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sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
@sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
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sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
Final poem of #napowrimo I will try to keep a weekly schedule going forward. Day 30, "Difficult People"
May 1, 2025 at 2:11 AM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo day 29 "Ars Poetica" #poetry
Sometimes I gaze at you and wonder why you fear so much these noises of thundering motors– every passing car has its sights on you. It is easy to metaphorize– an unfinished fence clearly not filling its purpose, a still-wet painting scraped down to the raw canvas. I try not to think of you this way because it puts me in charge of your completion. I’ve said many times I don’t know best. I shouldn’t be trusted to save another. I will aim to celebrate the vibrant spectrum you shine back at me and scatter in the corners of my home without knowing you are doing it. I hope you enjoy the water from this cup, that it fills you with the strength you need to rejoice in yourself and walk a different path.
April 30, 2025 at 5:35 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo poem for yesterday, April 28th: Pulled to the Floor
I am convinced my office is haunted. Everything I hang, while I am away, falls from the walls like a quiet tremor shook it loose. So far, my African American art retrospective poster, carried from Harlem in a tube, The frame was shattered, fixed and rehung, to crash down twice before I just threw it away; A signed Bitch Planet cover, Vintage 2014, which I didn’t fully stand by, anyway; a comic about anxiety I bought mostly to support the artist and because I want students to know I care about anxiety; and the wooden stencil of Margaret Atwood asserting a word, after a word, after a word is power, ready to spray paint on any wall or sidewalk I care to deface. Someone up there hates my politics, clearly. I have worked hard to make this office my own. I clean it when I can’t stand the clutter piling up like I’m building a scaffold of comic books and dirty coffee cups to support some thoughtless tower of detritus. Today I arrive to find my two whiteboards ripped down and slid behind the huge beige filing cabinet I use for construction paper, my racquetball racket, and Swiffer dust cloths. The boards bear my notes for some class I never taught but carry in my heart to pull out some day. I don’t know why these Command Stirps fail and leave stark bare surfaces surrounding me. Perhaps it’s a hint to meditate more, gaze into the blank nothingness, collect lighter reminders of myself or maybe just keep these things private. I’ll contemplate this longer before putting them up again.
April 29, 2025 at 5:57 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
Second #napowrimo poem of the day, "One Last Walk"
One Last Walk In the record of my life there is a section stamped with an emblem of a tennis ball mid flight. One paragraph was written in the cold of a gloomy cinder block cottage. I sat there staring into my footprints on the carpet trying to spread myself across the lawn and dry in the sun. There is a symmetry to this most recent occasion. We walk the muddy trail of Lake Padden park. I’ve seen it in ice so slick only my dog could climb the narrow slope while I wait below and yell. This is the spot where she stopped to chew the grass where the woods give way to a long scar of towers and cables that must connect town to country somehow. They crackle subtly like the flash of glitter stuck in an unnoticed crack. My family came here to share this trail with whatever crows or fieldmice or off-leash lap dogs roam here. We do not lay your story to rest here among these familiar things. Be here, where we leave you until the rain washes this away, and this paragraph gives way to another.
April 29, 2025 at 6:30 AM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
Several #napowrimo poems coming today as I catch up. This one's called "Far from the Worst Case"
Far from the worst case In the future when I have a child, I understand that times will be vicious and desperate in ways both subtle and obvious. There’s no way around this right now, anyway. But, oh, a wonderful machine could take to the air and suck the carbon from the sky. That might do it. You never know. How should we prepare for our future– the human concerns? I could pack a go bag with dried mango slices and protein bars, a first aid kit I got for camping, and lots of water. Or not, which honestly might be sufficient. But in the future when I have a child I must learn to plan out over the crest of tomorrow.
April 28, 2025 at 4:31 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
Only a few days of #napowrimo left. Anyone have a prompt for me for these last few poems? Day 25, Book Club.
Book Club Read this story with me. This can be the way of our love stacking images on a shelf layered between firm colorful covers. I brought you groping eyes that slide from occasion to revelation and back again: the waves crest and die at our feet. You brought the werewolves grotesquely entwined in wealth and poverty at the edges of civilization. They sniff the air and find their kin weeping. This game of knowing together puffs us outward like a balloon expands into the crowd of gas surrounding us the skin stretching through it. Rise like a rocket with me to the burning light of condensed memory. Read this book with me of our lives together and lay it down again.
