Posted in Poetry, tagged modern poetry, modern society, Poetry, voting, voting plan on 30 Oct 2026| 2 Comments »
you got this
you’ve thought on it and you’ve decided
but your heart, maybe it’s just too tired
and the world, it doesn’t inspire you
to care much anymore
and I get that, I do
‘cuz none of them seem to care much
about you
but you got this
‘cuz you know, life won’t get any better
by itself
life needs you to tell it
what you need
what you want
that you’re here
that you have a voice
that you care enough
to vote
Posted in Creativity, tagged Creativity, perfectionism, self-doubt, watercolor on 27 Oct 2026| Leave a Comment »
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
— William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure”
I’m sitting in my office. Behind me is my jury-rigged drafting table. This has gone through many iterations and re-dos. Today, it comprises a worktable, the leaf from an old gateleg table (attached to the front with hinges), a random block of cedar (to prop up the far edge and create a slope), and two thin strips of basswood clamped near the bottom edge of the slope with spring clamps (to keep the art-board with paper from sliding off the slope). On the bookshelf beyond rests one pint glass with brushes, and another with a palette knife, toothbrush, and other tools. A makeshift collection of drawers sits to one side, with various media, drawing implements, pastels, tubes of paint, sponges, and miscellany. To the other side is a small shelf with tape rolls, paper towels, tissues, and rags. The bookshelf holds a variety of thick cotton papers, in rolls or pads or blocks. In the closet is more paper, in a portfolio, to accommodate their large size. All of these items have been moved around at least three times, and modified (and sometimes unmodified) in several ways.
This spring, after a brief flurry of initial activity and experimentation with watercolors, I had to stop as the pain in my dominant hand was too much and my control with it was too weak to use it for painting. Then I had to wait until autumn for the surgery that would eliminate the problem. And now, after months away, I am approaching watercolors again. I have, however, been procrastinating, focusing on the studio furnishings and painting paraphernalia than with actually putting pigment on cotton. I’ve been crab-walking around the activity for weeks, thinking about restarting, but always finding something else that needed my attention.
Why? Because now I know how hard this is. Now I have seen the expertise required to paint what I want to paint.
And I doubt—
Aye, there’s the rub. I doubt that I will be able to develop the requisite skill set, so I’m using this predetermined outcome to fashion sufficient justification not to start in the first place.
Self-sabotage. Vicious cycle.
Then, about a week ago I realized, I’ve been here before, and I’ve gotten through it, with writing, with poetry, with music, with watch repair. But how? How did I get through it? I didn’t take notes. For the past few days I’ve been letting those questions steep, and today an answer arrived: Change the goal.
It’s easy to see, in retrospect. I simply aimed too far, like “over the horizon” far. That’s daunting (on a good day), and can overwhelm you with its seeming impossibility. So I need to change the goal, rein in the target. Maybe I can achieve enough skill to paint in a looser style, or with abstract designs. Let’s rein it in more. I could just paint small things in isolation—elements of a scene—rather than a big complex landscape. Or even further. How does watercolor pigment work on this brand of paper versus that, when the paper is damp versus dry, with the table flat versus sloped?
I am almost there in the process. I’m still reining it in, but I actually picked up a brush yesterday, and today I reviewed some tutorials to remind me of what is possible.
Baby steps.
k
PS. Special thanks to Dame Sarah Spring, who shone a bright light on the quotation above, which made me rethink many things.
Posted in Poetry, tagged creative writing, modern poetry, Poetry on 15 Oct 2026| Leave a Comment »
let me be
your mooring point
so we can weather the storms
together
Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged creative writing, grief, grieving, loss, modern poetry, Poetry, Writing on 06 Sep 2026| Leave a Comment »
[
[
[ thunder from a clear sky
[
[
[myriad ways to say farewell but none can
[
[ words break, thoughts shatter, lay unfinished
[ inside my skin
[
[there is no part of my universe with which you are not entangled
[
[
[ empty vessels whisper unutterable truths of
[ absence
[
[ pilfered moments, stolen years
[ falling inward building
[
[dark star of rage within my breast
[ you can’t you can’t you can’t
[
[swallow the gods—tin gods—that made it so
[
[cry out
[ no sleep no dreaming no
[
[
[ unimaginable
[
[face close to mine, breath coupled
[ the reverence of our
[
[ spills out onto barren steppes
[ together, only apart
[
[farewell my
[
[
Posted in Books, Food, Writing, tagged Alton Brown, book review, cooking, culinary art, food for thought on 29 Aug 2026| Leave a Comment »
Words, especially when written, contain a certain magic. Take a pen and paper. Write something down—a thought, a memory, an anecdote, a brief essay about Nutella®—and tuck it away somewhere. Then, months, years, even centuries later, if someone else finds it, reads it, they may (depending on the craft in the writing) see not only what you saw, what you described, but feel what you felt. Your words can show them more than what was, more than what you experienced, but how it affected you, how it changed you forever. The reader can feel it too, whether it’s the frisson of shared excitement or the rage of injustice or just the ineffable longing of a recognized moment of transformational beauty. It’s there. Caught in the amber of your writing.
