good
The Thneed is great
And it’s just $3.98
Everybody needs a Thneed
It’s revolutionary guaranteed!
The Thneed is new
The Thneed is nice
And did you see that price?
Since the glorious dawn of man
There’s never been a thing to do what this thing can
So listen carefully
To all the wondrous things a Thneed can be
It’s a sock, it’s a suit
Boxing glove, parachute
A butterfly net, reusable diaper
An exercise belt, a runny nose wiper
A slingshot, a muzzle, a jump rope, a hat
A colorful sweater you put on your cat
Nothing else in this world can do that
Old or young, tall or short, thin or fat
Republican, independent, libertarian or democrat

In “UNDESIGNED,” the second line opens on “the fall of prickles thneed.” It isn’t the soft release of a piece of bark completing its natural cycle but, a manufactured object made from what the trees were stripped of, falling into the world with its edges intact. In The Lorax, the Once-ler casts it onto a beautiful woman in a moment of public frustration. Before the thneed, she is at ease on a bench, complete without enhancement. Yet the thneed requires her body to authenticate it. Ironically, one of the characters turn to her and express how the thneed makes them like her more. And yet, the thneed still depends on nature’s remnants to feel real. It must carry the memory of the tree even as it erases the tree itself. What exists is not enough until it is designed and commodified, yet the design still requires nature to make it believable. Humanity is inextricably the holding place of earth’s hearth and the ability to create is a spiritual gift humanity shares with nature. But when does creativity become unethical? It is when the foundation is stripped purely for design, and that, in itself, is an unbecoming of the world. “UNDESIGNED” begins on that earth, with a fall already in progress, asking what lands naturally and what was destined to fall.

UNDESIGNED

“UNDESIGNED” moves through the earth: autumn, trees, light on a specific afternoon, and ground underfoot. Ground is the noun beneath the feet, the verb that holds, and the surface the grind runs across. The poem opens in a fall that hasn’t declared itself yet:

was it my autumn leave
     or the fall of prickles thneed?

The speaker can’t distinguish their natural shedding from the artificial object landing on them. What the body might have released on its own schedule arrives alongside what was designed to catch and hold, and the two are indistinguishable at the moment of contact. “Leaf turned armor” is where that confusion enters the body itself. What should complete a natural cycle of release hardens into protection before it can finish falling. The poem returns to the same refrain twice and resolves nothing between the first instance and the second:

ground it—grounded  
     or bound by the grind

The refrain contains the poem’s argument. “Ground,” “grounded,” and “grind” share the same root and the same mouth: the hard g, the round vowel, the d that lands at the end. But “grind” is what happens when the ground stops holding and starts demanding something in return. The earth beneath the feet and the force that wears the speaker down are made of the same material. One cannot step off one without stepping onto the other. The dash between “ground it” and “grounded” represents the tipping point: “ground it” requires an agent, something doing the grounding, while “grounded” is the state that results. The better condition still depends on a force outside the self to arrive. “Or” unsettles even that. The refrain doesn’t choose because the speaker can’t.

by love dim murmurs a fickle
     leaf turned armor

What the body let go, the material world picks back up and hardens. The natural cycle of release is converted into a shield before it can complete itself. A sunbeam between trees takes up space and casts shadow from the same source. The beam exists because something blocked it. Presence and shadow become one event. The self moving through the world illuminates and conceals; which one the witness sees depends entirely on where they are standing.

UNDESIGNED

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Week II

recognition: From UNDESIGNED

rec·og·ni·tion /ˌrɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/ noun.

From Latin recognitiō, from recognoscere: re- (”again”) + cognoscere (”to know”). First attested in English c. 1430. The act of knowing again; the identification of something previously encountered; the acknowledgment of the existence or validity of a thing.

cog·ni·tion /kɒɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/ noun.

From Latin cognitio, from cognoscere: from the Proto-Indo-European root *gnō-, “to know.” The mental faculty of acquiring knowledge; the foundational process by which the mind receives, processes, and holds what the world delivers into it.

“recognition” is written from the ellipsis in “UNDESIGNED.” The earlier poem arrives at “another other side...” and trails off; its language running to the edge of what the material world can say. What opens on the other side of the ellipses is a descent into the interior. The opening posture is the head cast downward, the sole of the right foot firm against the ground, and the spine lined up to stall. The chamber (the ear, the heart, or the interior space) where a child first receives the world, was built to hope for the fruitful sound; the true frequency of a living thing before culture overlays it. The fruitful sound is the self orienting toward truth, creativity, and what the earth produces when left to its own devices. The embellished sound is what the chamber receives instead: the ideas that program people young, the doctrine and the social encoding that lands on a child before the child can evaluate it, the same way the thneed fell on the woman.

the hope versus what grows
is the cast that clays
     shade

To cast is to throw, to shape in a mold, and to assign a role. Clay is the earth’s most malleable material, the substance God forms the human from in Genesis, and the thing that takes the shape of whatever presses into it. To “clay” as a verb forces the word into a function it was not built for, the same way the chamber is forced to grow around the embellished sound. To cast shade is to obscure. To clay shade is to give the diminishment a body, to form it from earth’s material, and to make the shadow into something solid that stands beside the self permanently. The gap between what the self hoped to receive and what it grew, leaves the self with a companion it did not choose.

