What, then, of the glory gifted, profligate, to Man?
Children, elevated, laughing in firm arms,
Know more of joy—more often—granted in Creation
Than we worried-careful creatures:
Scheming, thinking, shoring up and down
Through grey and dismal lives enlivened
Momently and rarely by a glimpse
Of what it was
To be a child.

Burn these bloody twisted branches,
Aching, to the ground.
Memories of dreaming sleep
Were all we ever found.
If, perhaps, there is some hope
Enshadowed by your tree…
If there is, it never was
The kind of thing we see.

Love without an image true
Is never love at all,
So we struck the ground anew
And planted in the Fall.
We tried to raise a solid Oak
On which we could rely;
But every seed of each rank weed
Turned all our plans awry.

Setting ship with eager sail
Vainly to the West,
We sought to find some alter place
On which our heads could rest;
But when the prow struck stony soil
We had lost our breath:
Violence and endless toil
Rounded with a death.

Turning pages stained with hope
In tears of blood-soaked love,
We found and gave all that You had
And sacrificed a Dove.

4/19/2025: 14:36 GMT: Minor edits to correct two transcriptions errors

“I don’t believe in anyone who says love, love, love.
It means self, self, self.”

—Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

Like Proteus, her form would not resolve
(When substance flickers, surely it is flame):
I felt heroic holding her—stood firm—
Bare feet in singing waves and stinging sand.

Texture and appearance—all sensation—
Writhing as if desperate for release;
Jealous, I clutched for each comfort eked
By accident or intent—either—both…

I maintained my grip and wouldn’t, then, say why:
A novel form of fear, the intimation
That her double-mindedness demanded
Conflict as proof-positive of passion.

Lust of flesh and eye, my pride of youth
Had drawn me to her: how I longed to gaze
And glory at her glance; to taste and touch;
To drink her fire in to every sense.

    God, with wisdom, gave us senses
    For the love of Him and His Creation…
    Why do I want less than what He wants for me?
    Narrowness and meanness—poverty.

The brushing of her lips; my dread of death—
Or dying; our denial of the doom
Which we both sensed above us; every thing
We harboured superstitiously unspoken

Through the chase—her back and forth
Revisions of positions, hopes, frustrations;
Tender-foolish instances I took
(Or mis-took, rather) for complete surrender…

And when, after all, she did permit my grasp
To close upon her—did admit surrender—
Then began the shapeshifting and struggle.

    I believed—back then—we’d do no harm.

Over time, suspicion grew from doubt
To faltering to loosing my embrace.
I sheltered hope against and for return
As she caressed my cheek and went away.

I, too, left, in time, and we remained
(As we said)… friends. Then ten years of back and forth
Confusions, conversations, and confessions:
Tantalizing, teasing—trying not to grapple.

Pride, desire, promises sincere and rash
Grow such stubborn, toxic, brittle roots.

    I regret so much I can’t express
    My gratitude, contrition… and relief
    At finally—I think—now—letting go.

We are, at last, more than halfway through what has been a rather bitter Winter, though Lent has only just begun. As ever, thank you for reading The Brass Bull, I hope this poem serves as something more pleasant than cold comfort.

“Woe to the babblers, woe to the loose thinkers and woe, woe to all the hangers-on who learned from them and praised them.”

—Anti-Climacus, The Sickness Unto Death

Since you’re lonesome and long to be seen
As useful and important to your friends,
Acquaintances, romantic possibilities;
And since you’re insecure (so easy prey
To a seductive shortcut), you resort
To gossip: what a wiser age with greater nuance
Should have labelled scandal or detraction.

James, in his epistle, tells us that the tongue—
Although a lesser member of the body—
Is, in truth, a flame which can ignite great fuel easily;
Furthermore, he claims, this flame is born of Hell
Itself: this minor member (double-minded, forked)
Contaminates all flesh and is not tamed:
A venomous and zealous, peaceless thing.

Therefore judgement—or detraction—is an arrogation:
Dealing out the law instead of doing.
There is one judge only who has perfect power:
When He sits, His judgement of the judges
Will be strict, exacting, harsh in measure of their own.