April 26, 2025 at 4:39 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
Here is my baggy, didactic poem about RFK Jr's fuckery. #napowrimo #poetry Day 24: Preventable Disease
Therefore, when parents say, I wish my child did not have autism, what they're really saying is, I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead. – Jim Sinclair “Don’t Mourn for Us” The risks and costs of this crisis are a thousand times more threatening to our country than COVID-19. Autism is preventable and it is unforgivable that we have not yet identified the underlying causes. We should have had these answers 20 years ago. -- U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Once we were sick  with longing outside the bounds of loving. There were no shortage of explanations: female or male spirit misplaced, child abuse obviously perverted or born this way. Whatever it is, we had it. It took a pack of homosexuals charging the doors to ruin a good diagnosis, admit there could be gay psychiatrists or teachers we weren’t ill, necessarily.  So the medicine changed, and the questions went in other directions, like  whether we marry or whatnot.  - continues on next image -   I want to stand up for disease.  Disease can be a metaphor for uncertainty about the future: will my child embarrass me with its chaotic body, will we survive this inhumanity or not? When possible, diseases need cures, definite if not satisfying endings. Some diseases are preventable. We can disarm some traps before they go off— stop calling people broken for telling stories about the world and the role of love in it. Let us move through the world as we each do.  This disease you fear is mourning. You can’t prevent it.  You can vaccinate, though. - continues in next image - Of course, the stakes are high.  Who knows what they’ll say causes autism? Same old things: parents, the drinking water, culture problems. Who knows, either, how such people once defined should be treated, prepared for.  Mourn the need to make some choices. Grip the fear of a divided future in your hand and let it drop beside you.  This disease is hard to bear, the grind of uncertainty,  The worrying child on their way to a shadowy future.  Diagnoses change.  We explain ourselves in sharper terms as our allies fill the room. Tomorrow there may be no sick autistic people sick from their autism alone.  It is not clear if this is preventable. We must mourn the world we live in and the powerful people we share it with.  - see you tomorrow -
April 25, 2025 at 4:54 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
Three poems for #napowrimo today to make up for those I missed.
Red Flags Protect me from my vague moralizing, plunging me like a clown in a dunk tank. A surprise like a heavy softball hitting home. It’s what the thing is for, to throw you into the deep. The Assignment This disaster spins out inevitable like a sparking fuse. I lit it myself to feel the urgency of the moment. I was not serious about being serious. Don’t read that assignment after all though I told you to. I didn’t know the risk of a plane full of parents and sons, a venerable institution once resented sitting tall with a bloody nose. Nobody asked me to do this. And certainly there’s enough to hate about me. So don’t read this sickly protest or the next one, either. Best Served Hot You assure me kimchi pizza will be delicious spread all over the dough with thin sheets of tofu laid over the pie and my special cashew cheese on top. I believe you have been watching my reaction to spice so far, bravery and ecstasy comradely of painful sensations, like a pinch where you’re sensitive, a shock even when telegraphed every time. I’ve made you something, too, on a plate under a glass cloche, steam dripping down the side. Unlike the kimchi pizza, my dish is not to be shared, except with a select few, who know it’s toxic and approach fork first anyway.
April 23, 2025 at 6:22 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry #dogs Day 19 "Muzzle"
Muzzle Vegans don’t own dogs, officially: a colonial  concept, a tradition as sacred    as a wandering, mumbled hymn. It’s incoherent and obvious. It’s ordained.  Animals can, and often must,  be property. I begin by smearing the  hard plastic muzzle with peanut butter.  I set it by his crate, near his bowl. If this works, I will coax him further with treats held just through the muzzle’s bars so he must lower his face in the cage to get the reward.  Vegans don’t own dogs, officially.  We recognize that dogs want choice, even if it’s just a belly overstuffed with  anything even this kibble I dump for him. Which is also vegan, by the way.  Last time I forced the muzzle on him, he thrashed his head wildly, crushing houseplants and knocking  me on my ass: thanklessly.  With Karly, his sister, gone,  he gets my whole attention, which means he’d better get less dangerous, and fast. Vet techs last week dragged him out to the lobby with a muzzle in hand. He was a beehive ready to swarm. He yanked his head away and lunged to get himself free from the vet staff who want to pump his stomach and save his life.
 Vegans don’t know what’s best, as a policy.  This dog wants what he wants.  I know he must go to the vet. He wants to go to the park, and so do I. I want to make it back alive and not prosecuted. He wants me, my hands specifically which give comfort and food and the outside. In a month or so, I will try to apply the straps and see if he whirls himself around like a lunatic institutionalized, writhing, pathetic,  a danger to himself. This is how you get to see the world. Consent doesn’t factor into it. This is all my doing. 
 Some people take flowers and  weave them through the bars of the muzzle, a sign to other dog-havers at the park that this is a joyful dog who just wants wrong sometimes.  Freedom like this sits heavy across the brow Like a cage does in the sunshine.  
