I have known some cities 
and I can name them all:
cities large, and cities small, 
cities of the plain, cities of the sky, 
cities that sit where mountains split
to draw the painter's eye; 
cities of day, cities of night,
eternal cities, cities of light, 
cities of sand, cities of dust,
and river cities red as rust, 
cities of smoke, cities of steel,
defiant cities and cities that kneel
 
I have known some cities 
where pastel skies 
hang above asphalt cries, 
where lips of dust whisper lies 
to tenements and slums that rise 
like tarnished filigree 
embracing its diamond, 
cities piled up on the edge of forever
like last-chance casinos 
where snarling natives wait at the gate
to fold, spindle and mutilate.

I have seen some cities where avenues blaze 
beyond the shattered glass and broken barricades,
where peddlers of fashion and bloodless passion 
raise panopticons of pity, and purveyors of praise 
surround themselves with perfect sun, 
perfect skin, 
perfect teeth, 
perfect days.

I have lived in cities and learned to despise
the oiled shoulders and screaming thighs, 
the fan boys with their velvet claws, 
the sycophants and hangers-on, 
the curious passing by; 
I am weary of cities where women tire
of passing through turnstiles in the 
roundhouse of desire, 
where housewives draped 
in desperation’s shadow 
make plans to escape
their timid men battling the uncertainty 
lurking below their tan-lines, 

I walk alone the darkened streets 
and listen to the shuffle of anonymous feet
as the shadows of the city, 
with the weight of concrete, 
press down 
over cornfields, brown with rust, 
across fence posts in long rows,
standing transfixed 
in sockets of inexhaustible corrosion,
along pine groves fronting summer lakes 
where moonlight once frosted the apples, 
across flooded river lands, 
farms and quarries, 
small towns with a single church, 
cities have swallowed every cathedral of solitude 
I have ever known,
 cities that gather like moisture waiting for rain to take shape, 
ghost towns of the heart, 
dry ice in a desert landscape. 

© Paul Wittenberger, Substack, February 14, 2024 - This poem is a companion piece to “A Prayer for These Latter Days,” which was posted yesterday, as there is some cross-over or duplication of 1-2 lines.

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Let us bow our heads, lower our gaze, 
and praise all places where history fades 
into dumpsters, landfills, and tourist arcades, 
where mansions struggle with manicured yards 
bordering the wreckage of boulevards 
where people with good intentions parade
but are always betrayed by what they discard.

Let us do our penance among those who tire 
of living the homilies that mask their desire: 
those haunted and homeless, lost between wars, 
plying their trade in dark metaphors, 
coupling on bed sheets, ghostly and white, 
dressed in shreds torn from the curtains of night.

Come, let us pray where avenues blaze 
beyond shattered glass and broken barricades, 
where NO ENTRANCE and NO EXIT signs
clearly spell out what is yours and what is mine.

Let’s finger our beads beneath pastel skies 
bathing rough asphalt with shimmering lies.

And while we’re at it let’s find some grace 
for invisible strangers and their daily race, 
barreling through corridors of concrete and chrome, 
to the safety and comfort of family and home, 
to the wives and the kids and that enduring sense 
of freedom that peters out at the backyard fence.

© Paul Wittenberger, Substack, 9/19/2023

Paul’s Substack is a reader-supported publication with subscribers and readers in all 50 U.S. states and more than 80 countries worldwide. All content offered is free. A subscription is not required but appreciated.

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The down and out, the not quite there
they hang about without a care.
Their future came and then it went
They stay behind to pay the rent

The bed don’t care, the room don’t mind.
The management is all but blind.
They change the sheets most every day
depending on the games we play

You want a taste to cure your ills?
What’s your pleasure—booze or pills?
I’m not the best, you ain’t the worst.
I’m just the water to cure your thirst

I’m your prescription to dull the pain,
the balm of Gilead to soothe your brain.
The bed don’t care, the room don’t mind.
The management is all but blind.
I’ll be whatever you need me to be.
Forget your guilt, set yourself free.

Words @ Paul Wittenberger, music AI-generated on SUNO application.

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A

I carry my memory like blackwork inked upon the skin, a sinewy dragon of days wrapped in clouds of lotus blossoms and invisible rain.