Yet you gossip—light the flames
Then leave them unattended: eke out gains
To store up on the earth your gold and grudges—
Careless of both consequence and mercy.
Then, when the tongues of others turn on you,
You cry loud for justice—act aggrieved…
But mercy is not granted to the merciless.

Therefore, mend your heart; restrain your tongue;
Suffer patiently your own temptation;
Be more swift to listen; still your wrath
And, with humility, accept humiliation:
He who gifts all wisdom—each good thing—
Who does not change—and in whom perfect mercy
Is too perfect justice…
Judges soon.

A very happy New Year’s Eve to any readers (and especially subscribers) of The Brass Bull. I intimated that I should have another piece ready before 2026 and am pleased to have been able to deliver. Winter is only just begun, but at least the days stretch gradually longer now. Why not

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“Even in seeing one self in a mirror it is necessary to recognize oneself, for if one does not, one does not see one self but only a human being.”
—Anti-Climacus, The Sickness Unto Death

The time I spent on you and all
The sacrifices I’d hoped, being drenched
Across your altar—all the blood and tears—
Might be honoured… might bind life to life:
Mere vanity and vapour; foolishness and fear.

Now I’m left with memories—and pain—
And the serpent of suspicion whispering,
Insinuating—in a voice like mine—
Such awful, hateful things and… worst of all:
At minimum, a few of them are true.

Or not far off the mark. In any case,
The thought of judging justly (even one
Among the teeming and increasing throng)
Is staggering. It leaves me short of breath.
And desperate. Like you did.

I fear judgement’s fierce, refining blaze
Blocks any exist from this place you left me:
How else will I grow (besides resentful)?
How else learn and change unless
By burning out the truth?

Even truth, though, I don’t think would heal me.
Your wounds won’t stop bleeding,
Though I clean and bandage them unceasingly,
Pour wine and water over them and brood:
How is it, being absent, you yet get
Fresh blood upon your altar?

Finally! A new piece; as I have before, I assure you again that there are several more nearing completion. With luck, 2025 will not be laid to rest without another one posted and Winter—already having shoved Autumn out of the way rather greedily—will see one or two more as it kicks 2026 off. We shall see. When it comes to this sort of writing, there’s no real prediction.

“The ladies did change favours; and then we,
Following the signs, wooed but the sign of she.”
-Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V, Scene II

“I’ll tell you what I don’t want:”
His response is choked and he is nearly choking
“I don’t want to be the catalyst again—
The means of ‘self-discovery’ for her
(Yet another broken-gorgeous girl)—
For her finding out that why she let me kiss her;
What she always needed from romance;
The real reason for her sensual surrenders
(She places those—all polished and precise—
Like silverware before me on the table,
Assaying my experience and manners:
‘Does he know that this fork is for oysters?
That one for dessert?
The smallest spoon, here,
After-dinner coffee?’);
All her body’s history; her pain;
That innermost unspoken emptiness
And ache to be fulfilled;
All the seething, intertwining things
That measure out her life, compose one self
To face this cruel and enticing world
We’re all thrust—unwilling and afraid—
Into the very teeth of… every thing
(She finds out somehow after and through me)
Was guiding her toward some way of escape
Or metamorphosis—for which
(She, quite earnestly, shall reassure me)
I have her permanent
(Regrettably, though, soon, now, distant)
Gratitude.”

• Minor edits on 11/15/2025 to remove italicization from body of epigraph and add the closing quotation marks to the ultimate line

Thank you for reading The Brass Bull. There are several more poems scattered about on the glowing floor in here which are approaching completion, but precise timing on that is, as always, part of the vast array of unknowns which plague, taunt, and seduce us all.

“And then came the long surrender…”
—B.H. Fairchild, Rave On

That fire that she touched within my chest
Burned away defenses, then well-seasoned fears,
And—seeking further fuel—wormed its way
To spaces in me, still, I cannot quite approach.

She was active—reaching out, retreating—
While all I knew to do or understood
Concerned a certain sort of standing still
So that my illusion of love’s parity collapsed
          And… she left me… breathless.