And yet, luring in through the nothingness, through the loneliness, through the accumulated absence of the fruitful sound, is the promise of arriving at two things that need nothing external to confirm them. Two ubiquitous true knows: universally present, always already true, requiring no “gaze” or crowd to validate their existence. Cognition, returned to its original function, finds the knowledge that was always there.

Part II of “recognition” turns horizontal as the subject begins to rest. The first section holds the vertical: the bowed spine, the root, and the downward cast of the head. Part II releases the tension, and the pain:

as I lay, I forget to 
lie awake

To lie awake is to perform consciousness; to maintain the vigilance the “embellished” world requires. To forget to lie awake is to stop performing it—the body moving to the ground, returning to the earth, and no longer holding the posture the grind demanded. In that release, a different dream becomes available: the back of trees, the ebb tide, and the inner being surfacing from beneath the accumulated sound. The speaker begins to recognize their humanity.

recognition

selenelise: a recount

se·le·ne·li·se

/səˌlɛnəˈliːz/

verb. From Greek selēnē (moon) + helios (sun) + the conjugative suffix -ise. To experience the rare state in which two opposing forces or truths become simultaneously visible; to hold contradiction without resolution. A selenelion in the self.

sel·e·ne·li·on

/səˌlɛnəˈlaɪən/

noun. From Greek selēnē (moon) + helios (sun) + -on (neuter suffix). A rare optical phenomenon in which the sun and a fully eclipsed moon appear simultaneously on opposite horizons, made possible by the refraction of light through the earth’s atmosphere.

“selenelise: a recount” was written for Valentine’s Day. “selenelise: a recount” opens as:

it was high time
for the other
eye on side

the other know
engulfs my
favorite maze

“It was high time,” colloquially means something overdue, but it reaches forward toward the high tide that arrives later in the poem. “recognition” closes with one eye at rest, “as I lay, I forget to/ swim with eye,” and “selenelise” opens with the other coming onside. But the lineation matters: “for the other” hangs suspended across the break before “eye on side” completes it. The delay enacts the other arriving into position gradually; the eye coming onside across the line rather than all at once. The image is drawn from soccer, where the offside rule determines whether a play is valid or dead. The other eye arriving onside means the speaker’s second way of seeing has finally reached a position where it can participate.

From the thneed 
     I’ve lost a sleeve 
but gained a 
     stream 

The sleeve belongs to the designed self that’s shaped for others’ needs. The stream belongs first to “recognition,” where the ebb tide already pulled back to reveal the inner being, where the speaker lays down and the current beneath the embellished surface finally became audible. The speaker kneels before the moon. The head bows again, but now directed at something celestial rather than subterranean. The moon is in its eclipse, both itself and the shadow the earth casts across it—a selenelion of one. The request is direct:

cast me 
    right 
  into 
my lovers 
  dream

selenelise

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Week III.

Flame Will Rise: From Oral Tradition

I. Oral Tradition

Tradition is back
from a twist of the spine,
a movement that leaves half a skeleton—
the other is broken and gone.

What once was spoken is no longer written.
What once was sacred is now screenshot.
Life is archived in tweets, in clips, in posts—
each word a potential weapon,
each secret ready for exposure,
each story waiting to be weaponized
by whoever finds it first.

The oral gave way to the written.
The written gave way to the recorded.
The recorded gave way to the surveilled.
Now everything they say lives forever,
timestamped, geotagged, searchable,
belonging to platforms they do not own,
curated by algorithms they do not understand.

No fire needed to burn the books.
No executions for thoughtcrime.
Just screenshots. Just comments.
Just the slow accumulation of evidence
that what you said is what you meant
is who you are is all you’ll ever be.

We fracture under the weight of performance:
integrity online,
whatever we need offline,
and somewhere between these selves,
the spine twists again,
our actual selves’ fracture,
split down the spine,
half skeleton, half ghost.
leaving us in search for the pieces
we lost when we agreed
to let our lives become content.

Nostalgia keeps me while the present runs ahead.
I search for the pieces of that lost spine,
trying to reassemble what was broken
when we traded stories for content,
when we became consumers, then products, then consumers again,
endlessly cycling through ourselves.

And writers? Stop writing.
A useless endeavor.
Allow our feelings and ideas to breeze through the air
as we sit around the campfire…

Where, in the circle of light,
a figure waits—half-revealed, half-shadow.
He speaks in fables about life,
tales so rich, so textured, so unlike
the mindless scroll, the endless feed,
that writers lean in, mesmerized.
The hunger for his gaze is immediate,
for the community promised around the firelight.

He tells them to add sticks to the fire—
“The flame will rise, and you will see my face.”
So, they gather wood, feed the flames,
desperate for the moment of full revelation,
for the face that will complete the story,
for the validation promised in firelight.

But the shadows only deepen.
Half his face remains hidden.
“More sticks,” he whispers. “Keep going.”

