A POEM A DAY

I'm just happy to be here.
April 16, 2025

10/30: Ode to the Pastrami Reuben at Roegels Barbecue Co.

With thanks to Russell, Misty, Bruce and the whole Roegels Barbecue Co. crew

Thursday is a special day
Smoke rolls into the sky
like a spire
I chase the smoke like a dream
come true, like a family heirloom
The gospel of low and slow
casts a holy shadow
I know what blows in the wind
I know what time gives
and how time takes.
The Pastrami Reuben is a gift
time gives, made by hands
that take what was given
Some days, I show up too late,
and I am still grateful
What I want isn’t always what I get,
and I am still grateful
What I receive is a recipe
made with love and smoke
I’m learning the lesson of letting go,
no matter the teacher.
Good things come to those who wait.
When I reach for my plate,
I trust my fate.
When Thursdays come,
The Pastrami Reuben is an offering too
tender not to fall-apart.
The bark, a piece of art.
I offer all of my senses to this moment.

Leave a comment
April 11, 2025

9/30: A MAN IN BLACK EATS A PINK CONCHA

For My Grandpa Fred on his 84th birthday

It’s your birthday, today, Grandpa.
84 years alive.
I’m 33 years here, now.
You love God, your family, and Johnny Cash,
the Man in Black.
I’m rocking black boots and pants just for you.
This morning, I eat a pink concha,
the same kind you’d buy on those mornings
I woke up early enough to eat before my brothers beat me to it.
As a boy, I learned if you put a sea shell to your ear,
you can hear the ocean waves.
I take the pink concha and hear the
ocean of time you had to travel through
to be here, now, celebrating your birthday.
Did grandma make you breakfast?
Did you stay out trouble?
I hear your voice call her Guerra, or your supervisor
I married my own Guerra too, a beautiful Mexican woman
who supervises me too. You told me a story once,
the last Easter before I would become a father myself,
about a boy who gave
you an orange when you had nothing to eat
on the coldest winter day of your life,
You were just a Mexican boy
with hunger in your bones—
and how many times have you fed me?
How many times have I had a plate of food
you worked to buy?
The love you built into our lives
became a blueprint I follow to this day.
My son, your great grandson, stands in front of you,
mesmerized and full of laughter, clapping his hands,
running through the house you built when I was a boy.
When I was boy, you’d ask me,
who’s grandpa’s little boy?
Now I am a father, and I ask my son,
Who’s daddy’s little boy?
Another year around the sun
Remember when you saw the solar eclipse?
I do. I watched a video Grandma recorded.
You’re standing outside, in the driveway, with glasses to see the darkness
standing on your own two feet, looking up into the sky.

Leave a comment
April 11, 2025

8/30: Birdsong

With thanks to The Engines of Our Ingenuity, Episode 3310

When we walk into school together, the birds are with us too.
The romantic poets romanticized birdsong with scientific precision.
I carry you through the music each morning.
I never named what I heard
until today.
The birds sing and we call it birdsong. The soundtrack to
the small steps you take beneath the trees.
We all have our antidote to loneliness.
A reminder of our worthiness.
Evidence of our goodness.
Listening makes me a witness to what is.
The whispers we share on the walk to school
blend beneath the morning symphony.
It feels like a show just for you and me,
and before the curtain calls and I have to go,
You say DaDa and ByeBye and wave goodbye.

Leave a comment
April 11, 2025

7/30: The Apple Tree

I move my mouth to form a letter
and you follow me like a mirror.
Together, we make sounds
called words. In other words,
I’m trying to teach you to speak,
to pull your voice from the well.
Yesterday, you say Appppppuuulll
in the grocery store. Of course you mean
apple, and the word falls out of your mouth
like an apple from a tree. Of course I mean,
the tree is me.

