No Pictures – February 5, 2025 (Salt Lake City)
What if you traveled without taking pictures?
What would you do
If the only recorder,
Were your memories
Where would you walk,
With no map
What streets would you crawl
Who would you ask
When you got lost
And when you made it back
How would you tell the story
Of the old couple who took you in
When the night dropped and the weather turned
And you ate at their table
And they bade you off,
On a cold morning
And you boarded a bus,
Clutching an old tin matchbox,
The old man had given you,
Because you were scared you wouldn’t remember
City On Fire – January 9, 2024 (Cambridge)
This city is a conflagration
It will burn, slow at first, and reach a peak where the flames never will be higher
In the embers, some remnants from the original will survive
And the pile will be built anew
And the city will burn again, maybe higher now, past the past-thought peak
Have you ever looked at a fire, and thought–why it looks the same
As fires of the past–No
No, no two fires are alike
Maybe in form but never in path
So why try so hard today? To contain the conflagration
To keep it at a simmer
To fuel it only with the driest logs–throw it all in!The fire yearns for the wet wood
for the pine branches, and the sap
That drips from foaming mouth
And rubs against the crackling birch bark
This city is a conflagration
May it burn forever