The writers burn their hands reaching.
The fire consumes the wood they offer.
Ash covers their skin, their clothes, their faces.
Still, they cannot see him whole.

Until they realize—
they are alone.
The figure has vanished.
The fire has died.

And above them, in the cold glow
of screens they thought they’d escaped,
the spectators watch onward,
holding sleek devices—
vertical, segmented, curved—
a spine made into gadget,
vertebrae transformed to glowing nodes
they grip and scroll.

They chant in unison:
“Broken and gone.
Broken and gone.
Broken and gone.”

This is the final version of “Oral Tradition” from my chapbook, Susurrus. If you’re interested in the evolution of this poem, here is the first draft:

Oral Tradition

II. Flame Will Rise

Oral tradition is the oldest technology of the human. Before the written word, before the clay tablet, before the printing press and the content creator and the Substack, there was the voice passing a story toward another voice. It belonged to the lineage of mouths that had spoken it before, and to the lineage that would speak it after. “Flame Will Rise: From Oral Tradition” arrives in late February as the week that inherits all the accumulated material of the earlier poems and asks: what survives the stripping? What is the story that cannot be embellished out of existence?

missing pieces have long grown souled 
     in a new uncertain body

The human archive is a collection of vessels, each one carrying a version of what was always already true. The missing pieces, the fruitful sound suppressed, the natural fall interrupted, and the resting spot the long time burn deferred migrate into new uncertain bodies. The liminal smile occupies the thresholds: between the left’s hard-earned knowledge and the right’s demanded tribute, between the jagged ground and the wet submersion, and between the political and the spiritual. The smile is the duality that does not choose. It stands in the middle and holds both.

The middle kind  
a liminal smile

The flame rises from the place neither side controls and neither side can extinguish. The knew in the poem is knowledge that has lived long enough to be worn into a different shape. It is passion that drives the speakers determination past a biased understanding of the world towards the development of their dream. And what waits on the other side of the idea is cornflower blue. Blue has moved through all six poems as the color that holds what fire cannot burn and wind cannot extinguish. The deep truth hue of “selenelise.” The dire blue of the moon’s phase in “The New Year: Camargue.” Cornflower blue is the color of the sky at the hour the earth keeps. The life’s lover waiting in it is the fruitful sound made flesh—the genuine community the figure at the fire promised but could never deliver.

Flame Will Rise

The New Year: Camargue

The camargue is the river delta where the Rhône meets the Mediterranean. Wild white horses¹ run there. Arles sits at its edge, the city where Van Gogh rented the Yellow House.

“The New Year: Camargue” opens in ascent and in grief:

by why I went wept to move gently above the head 
the mist laced my vision for a veiled cosmocrats friend

The cosmocrat is the ruler of the cosmic order, and the veiled friend is the one who governs the arrangement of things without announcing itself. The mist is the atmosphere made visible—the same refraction that makes the selenelion possible.

they say its phase will dire blue
its lint is the lent view  
     the warmth from amber dwells

The moon moves toward its most dire and its most true. Lent threaded into the word for what light leaves behind, and the fine residue that gathers in the corners of things when the eye has been looking hard for a long time. The amber warmth beneath the lunar blue is the earth’s heat, the hearth “UNDESIGNED” walked across, and the fire “Flame Will Rise” refused to let die.

figure eight diamond tried four right 
held left by three  
     a white kite reveal

The figure eight is infinity, the eternal return that moves through all six poems from the sleepless hour of “UNALIGNED” to the new year at the edge of the marsh. Four right, held left by three: the coordinates of the speaker’s own constellation, a self-made geometry written into the sky the way the collection writes the self back into the earth. The white kite is a surrender to the sky that the speaker has already claimed. The visitor from “UNALIGNED” returns here:

to seize the visitor’s unaligned quest 
aligned breeze felt back to sea

The mighty visitor that moved past the trachea before language arrived for direction. The unaligned quest is the soul’s itinerary, but the movement the earth was already inclining toward before the artificial. The aligned breeze carries it back to sea. The ocean that waited indifferently at the edge of “UNDESIGNED” is the destination the “visitor” navigated toward.

The New Year

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Retrospective

I wrote each of these pieces before I fell asleep. The first two were a surprise to me. I was not planning on posting anything until I finished the first chapter of my epic, Requite, but I felt compelled to. “UNALIGNED” and “UNDESIGNED” were both posted a few minutes after I wrote them, so I would not scrap them. I disliked “UNDESIGNED” because the middle section was difficult for me to get past, so I remember deciding to repeat the refrain to bridge concepts. By the sixth stanza, I realized there was so much more I had to say, so the next four poems were developed. “recognition” is my personal favorite. “selenelise” was a struggle to write, but I wanted to challenge myself. The “lies lent”² wordplay was a gorgeous gift of a coincidence. “The New Year: Camargue” is a purely selfish poem. Nonetheless, enjoy these until April.

1. they are white on appearance, but are technically grey genetically

2. lies that are borrowed (temporary deception), lies given during Lent (sacrifice season), and lies as fabric lint (residue left behind after the grind)

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recommended reading:

The Prelude

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