Leave a comment
April 8, 2025

6/30: Springtime on a Sunday in Houston

Your mama tells me she used to feed the ducks
at Hermann Park with her mama, your grandma.
The oak tree where I kissed my-soon-to-be-wife
during our engagement photoshoot is still standing,
branches bending below, almost touching the earth.
Everyone is outside. Kisses exchanged at crosswalks
and sidewalks. I feel joy in every stop you take. The train
passes by and we wave. Your voice is music to the birds.
You want to walk everywhere. Even when your steps
turn into a stumble, you stand tall. Me and the sky,
both in awe. We forgot your sweater today, and when
the sun stands behind the shadow, your mother would
hold you close to keep you warm. I put my hoodie on your legs.
Halle and Luis join the adventure, our neighbors-turned-friends
take pictures of us as a family on a Spring Sunday in Houston,
a memory to memorialize this time. Time passes by and Mama and I
hold you, sometimes together, sometimes apart. My favorite part
of the day is when you and mama rode the carousel. I stand in the audience,
and watch your face spin with joy each time you pass us by.
Mama laughs and holds you close, and the carousel feels like time itself,
with each passing second telling me what the last second meant,
and what the next second could mean. Next time, we’ll feed the ducks together,
with mama holding the bread, like she used to do, all of us together.

Leave a comment
April 8, 2025

5/30: Starfish

I think water is your element

In swim class, I hold your body

as the water holds us both

I used to hold my breath 

each time your head went

below water,
Now I exhale

like the bubbles you’re supposed

to spit out each time the water

goes into your mouth.
The smile on your face reflects
off the water

When you kick your feet,
it feels like you want to fly

swells and swallows
me whole.
I whisper, where’s mama?
And your body is a ship
set for shore, for True North

Mama is a lighthouse,

a silver smile through the storm.

My head so often

bobs beneath the water,

and I lose my eyes when

I hear your muffled voice

echo like a firework. I overhear another parent say,
you’ll never get this time back
The words rise and fall over me

like hands on a clock,

and when I look over my shoulder,

I see class is over.

Leave a comment
April 8, 2025

4/30: A Backgammon Poem

The most shit talking I do on Earth is when I play Backgammon
especially against my brothers,
especially against my brother Brent,
who is the person who talks the most shit on Earth when playing Backgammon
and I won’t lie, he’s got game. But I’m the reigning champ,
not exactly an underdog, just a dog with a bone,
and as he likes to say, it’s all about the story.
For however long the gods of luck will allow,
we play through the joy and the pain.
It goes back to boyhood,
when my Dad taught us how to play
a game for your mind.
In the summer, or on holidays,
we’d spend hours in a tournament,
a tradition forged by time.
Classic big-brother, little brother
battling back and forth
through the generations of sibling luck.
I cannot help that my tongue was forged
in the fire of being the middle child,
chasing smoke like a chance to
skip a step in the chain of command.
Words roll out my mouth like dice on the board
I don’t always know how they’ll land
I don’t always know when I can play
the next game of backgammon against my brothers
So the best out 2 of 3 quickly becomes a game of 5
until it evolves into a full 7 game series,
one of us always
extending
the inevitable ending.

Leave a comment
April 7, 2025

3/30: A Brief Reminder to Love Yourself from the Abandoned Chili’s on Westheimer

With thanks to Anis Mojgani

Take a deep breath.
Are your feet fixed to the ground?
Now is a good to time to announce
to the rest of the world that you
have not forgotten to love yourself.
The marquee of the Abandoned Chili’s on Westheimer
looks like a chalk board a teacher forgot to erase
on the last day before summer vacation.
I read, Love Yourself as I pass pay.
Anis Mojgani once wrote Speak every time you stand so you do not forget yourself
and that line has lived in the Abandoned Chili’s of my heart ever since
I was a teenager watching his poems on YouTube on my mother’s bedroom computer.

I am a father
now
in this timeline, driving down Westheimer during lunch time
My son, Mateo, is pulling words from the soil like flowers
delivered to our front door to tell his mama I love her.
Mateo has never met Anis Mojgani or been to Chili’s
But I know he loves himself
When Mateo meets a mirror,
the mirror meets Mateo lips
My boy kissing his existence
Love in his lips even without
the words to describe it
Guess that’s why I’m here
To hear him speak
every time he stands so
I do not forget
how to speak for myself,
which is
how a father-poet
loves himself.