I had held her—Lord, a decade passed before
I saw beyond how deep and good that seemed—
As each cycle of ambivalence (her raw need
For comfort; subsequent withdrawal) drew my grip,
And hers on me, gradually, unavoidably, and only
          Tighter.

At the last, she left me for my fear
Of harming her outstripped my fear of loss.

I was not made for violence—nor overt manipulation
Of the object of my poor and desperate affection.

More than two months, I know, since the previous post. Be assured that work is being done; one must sow the field if one would reap the harvest. Autumn now approaches and we shall see what said harvest yields; hope springs eternal even in this season. If, and only if, you are inclined, why not

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“Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.”
—R. Hass, Meditations at Lagunitas

I think she caught my eye by seeming sad—
But that’s not quite the word
(There might not be a word) for what
Her turn of eye implied, just what it was
That her too-tight control of every facial muscle
Did not, quite, obscure.

Sunday-evening coffee-shop.
The both of us alone and silent
In a room half-full of background
Noises, strangers, conversations,
And that quiet dread at one more weekend’s waning:
She sat, back to me—though at the nearest table—
Fully-focused on display and typing.

When the hail came in sudden clamour
It was the nearest thing I’ve ever seen
To what it will be like, come world’s end:
Instantly alert and interrupted,
Everybody turned about and looked
Into some stranger’s eyes for confirmation—
As if each of us, without exception,
Feared a breach of sanity
And, nakedly, went begging for consensus.

We two, too, peered through brief-breached defenses—
Snagged our lines of sight one with the other—
Smiled at embarrassment denatured:
A second only, maybe two. The room
Returned to anonymity and we
Were no exceptions:
Mending up our wall in desperation,
Focusing-ferocious on our screens,
Deceiving one another—and our selves—
We let the moment wither.

She might have turned to look at me
A time, or maybe two, before the close
Of day and shop and opportunity—
I can’t be certain. We sat six feet off,
One from the other, headphones in
(Mine silent since the storm),
Screens ascroll with emptiness and words,
Body-language showing only hope
(Or what we hoped would look like hope)
Of being left alone by strangers,
Such as one another.

• Edits on 6/10/2025 to correct minor typos

• Further edit on 11/11/2025 to correct another

• Yet another edit on 11/11/2025 to correct what I desperately hope is the last

Thank you for reading The Brass Bull; I’d keep writing (and maybe even publishing) even without any readers at all, but a creation like a poem doesn’t fully become itself until it is read by at least one person other than its so-called creator. You are under no obligation to interact with this at all, of course, but if you think you know someone who might get something from it, why not

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You’re worried about power—that everything is reducible to this fundamental dynamic. Freud has made us suspicious; and this passing age of ideology has made us all the more so.

One of the choices that we get to make, day to day and moment to moment, is how we will view the world—how, to put it another way, we will interpret the impressions and sensations we receive. Of course, this is always something of a feedback loop: you start by interpreting things in a certain way—under some particular metric or rubric—and, so long as the viewpoint or ideology is sufficiently robust (and there are many which are: Marxism; Randian Objectivism; Freudian psychology; Foucaltian or Nietzschian power dialectics; the list could exhaust), because you go looking for a pattern which you already suspect exists (and because that pattern, indeed, is not altogether absent), you see it clearly… the more robust the pattern, the more clearly its adherents will see it everywhere. It is, of course, a matter of focus; focus is a matter of attention; and attention is a mode (however habitual it may have become) of intention.

The physical world, in the material sense of physics and chemistry, is wonderously complex and even retains some of its mysteries yet, for all our brute and brilliant hammering. The biological world’s complexity is of a higher order and Life’s secrets are better defended still. The human world, our social, spiritual, psychological, and linguistic (not to mention semiotic) atmosphere without which all the above would remain an entirely closed book, is complex to the point, nearly, of incomprehensibility. These complexities require of us a filtering of our attention in order that we can even begin to search for what is relevant and useful. So far, so good and so unsurprising. When we look for how, in a given instance or generality, self-interest (enlightened or base), or power, or class-struggle, or the conflict between id and superego might be manifesting, we will find what we seek. We will find it because all of that is always there, in greater or lesser degrees, and, in finding what we seek, we are reassured of the truth of our presupposition, our theory, our ideology.

