Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, had a hammer named Mjölnir. Mjölnir was considered a fierce weapon that could level mountains and summon lightning with every blow. In this poetry blog, every Thursday, (Thor’s Day), Mjölnir will forge only song - sing of the mysteries and beauties of the world.

Thursday, December 30, 2021

THE ALGORITHM

Careful where you click.
And how often.

In other words: 
where you put 

your time, energy
and attention matters.

Like magic, an algorithm 
may form without 

you even knowing it
and then, before too long, 

it is an intelligence
that is busy outsmarting

and outwitting you,
maneuvering you into

data structures that confound you
and that simply don’t compute,

while all the while
you are operating

under a compilation of impressions
and iterating beliefs that tell you:

I am solving a problem,
not creating one,

when in fact you're
bugging up the system,

hard-coding a virus 
into a virtual reality.


Thursday, December 23, 2021

EYE LOUPE 

Wherever you 
put it down 

or point it
watch what happens

to what’s under 
the suction 

of its scrutiny:
a thing 

magically magnifies.
Our minds 

do this also: magnify.
Which is why 

we must be
careful.

Depending upon 
our mood

we may perceive
a problem 

where there isn’t
one and yet

we magnify 
its size

tenfold 
and then 

find ourselves,
without knowing it,

focused on 
our fixation

and captured within
its fine framing,

caught
within its loop.







Thursday, December 16, 2021

IN THE MANNER OF THE WORD

At the party
I watched the words, 

who came in costume,
act out their pantomimes:

    make love to potato chips, 
    one chip at a time,

    weep mournfully over the texture 
    of their own imaginary skin,

    diabolically folding napkins as if 
    each crease were a new province of evil,  

    arm wrestle with the spice and spunk
    of impassioned foreplay,

    give massages like spastics 
    in the middle of a melt-down,

    pull up their argyle socks as 
    Einsteins' solving theoretical proofs,

and thought to myself,
if only we could express 

ourselves this freely
we might put an end 

to our own charade, 
and give up playing 

dress-up for one brief moment,
and stand fully exposed, 

as if we were the word naked
standing naked before itself.






Thursday, December 9, 2021

BAUDELAIRE AND THE BAGUETTE

“The French have a different word for everything,”
Steve Martin said that, and it’s true.
 
The other night, in a lazy sort of way,
in a kind of mental saunter, 
I came across a French word 
I had never encountered before,
before sleep, in a book on wayfaring.
 
The word was flâneur. 
It is nearly onomatopoeic.
It feels a bit drowsy in the mouth,
like the tongue is going numb 
in the very act of saying it.
And yet it also feels posey,
like it finishes with a slight swagger.
 
It was a thing in 19th century France, 
to be a flâneur, a loafer and a lounger. 
To be a Baudelaire strolling
down the boulevard, 
a connoisseur of the street.
To wander with no purpose.
To be a passionate spectator.
It was an art form to be a man of leisure.
 
Oh, what I would give to idle my days away
with no sense of urgency 
and nothing to do but savor
the ebb and flow of time
like a flavor, like a Parisian cheese 
on a baguette I symbolistically bite into.






Thursday, December 2, 2021

MATH BACKWARDS

I start with the sum
and work my magic 
backwards—choose
and use anything
I can lay my 
mathematician hands on:
my imagination  
a protractor
decimal points
powers and roots
proofs and theorems
differential equations
Fibonacci numbers, pi
probability theory
permutations formulas
inverse trigonometry, calculus
all in an effort to create 
the equation (the problem) 
that my mind has already 
solved, so I can, 
like a modern day Pythagoras, 
play slip and slide 
up and down the slope 
of my hypothetical hypotenuse.




Thursday, November 25, 2021

THE JUGGLER’S EYES

I didn’t listen to Rabbit,
who taught me how to juggle.

Stay away from the trees, she said, 
the branches will pluck

what you’re juggling
right out of the air.

I didn’t listen.
I just went right on juggling.

And for reasons
I didn’t quite understand

I became bewildered 
and befuddled by my

little circus act. And then,
sure enough, like Rabbit 

had predicted, a tree took 
what I had been tossing

up and down, from 
hand to hand, 

and left me empty-handed
with nothing to juggle.

I sat down beneath those branches
like the Buddha at the base

of the bodhi tree,
and waited—waited 

for the season to change,
for the tree to lose its leaves,

for the tree to give me back
what was mine. And sure enough, 

when autumn came,
the leaves fell from their limbs

and with them dropped 
what I had tossed 

too high. I picked the little orbs up
off the ground and put them 

where they belonged, back 
in their sockets.

It was then that 
I finally saw how 

blind I had been
to my own blindness,

and just had to laugh.
I howled like Coyote,

and was grateful,
so grateful, for a taste 

of my own medicine
and the genius in its trickery. 