Sometimes I feel each moment is a new world waiting to be discovered, and I am the first foot, a privateer without charter or flag.

And sometimes I think I am sole witness to my own pain, seeking another who will broker my misery for a trifle. If there are others, where are they? 

Why do they not come?

I remember how hard it is to forget, how passionate passion really is once you’ve had a taste, how writing is a distraction, a relief, and a salvation that still requires the body and the 
blood.

For once I’d like to feel that I’m not strap-hanging amidst a crowd in a trainload of false starts.

I did not choose to travel this way, never took time to embellish a tiny thought in a deftly wrought villanelle or to write my poor refrains in sonnet form or in cinquains or to scratch out a simple homily with lines that might end in a dash—just like Emily's.

One day there will be no writing, and on that day, I will walk into new skin, or I will walk into fire, and the blazing flame will burn away everything, and my name will be ash, the skin covering my bones will melt and slide to the earth in a puddle of smoke and grease, and my bones will be ash.

There will be fire. 
There will be freedom in the fire. 
The poor will still be with us.
You will meet God everywhere.

© Paul Wittenberger, Substack, February 11, 2024

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I watch the river split and billow like the 
sleeves of your old sweater, the blue grey 
one tortured and stretched in all the 
directions your body grew.

I think of your face in a morning of 
careless wind when blood seems to 
push memory backward.

I feel your body shake like an orchid 
held fast in its charcoal.

Your last embrace leaves the sky bare,
and empties my eyes of tears that fall 
like black oil, expressionless as the
sleeping face of a child

© Paul Wittenberger, Substack, January 15, 2024

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Trying to understand where I am is like trying to understand the game of chess if I were one of the pieces. Any move I might make seems to be an impossibility. 

I was there at the beginning, alone among the stars, waiting for you at the still center where nothing moved but everything hung silent in the vast quiet while the outside of the circle spun around endlessly.

Now the days stack up like stones heavy on my chest. 

I bury the bones of old dreams under the willow and pray for rain. 

Writing is distraction, redemption, salvation and reprieve.

Letters flow, typography dances, text blocks rise with ineluctable elegance, kerning and justification transforms white space into rhizomatic rivers flowing as paragraphs open and the vistas widen.

The center expands away from itself in every direction, beginnings find their futures, endings find their pasts, while the middle that knows only itself is both sunrise and sunset, present only in the incomprehensible instant of what was flowing into what never was, becoming what might have been, leaving behind what never will be, arriving finally at what is—the arrival speculative, provisional, temporary.

In the end, what writes is not the hand that holds the pen.

What is written comes from somewhere else.

What is meant is not in the eye that reads.

© Paul Wittenberger, Substack October 27, 2023

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One came down from the mountain
and one arose from the pit,
and they met on a field of glad tidings
but agreed they would have none of it.

So, their weapons they clanged
and they clattered,
and their muscles ached with each thrust,
as if only victory mattered 
returning one to dust.

Oh, the ladies still sing of the power
that brought down the devil that day
and the boys still train their eyes skyward 
to that kingdom so far away.

And the good has never been better
and the worst has gone to ground
where it festers in blistering silence
for the blind who still stumble around.

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Outside your window there is more than enough room for night to unfold itself as the world shapes its darkness into the animals it will become in your dreams, 

space enough for shadows that move like living creatures with hot breath rising like marsh mist in the cool night air, 

breath that can be seen, reckoned with, and you, wherever you are, struggling beneath the weight of every shadow, ears cocked toward every crack and creak that breaks the silence of your room, 

you alone, adrift through the shadows, sunk into the shallows of sleep, trapped between waking and dreams, you know this feeling, too, this fear, this dark thrill of encounters in the shadows, 

raising your body in alarm, then quietly drifting off to sleep, before that first flicker of morning light when the sun rises again, and the machinery of dreams hides itself away.

© Paul Wittenberger, Substack 2/18/2024

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Thin light unfolds like a letter never sent 
but still perfumed with urgency, 
the edges softened by waiting. 

Moonlight fades, the last miracle 
in a collapsing liturgy, 
while the rising light of day 
might be the precise shape of salvation. 

Our bodies were made to touch, 
to allow fingers 
to rehearse a thousand stillborn gestures, 
the way one traces ash to remember fire. 