Furthermore, the act of seeking and the belief itself manifest the pattern sought all the more. When you go looking for power dialectics in human interactions, you create them, in some small part, at least, even as you discover what was already there. More concretely, perhaps, if you go looking for signs of class struggle with your boss in some interaction, you will at least nudge (and perhaps shove) the interaction in that direction. When you keep a weather eye out for self-interest in every human interaction, you defend and reinforce your own self-interest and this cascades, naturally and all but inevitably, on the other party’s part. These lenses, these ideologies, are viruses wherever they take hold and totalize. They recreate the world in their own image. An ideology is always and everywhere idolatry: it worships the perspective, the lens, as Truth itself, forgetting that a lens is a tool for perceiving other, extant, things in greater clarity or detail.

This is not to say that all idologies ought to be rejected wholesale—some lenses have their uses, after all, and can aid us in a search for truth about the world or ourselves or even God. But the lenses are not Truth, the perspective we adopt is not God’s. Truth does not narrow, consume, and impoverish the world or the self, as ideés fixe do. Truth glorifies the world, glorifies existence, causes meaning to flourish. Ideology produces only the sort of meaning it predicts—and only does so by consuming all other sorts of meaning until the world is monocropped and grows barren and more barren, season by season. You accepted the ideology because it simplified the world and clarified meaning, made it easier to feed yourself and others, but the world grows hollow, so treated—the ideology consumes it even if, like some parasites, it passes some of its excrement to you as easy sustenance.

You will, eventually, come to an end where there is no more wold to understand, no more outside meaning for the parasite to consume and pass the waste along to you, nothing you can see through the lens you committed to save for a dead and blasted landscape—a wasteland in the creation of which you are complicit. In that wasteland, only death remains for you. The meaning you had sought and thought you were accumulating all your life being completely consumed, the parasite, at last, turns against its host.

Burn these bloody twisted branches,
Aching, to the ground.
Memories of dreaming sleep
Were all we ever found.
If, perhaps, there is some hope
Enshadowed by your tree…
If there is, it never was
The kind of thing we see.

Love without an image true
Is never love at all,
So we struck the ground anew
And planted in the Fall.
We tried to raise a solid Oak
On which we could rely;
But every seed of each rank weed
Turned all our plans awry.

Setting ship with eager sail
Vainly to the West,
We sought to find some alter place
On which our heads could rest;
But when the prow struck stony soil
We had lost our breath:
Violence and endless toil
Rounded with a death.

Turning pages stained with hope
In tears of blood-soaked love,
We found and gave all that You had
And sacrificed a Dove.

4/19/2025: 14:36 GMT: Minor edits to correct two transcriptions errors

Guilty as I am of dust and sin
And arrogation, overweening pride
And cruelties both idle and well-whetted—
Guilty, though aware within my guilt
Of no more guilt than my guilt lets me see—
Guilty, Lord, and cowering in shame
Afraid of facing further depravations:
Too petrified to plumb my wickedness
From the dread of having to, then, pay
The price of holding fast to such self-knowledge:
Suffering and sacrifice and change.

Quiet and insistent grace remains—
Sometimes she is gentle:
Transformation can be ecstasy
Just as it can be humiliation—
Still… I am hard of head and heart
And some stones must be broken.

Though, life need not be doldrumed nor
Must every pain or pleasure
Be so perfectly attentioned.
Why my desperate defense of delusion—
What is guilt but debt I can’t repay?
All of this forgivenesss gets new debt
Which must be honoured, though it’s not called in:
The price that I must pay for perfect love
Is nothing less than fear.