Thursday, November 18, 2021

PASSING GAS

Maybe the Big Bang
was just one epic fart,

a cosmic flatulence, of sorts.
I have gas, but mine is not  

of mythic proportions, 
thank god. At least 

that’s what I tell myself.
But maybe it is.

Maybe those trapped 
bubbles inside my belly

are nothing more than 
a deep desire for expansion,

like hydrogen and helium
had at the beginning of Time,

that gave rise to 
the stars and the planets,

the suns and the moons,
the constellations and the galaxies, 

all inside  
an expanding space,

a boundless belly.
Maybe all my bloating

is an intelligence
all its own,

roiling for the chance to join
with a source and force

greater than the body
and bubble my narrow being 

can offer. I am ready 
for that day to come,

for my own Big Bang moment,
a release of such a magnitude

that everything I carry inside me
that might be fuming or swirling 

finds its way free
and in that singularity

becomes lighter and brighter
than it’s ever been, 

and oh what a glorious 
heartburn that’ll be.


Thursday, November 11, 2021

CURATING CUBISM

Every day I wake
and look 

at the figure
in front of me.

And every day
it shape-shifts 

into some new
form

that has me 
think 

some new thought
about it. 

And with this 
altered thinking 

my soul grows heavy
or light 

depending upon 
how I am seeing

the thing I see 
that day.  It’s not 

easy going through life
with a kaleidoscope

in my mind.
Oh, how I wish 

I could take all this 
thinking 

that gets 
stretched

across hours,
days, weeks,

and months,
and put it down,

into a canvas, 
collapse it

into a cubist 
painting, 

strip it 
of time 

and space,
render it 

into 
one muted 

flattened moment,
that I would hang

like a mirror
on a gallery

wall. All that 
thinking, 

all in one place,
within one frame,

within one room,
what a relief 

that would be,
how free I’d be.

I could visit it,
the painting, 

the thinking,
whenever I wanted to

instead of
it visiting me

randomly, compulsively
all at a moment’s notice.

It would be
outside of me

as something 
I could witness

instead of being 
a thing inside me

like a cancer
I couldn’t cut or cure,

like a child I couldn’t
comfort or cradle.

With it outside me
I wouldn't 

feel so 
powerless over it.

I'd be the curator 
and in control 

once and 
for all.





Thursday, November 4, 2021


HOUSES CLOSE BY

Apart like
stars or atoms, 

notes 
in a fugue.

Like voices 
held      in silence,

in the 
expanse

splayed      between
the in-between.

These houses
 might as well 

be minds
trying 

not to try 
to think, speak.

What do they     hear
         in their      separate 

 confidences          
among the       walls 

 and          windows
ceilings and doors,

tables and chairs,
inside         all the insides 

                in their       distances,
            surrounded by
 
all that’s 
outside and gathering

                in the space 
 around them?

  Is it hope, trust, 
      peace.       A prayer?

   Or simply       a breath 
                breathing 

                 its way 
back home?


Thursday, October 28, 2021

 THE LION’S LULLABY


Sit with it.
Be with it.
Look into its 
anguished eyes.
Do not flinch.
This will be 
the hardest thing 
you will ever do.
Eventually, it will get 
drowsy, then drop 
off to sleep.
Be with it also
as it sleeps.

The next hardest thing 
you will do will be to 
know what to do 
knowing that this lion 
of shame is asleep
inside you and will 
wake soon.
When it does, 
remember … the eyes.
Stay with the eyes.
This is the practice.
Presence is 
the lion’s lullaby.


Thursday, October 21, 2021

TRUST

Use what 
you cannot
 
control 
or see

to power you 
on your voyage.

Hoist 
your sail high.

See the canvas 
swell and billow.

Trust
the wind.

Before that 
you must

trust 
in trust,

which might be 
even more

invisible than 
air itself.











Thursday, October 14, 2021

THE INVITATION

You could fasten
feathers to it.

Hear the air 
riffle through

its wings
as it takes flight.

Imagine it
carries you,

buoys you 
up and out of

the grinding
mind of time,

where the
days, the hours, 

and minutes 
aren’t counting

themselves down 
or arcing 

or spiraling
in one direction

or another
toward some

weighty destination.
There is only

the unboundedness 
of being, 

the now
that’s underneath you

and all around you
like a wondrous 

altitude or wind. 
The all of

everything is here.
This is the invitation

you’ve been invited
into as a breath 

that’s airborne.
What are you 

waiting for?
Drop into 

this moment, 
the moment 

before you.
Don’t let the fear 

of falling 
keep you 

from flying.
Say yes 

to this 
most beautiful bird.











Thursday, October 7, 2021

     ROPE 

I take the braided strands
           and unwind them 
    from one another 
               so rope is 
      no longer a tie 
           that’s bound up 
      in its own binding 
   cut off from 
           the intricacy 
        and intimacy
             once woven 
            within its
                weave. 

                    Now free          from its 
             own bondage         no one would 
                             dare         call rope 
       twisted, tortured         or entangled.