Leave a comment
April 3, 2025

2/30: A Migration of Love

With thanks to Evita Tezeno, Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You” and Sofia

No one else makes me feel the colors that you bring me
is the title of the painting before me
on my birthday.
A husband holds his wife in the kitchen of their life,
and the color of their love brings me to my knees like a
proposal
I prepared for over and over for months.
The gallery is full of exhibits invoking love languages
and I think of all the languages I want to tell you love you
and the only two I know now.
Any love poem I write for you sometimes feels like a love poem for Houston.
It is my wife Adela’s birthday too.
Adela wears blue crescent moon earrings
I remember her buying years ago.
Sitting on the patio of Tiny Boxwood’s,
the song Blue Moon croons through the morning breeze
Joaquin wishes me a happy birthday and tells me
his peach tree waited to blossom for me, assuring
This is a good omen
A chocolate croissant kisses my lips then my love’s
This is a good omen
Adela sees an orange bellied robin descend
and run along the ground until its wings woke up
This is a good omen
How to measure what tethers us to tenderness?

We are looking for elephants from the Great Elephant Migration: A Coexistence Story
in the middle of Hermann Park, walking past the Oak Trees
where I kissed Adela years before for engagement photos
On the way to see the elephants, we run into
a woman who is also looking for the elephants
I see a sign about the Migration of Love and think
what is love if not movement between two places?
What is grief but the refusal of love to migrate to the great beyond?

The woman is named Sofia
Sofia offers to take our pictures under the pink rose arch
inside the McGovern Centennial Gardens
we pass on the way to see the elephants we’ve never seen before,
when suddenly, Sofia asks, do we know where the elephants are?
And her path becomes our path
She tells us, it is her birthday today
And her path becomes our path
She confides, her husband died three years ago,
and if she talks too much about it,
she will start to cry
And her path becomes our path
Sofia was kind and warm, wandering and alone
until she found us too
her grief, migrating to love
our love, migrating to love
The three of us moving together
on our birthday, alive under the sky
coexisting
with love and grief
as the candles on our cake.

Leave a comment
April 2, 2025

1/30: Depositions and Ducks

The voice is the first instrument.
I just finished using my voice in a deposition,
cross-examining a witness, pulling sound out of silence,
and weaving together a testimony.  
Mateo is learning how to talk,
how to tune, how to invite sound
under the roof of his mouth
and offer a home to the words he wishes to come out.  
We work on repetition and annunciation.
Senator Cory Booker just used his voice to give
a 25-hour filibuster to speak on behalf of the voiceless
I hear a voice inside my head and we get along
long enough until silence stumps one of us.
I am learning the sacred art of noticing

                  (and rising to speak
                  (and raising my voice from the well)

My father is taking in the small moments
He shares a video of a bee in his backyard
descending into the orchid flowers in full bloom
and the gravity of this love tethers me to the screen
I watch a video where a son holds his mother’s hand
on the golf course, and says, Slow down, mommy,
I want to enjoy this moment.
Is this my revolution?

A moment is time tapping against the infinite
This moment is a clue

I’m gathering clues
like words under the roof of Mateo’s mouth.

This morning, pink roses preside
over the concrete wall of my office parking lot
and I see another bee find the sweet nectar
of everything happening now
I’m taking in the small moments,
a circle is drawn around me until it becomes
A line I bend to my will
or an apple falling from the tree and down the hill
into the mirror of where I meet myself
like another moment, another clue

The voice is the first instrument to ask, who are you?

I’m rewinding time,
I’m learning to be a dad for the first time.
Beginnings beget beginnings.
I bear witness to an origin story
on the way to lunch
Another moment stole my senses
like a bee buzzing in sugar
like the earthquake of joy out my boy’s mouth
A parking lot plot unlike any other:

I see and hear a Mama Duck with her sixteen ducklings
in orbit, marching into a bush, jumping into the dirt.
The consequence of my curiosity leads to the discovery that
this Mama Duck brings her ducks out here once a year,
to show them how to walk, how not to get lost.
Are we ever alone in any moment?
My friend Alex says that this is the Universe reminding me to tune in.
So I do.
Right now,

Mateo’s voice is a box he loves to unpack,
a little duck learning to quack.
When I hold him, he sometimes will whisper a word
to himself like he wants to make a secret memory
Mateo is creating moments I want to rewind
If I pause time, I might lose a moment
I won’t avoid the future, I’ll just save it a seat.
The joy of being alive is as simple as writing my life down
as I’ve lived it
as I’ve loved it
every infinite moment
tuning me into an instrument.

Leave a comment