All readers have likely had such moments. Whether it comes as a critical moment in a novel or from the heart of a poem, it’s something that sticks with us for a long time. It’s a rare thing, and to be cherished, because it’s absolutely unique to who we are and when we are. It is a human connection without connection, an ephemeral and intangible thread linking one mind and one time to another.
That . . . that is magic. Nothing less.
I had one of those moments today, from an unlikely source: Alton Brown’s collection of essays, Food for Thought: Essays and Ruminations.
I’m not one for biographies, auto- or otherwise, because to be honest, most celebrities aren’t good writers. And while Brown is a clever guy, witty and mildly acerbic, I would never have picked up this book if my adoptive brother—a talented memoirist in his own right—hadn’t loaned me his copy with a “Read this; you’ll love it” assurance. And he was right. I am loving it.
I never would have expected to have one of those moments, though. I expected fun. I expected to chuckle and smile. I did not expect magic.
And you shouldn’t either, because while Brown’s essay, “Meals That Made Me, Part II” (his recollection of eating pizza in the Tuscan hills outside Cortona, Italy), deluged me with a flood of memories of my own days as a young man alone in a foreign land, there’s no guarantee it’ll strike you in the same fashion.
But if you have an affinity for cooking, for family culinary history, if you like your humor served wry and with a dash of the absurd, and especially if you appreciate the mixture of science and art Brown uses in his approach to educating us about food and cooking, I expect you will gobble this up. It covers a broad spectrum of his life with a scattershot of brief pieces, from his earliest days to current times, bouncing back and forth through his years in seeming random fashion, but with each piece his writing is focused and bright and funny and often beautiful in its clarity and appreciation of the life he has had.
Maybe you’ll find some magic in it, as well, but even if you don’t, you’ll have fun reading it.
k
Posted in Creativity, Poetry, Seattle, tagged liminality, modern poetry, Poetry, quiet living, Seattle, suburbia on 16 Jul 2026| Leave a Comment »
after
one cancer scare
one heart attack
one hand surgery
one gained weight loss
I lace up my pickleball shoes
and return to the asphalt
of my suburban streets
to walk under skies filled
with the grey promise
of summer rain
it is The Rabbit’s Hour
that dawn-dim time of a summer’s morn
when the wild rabbits emerge
to munch the unmown fringe
between pastel mid-century homes
before ceding their world
to the one ushered in
by joggers with leashed labradoodles
the rabbit plays leapfrog
through curated gardens
past sword-leaf and yucca
but goes rock-still as I near
fixing me with
one onyx eye
a perfect cabochon bead
keeping me in full view
waiting
I slow as I pass
to appreciate longer
its inborn technique
of not being seen
heathered brown fur
blending with the drying grass
the eye does not blink
I am its only subject
its sole concern
its fate hanging on the breeze
the air shifts slightly
loaded with the perfect pairing
of petrichor and lavender
and as I continue onward
the nose twitches
once
twice
my pickleball shoes
have never been used
for their designed purpose
as I prefer to walk
among conifers and rhodies
when the world is sufficiently calm
for me to glimpse the place
where the rabbit world and mine
meet
Posted in Creativity, Music, Writing, tagged allusion, analysis, creative writing, emotion, modern poetry, Poetry, Writing on 15 Jul 2026| Leave a Comment »
Sometimes, words are insufficient.
There are times when I write a piece—usually a longer piece like yesterday’s but sometimes just a poem—that the rhythm and speed of the words is just as important as the words themselves; it’s like rather than writing, I’m composing, and so when the piece goes out into the world I don’t want it to be read so much as performed. What the piece needs is something . . . else, something more. It needs less to have been written than to have been scored, like a piece of music.
Music has the advantage here, and those of you who have learned how to play music know what I mean. A musical score isn’t just the notes that tell you what pitch to play and how long to play them: high, low, short, long. The score is full of other instructions like how loudly to play the note or how softly, whether the notes should all be slurred together or if they should be distinct and separated. It tells us the tempo, and when it should speed up or slow down, hold back, pause, or just freeze under a fermata’s little umbrella. It even tells us the feeling of the section we’re playing, like if it should evoke agitation, sweetness, sadness, grandiosity, gracefulness.
It’s not that I want the piece to be sung; no, it should be spoken (aloud or silently), but as with that last piece, there are sections where it builds in fervor and speed, piling word upon word, crescendo, accelerando, stronger, faster, until bang! hit the sforzando on this word, and then quieter, softer, slower, and . . . breathe.
It’s a frustration not to be remedied, this missing element, especially as I know readers will often skip over sections, miss the rhythm of the words I’ve chosen, skim. Not a criticism. Folks are busy. Life is busy. Time is precious, and even if you grace me with the time to read a piece fully, thoughtfully, there’s no way it’s going to play in your head the way I’ve conducted it in mine. And, sadly, there’s no guarantee that, were I to read it aloud, it would be any better. Composition and performance are two entirely different skills. I’ve attended enough author readings to know this is true.
But, keep it in mind, maybe. Tuck that thought away, and if there’s a piece—a short essay, a vignette, a poem—that really clicks with you, go back to it, maybe even read it aloud, and see if there’s something else, something ephemeral, something hidden in the recitation that is more powerful than what mere words convey.
k