Thank you for reading The Brass Bull. I hope this poem finds your Lent, whether you are observing it or not, as a welcome guest. I’ll skip the continued apologies for the tortoise-like rate of posts from here on out; these things generally take me ages to write and what backlog I had was mostly exhausted last year. Poems will show up when they are ready to make their debut into general society. Essays/Assays/Assails will pop up as the whim strikes me—but they are something of distractions from my real work here.
I must say, it’s rather nice not taking subscriptions as it means I can allow my work to develop at its own pace without adding further guilt to my already weighty load.
If you enjoyed this poem, why not be charitable and, like your parents worked so very hard to try to teach you when you were yet young and (mostly) innocent,

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Note: Redrafting and cleaning a long text like this is time-consuming and even somewhat counter-productive of the idea, so if the photos are difficult to read for you, please place all blame squarely on me and scroll down to the typed version. I’ll try write more neatly in any future such pieces, but make no promises. Prose flows quicker than poetry and neatness and speed in handwriting, for my style, are inversely correlated.

Any criticism or commentary on any work worth the effort runs a double risk. The devil, on the one side, is the temptation to outshine or overshadow the object while the deep blue sea, on the other, sings seductive of the ease with which one might plunge pompously into the error of the typical commencement speaker: using the purported subject as nothing short of a thin pretext for talking about oneself and one’s pet theories/ideology/etc.

Properly done, of course, one ought to have some sort of insight (although the modern/post-modern fetish of ‘originality’ in the sense of ‘no one has ever published this though before’ is an artifact of forced writing and/or writing for profit—only in those contexts is there a deep concern about plagiarism), but the work should always treat itself as a fundamentally separate yet dependent thing in relation to its subject. That object is the ground from which one works—in criticism, one can expand this to works by the same author/artist/director or even to the genre generally (so long as one identifies the genre accurately and has a good grasp thereof), in commentary, one draws from outside only to make explicit what is implicit in the text itself, after all, the text did not appear ex nihilo.

Commentary in particular can serve, as many Biblical commentaries do, as instructive to others, but this is secondary to its primary purpose, which is to be instructive and elucidating to the author of the commentary itself, external instructive value is accidental, not necessary. There is great confusion on this point at present and the ways in which that confusion muddies the already confused waters of the “A.I.” situation is left as an exercise for the reader.

Understanding is a different thing from the regurgitation of information or opinion, and it is understanding which is the proper goal of education. Yet any mode of ‘objectively measuring’ understanding which can scale beyond a natural conversational group (eight people at the outside) without becoming massively unwieldy inevitably has to rely upon an informationally-based proxy for understanding. Over time, the proxy begins to seem like it is the thing that actually exists while what it stands in proxy for fades into an elusive and unimportant shade—in the minds of the measurers. But man has confused map for territory since language (the primal map) first arose; none of this is new, this is precisely a problem we’ve been navigating with less or more success throughout the entire history of our species, and doubtless a good portion of our prehistory.

Writing, without which neither criticism nor commentary would exist nor even be coherent as concepts, is a pretty recent development—and authorship in a unitary sense is later still… originality is a mere handful of generations old at most. The acquisition of spoken language is organically instinctive to human beings (though perhaps this was not always true) while literacy is not—one has to pause and wonder whether, at some point, perhaps not all that far in the future, literacy might not also become so organically instinctive—the ability to write and to read must be learned in the sense that it must be taught, at bare minimum by exposure to the idea of writing and reading and examples to imitate and learn from; at maximum by pulling a child kicking and screaming for years to the most basic level of literacy necessary to function in one’s society.

Since the advent of the ‘smartphone’ (what an odd term that seems on reflection in 2025… or else ominous) in what we so smugly refer to as the developed world, basic literacy has become essentially universal. Texting and social media have become so integral to human interaction that the impetus to be able to ‘read’ and ‘write’ in the minimal sense necessary to use these technologies has become overwhelmingly strong. And yet, among the more classically literate, there has been a long trend now of eschewing social media in all (or at least most) of its forms and it seems inevitable that there will be more and more in the same group who eschew texting as a replacement for human interaction (though its place as a practical and efficient means of coordinating more traditional in-person interactions seems secure at present). Nor does it seem unlikely but that a trend in voice-memos and text-to-speech functionality may well allow true illiteracy to arise once more among the technologically-reliant.