April 19, 2025 at 11:13 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry #nature
Day 18, "Still Life"
Three times so far I have looked down the cliffside to the creek below my apartment to find a blue heron stalking fish. Twice, it scrunched down low and lifted itself skyward with no elegance at all, like a man struggling not to drown. It scooped the air with its preposterous wings as it rambled into the sky.  It reminds me I share this apartment complex Is dinosaur country, and the cars and garbage bags turn out to be mostly human concerns.  There are no herons today.  Today there is a new presence in the creek.  Someone has hurled a gray shopping cart over the edge.  Maybe it’s one from Winco, half a mile away. It seems impossible that it could have tumbled clatteringly through the bramble of choking Himalayan blackberries down twenty feet below.  I honestly don’t know what to make of it. It’s baffling.  This is the sixth such shopping cart I’ve seen here.  Most get stuck in the thicket of vines and spikes,  but two have made it to the water. Shining like springtime,  the stream passes straight through them.  To the north, an orange one stands upright somehow,  on its wheels, like some cryptid had the thought to go shopping for a thousand rounded stones and whatever tadpoles live there this time of year.  The orange one has moved downstream as the waters have risen, But it still holds itself and the air within it upright.  This isn’t what happens when you forget something. Nobody lost track of things. This is the scene of an angry compromise, an unfilled hunk of consumer potential  fallen clumsily to earth like a heron ascends, a brutality for all the air it can grab.  The dimming afternoon light shines off the galvanized tines of the  noble shopping cart.  Some hidden sculpin pauses its swims and nibbles at the gunk  accumulated on the wheels. A shopping cart sitting on its side in a long, slow-moving creek
April 19, 2025 at 2:35 AM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry Day 17: Learning Lives Here
Begin with yourself in the room,  here, drawing a picture of yourself flying through outer space on a sparking rocket  just big enough to hug.  Can you believe you need to choose?  Can you agree that choice is the only engine to push us forward? Let me get in the way only like a server handing you the menu, interrupting your dinner conversation only long enough to force your decision.  Do something ugly and eager. Bargain with your capacities. Just let me know when you’re ready to move on. 
April 18, 2025 at 4:14 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
Day 16: Part of the Family #napowrimo #poetry #furries #polyamory
Part of the Family What do I have to offer a girl like a candle In the dark? I put these tacky, dyed daisies At your feet In an old mason jar. You are playing guitar In an ice cream shop. A nine-year-old Wants to talk about The Beach Boys, Who gives you $20, Which you accept as tribute. What about that man, Resonant as a conga drum, Who lifts the sun each morning? He holds two stuffed plushies. When they speak it is with his voice. What can I offer a man such as this? I have a car, I guess. I have a plan for the future. I can draft an account of my love. I will adjust the head band you gave me, with cute panda ears. I scratch your back. I move the daisies to the table so everyone can see My role in the pack.
April 17, 2025 at 10:03 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
Here are two poems to catch us up. #napowrimo #poetry Day 14, Emergency Vet April 14th 3:30pm #sonnet and Day 15 Mopping the Floor.
Emergency Vet, 3:30pm It’s lucky we live so close. I could walk Past the scarred over pavement of the Guide, Where past the mall, Near the sex shop, My younger dog and I ascend the too-steep driveway. The lot is full today, so I park illegally. He causes a scene the whole time, lashing out as if he’d be happy here Only over everyone’s dead body. I wish he would stand to be muzzled. As it is, he stands announcing that his reason has left him. I’m too tired to be embarrassed. I pay my bill. He’d eaten the meds I left sitting out. I found the gold foil wrapper all over the floor Each blister pack shredded and scattered Across the bedroom floor, like it’d blown up from within. So here we are again. Half a mile from home Sitting with five other dog owners and a nine-year-old Whose grandfather is explaining the rules of Pong. Maybe they’re having a worse visit than I am. Mopping the Floor This water comes out Like a secret you can’t hide any longer: This, I say, was on my floors. This. It’s easy to blame it on the sick Dog Who gunked up the place plenty even before she got sick. I have her red-handed—the water is like her fur, dark and lively like a roiled up creekbed.   The silt in there is life. The fibers of the mop grab it And clear it away. Collect it elsewhere. There’s a space now for new mud And spoon drippings and who can say what vivid pollution I’ll welcome in and call waste tomorrow. Today, this clean floor is ready to catch what comes.
April 15, 2025 at 4:16 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
Say goodbye to Karly. 5/5/2011 - 4/13/2025
Karly was a close companion to me for the past 9 years.
Here are a few of my favorite pictures of her. A few also feature Prism, my younger dog, who now gets to be the sole focus of my attention. @acelessthan3.bsky.social

[No day 13 poem for #NaPoWriMo]
Black dog sitting with a white man in a hat, sitting in the desert A black dog running with blurry background A gray dog licking a black dog's mouth just as she's yawning Three humans and two dogs
April 14, 2025 at 4:10 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
Didn't write a poem for day 13.
