Study of Loss
We spend our lives failing—and it's not failing—
it's getting good at something no one else
cares about.
Listen. While I'm down here
the coins thump my skull
in random intervals, like tiny welts
of fire.
As if I somehow ended up at the bottom
of a wishing well.
And I'm not tasked to lift anyone else's dreams
upward.
Not even my own. I'm just down here
to study loss.
And what you learn... in the end... is that you're never losing.
You're just earning the strength to give up properly.
A Way Through
When a rock earns
his eye because water
drips in the same
spot for decades,
there is a way through.
And if that drip is not
a constant tear,
but the sweat of a cloud
that never gave up.
Firelight
I am incapacitated
by the small stuff.
Like the rage of imprisonment.
So I dream in the sweat
of every monk
who remains
in the bedroom
of a mind's isolation,
chanting some primal
tongue into its own firelight.
Obscurity
Will there be a skylight in that place
to hear the rain unlock and shatter?
Will there be women smearing
gold across each other's mouths—
to indicate where they become the openings
to lanterns.
Or. Is it dark in obscurity.
With bows of cedar pinning the chest
to loam until
someone kneels beside you and says, Woman, please.
Obscurity oils itself in the sheen of
ten thousand suns. All anyone has to do
is open a book and touch.
Part Myth
For now it's just me un-welding ringneck doves from my
throat, wedging crescent moon to collarbone to glow like the enamel
on a midnight whale.
I ache.
To pour sunlight upon your chest so gold it would tear
a hole right through you. And the other side
would be part myth, wondering if you'd
need to pack your belongings into boxes, move to Mount Olympus—
is cardboard even allowed there?
I ache.
To turn these haunted years into libraries full of meadow
song, so when a reader enters he forgets the nonsense of
books and unravels over the orange of an open poppy.
But who are we kidding. These years I've made a grave into
a boat and I sail around the yard inspecting the lives of magpies.
It should end well. It always ends well. It's a poem we took
to a training class to mimic the sea.
Troubled Artists
Roll the piano off the cliff,
call it music when it lands.
Out of
my skin.
Lightning bolts weave drunk between teeth
or keys mistaken as mouth.
Smoke rises from lips
wrapped in prison walls of mahogany
shattered on craggy rock—
erased of longing.
To be elsewhere.
The green sea shackled to shore
playing the wreckage until
it is drowned.
Copyright © 2025 Otis Nebula Press. All rights reserved.