The universality of the calculator did not make basic arithmetical literacy impossible, but it did make it difficult to retain and consequentially rarer than it had been. The typewriter and then the personal computer did not utterly destroy handwriting, but (tand this text is an example of this, compare it in legibility and speed of composition to something by a casual writer of the nineteenth century and I will seem a complete dullard) it changed the nature of the act of writing itself and turned writing legibly and neatly into a minor specialized skill, like basic capentry [sic] or baking… not uncommon, precisely, but hardly essential and its lack is neither surprising nor remarkable. Walk into a coffee shop or small restaurant which uses a chalkboard menu or handwritten signage of some other sort and there will be one or two employees who have the skill, interest, and responsibility of writing those out: and any actual drawings or pictures will have infinitely more artistry to them than the handwriting itself (unless the employee is so specialized as to be a student of calligraphy), yet the handwriting itself is far more of an aesthetic statement than any visual art the business contains.

You must, dear reader, be wondering at this point in this essay what—on God’s green and blooming earth—the unifying point or thesis could possibly be. I began, after all, discussing commentary and criticism, excoriating the tendency to devolve into pet theories and self-indulgence… and where did I proceed to wander if not into the self-indulgence of stream-of-consciousness and gestures at pet-theories; bold and unduly general assertions; completely unjustified leaps from one subject to another and into arguments in which I have no business inserting myself, being expert in nothing but a few boring technical things which keep me fed and sheltered and have not bearing here? Perhas we could recover the original sense of the word ‘essay’ from the ravening academy somewhat by twisting it slightly into ‘assay.’ This is, then, this has been, an assay, a judgement, an assailing of a target where the target has been my wandering thought and the judgement has been of where it might lead if followed through by means of writing, rather than in speech or in simple thought itself (either of which would have produced vastly different chains of inference and reasoning). Such an assailing is more similar to a letter written to an audience than it is to an academic essay or a journalistic ‘piece.’ More toward an epistle than a journal entry, too, since it is written for an audience (whether it finds such an audience or not being an entirely different question, of course) other than the self… and yet, like all writing, it is still self-focussed, still an act of creation which clarifies the self (or some part thereof) somewhat. An artifact which bears testament to the imperfect assailing of the fortress of thought.

I’m honestly impressed if you actually read that whole rambling thing… it is, in the end, an experiment the results of which please me, but are probably worthless for anyone else. We’ll see whether more focus and neatness is in the offing in any future ‘assails’… or even whether it makes sense to continue publishing them. This probably would be a poor post to share, being quite unrepresentative of The Brass Bull as it has developed so far, so I’ll skip the button this time and if you do want to share, you’ll just need to click or tap an extra time today.

“Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.”
—A. E. Housman, LX

Time comes when a soul withdraws:
It strips away whatever won’t be missed—
Maybe, too, some measure of what will—
To seek itself in sharpest finitude,
Polished and refurbished like the blade
New-freed from the rust of luxury,
The dullness of all desperate distraction.

Sickle-blades are bent for better reaping,
So this soul must bend its back to labour:
Cutting fistfuls close against the ground;
Whetstone handy, regularly used;
Binding bundles into sheaves with straw;
Stacking these in stooks for desiccation—
Harvest gathered in, more brutal labour
Sits in silence on the threshing floor.

Soon enough, the chaff infests the air
Like so much idle talk
Gusting off to wherever wind blows:
So simplified and stripped of all excess,
Again the grain is dried, then sacked
And stowed until a stone or still
Should be employed upon it.

So, for now, come find me dozing fitfully until,
Haggard and disheveled (preoccupied, perhaps,
With many other matters) and yet punctual,
Love shambles in to rouse me to the world.

I know it’s been quite a while since the last post—holidays and then Winter’s vicious maw have kept me from finishing anything until today. There are a couple other pieces nearing completion and I hope to have them finished and published… if not before the end of Winter, with luck by early Spring. Sometimes one can only work on what one has and finishing anything simply has to wait.

I write for the sake of what it is that I write and whether anything gets any views or ‘engagement’ is largely irrelevant to that motivation; but if you have any inclination, I’ll make it easy for you to

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I was thinking how you rise and fall
In time like breathing in and out
Half-conscious of repeating flesh-incarceration’s
Ceaseless sequencing like thought’s alacrity
In apprehending even its own absence
Or like being caught in time and sin and love
And seeing no escape from any one of these
Save suicide in one form or the other.