April 14, 2025 at 3:37 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry Day 12 "Observed by Others"
April 14, 2025 at 4:17 AM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry Day 11: Picking Nettles
I have to admit that I know far less than I should about the plants I share the trails with.  I paddle along the muddy edges of Bellingham jonesing for my fix of soft earth and uneven tree roots.  An excuse to get sun on my scalp. You two brought gloves and knifes today,  foraging for dark green shoots of stinging nettles.  I hold Prism on his leash while you work, keeping him from leaping three more times  soul-first into a running creek.  The trick is to boil away the sting, you tell me,  turn poison into medicine or curry. I may someday learn to identify  the trailing blackberry vines  peaking at the edges of the underbrush,  or the branch where there will soon be  crimson pinpricks of huckleberries clustered in the sun.  For now, I will keep the dog in line and wait for you to hunt me dinner. 
April 13, 2025 at 1:31 AM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry
Anticipation We are all farmers of possibility. We lay our intentions down with soil and the soft nutritious composted dead. The best we can do is amuse ourselves while the possibilities play out— I should go do activism, I should write a new song, and I should not sit and watch In despair in case my work is wasted. I press round nasturtium seeds into every Edge and bare spot. They’re overwhelming when they grow Flat plates reaching all directions for the sun. Those that grow, anyway. I will try not to resent the burn Of possibility, Obscured under ground For now.
April 11, 2025 at 9:29 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry Day 9, "Palliative Care"
Palliative Care Don’t move too much. Collect dust like a sword plant On a shelf, All beautiful organic forms, Impermiable except the tangling ball of root at your core Which wants nothing but water And the basic stuff of life. Circulate for a while Longer In the air of my apartment, The particles of you lifting when Some neighbor passes the crack in the door frame, And settling again when you’ve Grunted your protective grunts And calmed down to Your bare surviving self. You are a prism’s shadow on the wall, a hint at the complexity around us, A solid thing at the heart of a brilliant transformation. Sit with me a while longer And eat anything you desire.
April 10, 2025 at 6:47 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry
Emergency vet April 8th 6:30pm Sick old dog of mine A hole torn to the tendon It’s gross. I hate it.
April 9, 2025 at 4:42 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry
This weekend ended at least three times.  Stopped being one thing, pivoting, shuttling back with another thread to move the fabric imperceptibly longer.  This weave is indecision you can hold and wrap yourself in for a while early/late at night when she’s so still you stop to feel for breath.  She’ll live for now, and I’ll come back from the brink of decision making and bob like a branch in the creek, sometimes flowing, sometimes dry or trickling.  I can’t say I know what to do, but I can live with indecision and for a while so can she. 
April 8, 2025 at 5:37 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry
A horse gallops beneath an alien space ship Who’s faster than this orange figure spread across the canvas board I bought at Michael’s real cheap, Which once reared back to push Another horse I removed from the picture When I painted the scene. It’s symbolic. Light reflected through the mind And not the eyes It doesn’t look like you think It looks. Above the prairie Hoovers the great eye Of some primal face Hunting for a symbol of freedom Like a horse Or perfect orange Like this horse Scraped and smeared Onto this board. I hope it’s nice to look at.
April 7, 2025 at 10:35 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry at the Summit Adventure Park in Bellingham, WA
Part 1 I wonder how they choose the music that plays at this trampoline park.  Boogie Wonderland. Yesterday. Brittney.   There must be seventeen tons of children here getting heavier and lighter higher and lower.  The teens practice backflips like they might lose to the earth and get stuck to it like a fly on paper. They jerk violently, they alight.  Part 2 I stand on the side in my non grippy socks.  You can’t fool me into jumping.  Two weeks ago I lifted a bag of soil  and my back still hurts when I bend.  I’ll live.  I’ll be on my phone.  I do remember what happened the 21st of September.  Have fun, kid. 
April 6, 2025 at 3:45 PM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry Day 4, "Never Trust Tears"
One day in the spring a leaf climbed out like an answer to the question  we ask when we’re growing, about the beginning of things, the curl of this hour as a branch proves itself alive. 
April 5, 2025 at 5:09 AM
sayhitoandrew.bsky.social
#napowrimo #poetry

Lots more sad poems about my dogs to come.
National Poetry Writing Month, Day 3, Emergency vet, 11:30pm You who lick and tear Down to the red, wet hide, You whom I honor As your leg swells with infection Permeable as a tire leaking air Slowly getting flatter, I honor you again.  It makes no sense to say you will die, When I mean you’ll die tonight In this hospital In these minutes.  Always in the future.  In the future. 
April 4, 2025 at 6:38 PM