I was thinking how I should have known
That what you said to silence was your own
And cannot therefore be repeated
Though it is re-membered in and by
Each breathing’s briefest momentary pause
That so-soon dissolves unapprehended
Like a grain of salt dropped in the sea.

I was thinking what I want to be
Is my self loved by you and yours by me
And how this is already
How I see the providential hand in everything
Love breast-breathes into being giving place
In brokenness to over-whelming grace.

• Minor edit on 11/15/2025 to add the missing full-stop at the end of the first stanza

One of my very favourites (and the only of my poems which I happen to know someone has memorized—the only true way to under-stand a poem and a profoundly flattering gesture)—I had been saving it up for some time and decided to share it at long last.

If you happen to like it yourself, you could consider whether you might want to

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You always turn away as we are talking
Pass our subject to a passing friend
And graceful if not gracious excise me
What can I do but fade

I can’t recall the colour of your eyes
As I sketch your visage in my mind
They are vivid green then soften into blue
And end storm-cloud grey

How much have you left unspoken
Here in vast and silent space
What have you been telling me

Every time the sequence seems the same
You speak first and look me in the eye
And after I reply you carry on
With someone else
And so I make my exit unobserved

How frightening to think
How small I keep you

• Slight edit on 12/7/2024 due to a transcription error in the original post. ‘when’ in the first line adjusted to ‘as’ to match the actual poem (rather than an earlier draft)

• Further edits on 11/15/2025 to adjust a similar error in the second line and to move above edit note to the bottom here and adjust it slightly—as well as to add the full-stop after the H in the dedication

Here, we’re stocking up on firewood (rather hurriedly and belatedly) to keep the fires underneath the bull well fed. The wood will be underseasoned and so excessively smokey, but that shouldn’t affect those of us inside. Have you considered whether you might want to

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Dear readers,

First, thank you for being a companion here in the belly of the Brass Bull. One hopes that one’s feeling marginally less alone—despite the sepulchral silence of the comments and the chat—is reflected for at least the singular reader to which one is always addressing all communications.
Second, I’ll do away with the demi-pretentious, pseudo-formal/familiar “one” business. I can be pseudonymous and still use the first person singular pronoun.
Third, you might have noticed that the rate of publication has dropped rather precipitously: this was always going to happen in time. I’m confident that Byron or Milton might have managed to write, whole-cloth, a poem every week, but my Muse is much more fickle and my talent much more mreager than either of them (though I flatter myself, privately, that my poems have rather more substance than Byron’s—I am, of course, in no position other than that of orthodoxy, to compare myself favourably to Milton)—and I am separately employed, earning, indeed, no money whatever from my poetry as is, indeed again, my preference and inclination. In short, I have limited time available to work on poetry and am extraordinarily pleased if I can produce a finishe poem each week month.
The archives from the last two decades are all but exhausted, so the rate and timing of new pieces will, henceforth, be much less regular. On the positive side, I intend to publish as poems are finished, so some poems will begin coming in on weekends and weekdays other than Friday (if my own Substack subscriptions are anything to go by, Friday is when everyone publishes and the leist of unread posts balloons)—I may also begin publishing more pieces along these lines or even very brief essays.
Suffice it to say, nay summarize, that The Brass Bull is red hot and its properties have changed somewhat, therefore. We are still in here, though, working hard to produce the sounds so keenly demanded by the small but loyal audience… the humble audience which remains more than 90% email-subscribed, rather than downloading another app on their phone just to read these scribblings.

Happy early Martinmas!

Yours,

Schemndrick K.

There will be changes and new sufferings as Winter sets her teeth in, but it will always be warm in here, so why not

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Why fall in love again when only pain
And sacrifice and odours of decay
Will be your last reward
If you are faithful?
Why, knowing this, do we still seek to bind
Ourselves to one another here in time
For life and good and ill until life’s end?
Why is the pall of possible divorce,
Though seen by all at almost
Every wedding, too taboo
To mention?
How is it we can show such bravery
Yet be so superstitious?

Why not fall in love? It’s only pain
And fear and present comfort
Keeping me in chains
Of possibility.
Why avoid what binding love demands?
Surely to be free is to spend freedom?
Moth and rust eat every hoard in time,
But what you spend in love is yours eternal.
Therefore love and lovers should demand
The absolute, or close as they may come,
Both of one another and themselves:
No half-hearted sacrifice is worthy.
Some hearts harden; some vows falter, fail:
While yet time remains, let us be gentle.

Posts are admittedly rarer in these times—the old archives are nearly depleted and new poems take time (and the time they take is their own, not my schedule); still, Winter will be hard upon us sooner than you think and it is warm in here. Why not

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“Smoking, I watched the endless April rain beyond the window.”
—”Norwegian Wood,”—H. Murakami

Since you told me that you could not bear it,
I forebore the baring of my heart.
Swallowing, I felt it sinking down
Until my stomach roiled when it lodged—
A thing like stone and silence—in the pit.

It felt, somehow, a bit,
Like a betrayal.

And the waning Winter light which found me
Confident and capable—and eager
(Maybe over-eager) to express to you
That burden we (or I) had felt
Like some suspended sharpness overhead
Of every interaction for some time—
Disappeared.

I had assumed that since you’d poured
Your pain like oil over me,
As if for an anointing;
Since you’d asked, so often and so fruitlessly,
Me for expression of my thoughts or feelings;
Since I take words spoken earnestly
At something like face value;
Since a dozen other things
Which seemed right at the time,
What words I offered would,
In your own way,
Be treasured and accepted,
Understood…

But: when I started speaking
And saw terror in your eyes—
It tripped so quickly to your tongue
And interrupted me mid my first sentence—
My response was automatic:
Inner panic; outward calm;
The swallowing of what I’d meant to say.
I heard a voice as cold and clear as ice
Inside my head insisting I had know
Of this but fled, from the beginning running
To a comforting delusion like a magic spell
Upon myself to modify perception
(See your prison as a palace! Soiled rags as silk!
Self-love as a sacrifice!)—
It broke.

All I recall, now, is that I had, then,
Some words for some emotion
Which, unspoken, since has burrowed down
Beyond my clawing reach
And might yet rise again.

But life lasts too long for regrets like these:
All worms and words and worlds turn
While we are doomed to shatter on the surface.

It should have been, for me, a gesture intimate
And open as the brushing of the cheek with fingertip
When I would tuck that one unruly strand
Of fickle hair behind your perfect ear.

• Minor edit on 11/15/2025 to adjust a full-stop to an ellipsis

Another newer piece—all this endless scribbling is gradually paying off (though I have immense trouble imagining how I could keep up one post per week, now that all the old stuff—or most of it—has been published). Have you considered that you might want to

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When every thing I’ve loved, excepting Thee,
Has turned again at last to ash and dust;
When every gift You’ve given, saving three,
Has ceased or faded, failed, gone to rust;
When all the love that’s left in me is grief;
When being given hope’s the final hope;
When faith holds fast somehow, but not belief;
When last temptation is toward gun or rope;
When all of this befalls, or if it does,
And what I’ve known of joy’s been buried deep
So no more recollection of what was
In comfort comes in small rain or in sleep:
Lord, grant me in that day that I might stand,
Though falling, in Your gently holding hand.

Plenty of small rain down raining these days; why not join us for shelter and

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“Bind us to our bitter lives—
Or bury us in hope.”

—Anon., “An Appeal”

Good God! Is there now nothing which remains
To rouse our passions in us uninfected
By some madding faction’s fatal call?
These politics exhaust all with their noise:
Such braying, trumpeting, and hammering
Of plowshares into sickles—
Crosses into swastikas—no symbol stable,
All must be transformed
(And at a moment’s notice) when it gains
Some slight advantage for the day or hour.
My heart screams for silence, but be still…
True passion, goodness, joy, integrity,
Love and homely virtues shy away
From public proclamation, trending posts,
Executive or legislative ‘action.’

Life is small as we who live it are
And needs no affirmation from the crowd—
Nor from elites.

Nor poets…

It’s starting to feel heated in here, no? Why not spread the suffering and

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