When you bent to me, 
I felt your name like static down my spine. 
My shape folded itself into you, 
a luminous heresy. 

I called it praise. 

What kind of light makes the wound so holy? 
What kind of hunger turns skin to brass? 

In your arms I was no longer mine alone, 
but something aching and starless, 
anointed with fire.

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We have so many words for love.

Ancient ones,
worn smooth
by centuries of mouths.

Shy ones,
which appear only once
and then vanish.

We have learned the language
of hands left resting together,
of chairs pulled close,
of silence that chooses
to remain.

We know the names
for devotion,
for longing,
for forgiveness.

We know the grammar
of staying.

Yet every time
a face turns toward us
lit by its own astonishment,
the dictionary closes,

and once again
we stand before the word,
unable to speak.

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I wait for what will not come
and still
its nonarrival shapes me
more deeply
than arrival ever could.

The day arranges itself
around that absence,
light falling where nothing stands,
a chair pulled slightly back
from no one.

I have learned the contours
of what does not happen:
the hour that does not break,
the word that does not cross,
the hand that does not reach.

This is not emptiness.
It has weight,
a pressure that settles
into the smallest parts of me,
making room by taking none.

I move within it
as if within a structure
built without walls, 
everything open,
nothing accessible.

If it were to arrive now
I would not recognize it.

I have been altered
too precisely
by its refusal.

What remains
is not waiting,
but the form waiting takes
when it is given
no end.

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I hear tomorrow’s footsteps 
moving toward today, 
as sure as I know yesterday is gone.

I hear words yet to be spoken, 
feel hearts before they’re broken, 
and watch as moonlight melts into the dawn.

Still my head is heavy 
with the thought that I must leave.
I’m not some stage magician 
with white doves up my sleeve.

A single life is what you get, 
just one to call your own.
And in spite of what preachers or poets say 
the time I have left is on loan.

© Paul Wittenberger, “An Assembly of Words” December 21, 2024

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Time whispers warnings
through my body
long before the body
knows why.

My bones murmur 
in the dark.
They count:
minutes, hours,
months, years.
Their math is impeccable.

Ruthless
Intimate.

These are days
my heart races ahead of me
and days it lags behind.

It is rarely punctual
but always honest.

My pulse forks, 
one beat for the body
one for the unseen life
I might have lived
if even one choice
had been different.

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A memory 
taps me 
on the shoulder
before it exists.

I turn.
It blushes, 
apologizes,
and waits nearby
until events catch up.

Other memories 
sit in chairs
waiting for me.

Their faces 
resemble mine
only softened
by choices
I have not made.

Across the room, 
a staircase descends
into tomorrow.

I hear voices there, 
half-familiar,
half-dreamed
calling my name
from a time
that hasn't been built yet.

Inside the room
a future version of me 
keeps a journal.

I open a blank page
that nevertheless
knows my handwriting.

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By the time words arrive
they are far too late: 
meaning has already 
gone to sleep.

I let them enter anyway.
They seem to know
what I do not.

They rest on the table,
beside a cup of cooling tea, 
as though waiting
to be remembered.

Maybe this is what belief is like:
dwelling with what doesn't bother 
to explain itself, finding comfort 
that it will stay.

Outside, 
the wind continues
its unfinished sentence.

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I look at the back of my hand, 
at the blue veins 
running like dark tunnels
beneath translucent skin 
that hides a thin lace
of capillaries,  
fragile as dust webs, 
easily burst to bleed out 
into small ponds 
or irregular blotches,
blood puddles shaped like 
American states, 
like Maryland or Kentucky, 
still bleeding 
beneath the skin, 
some still trying 
to find their form, 
even as the country 
bleeds to find its.

© Paul Wittenberger, published on Substack April 16, 2024, included in “An Assembly of Word” December 21, 2024

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How far the moon is from the sea,
a distant grasp for hands.
Reflected light is slippery
as it paints the silent sands.

A poor girl waits upon the shore
‘twixt fear and destiny.
Her family hopes for so much more
than rhyming poetry

Her gaze lights on the distant moon.
She mouths a prayer in haste.
She was told to find a suitor soon
else life would be a waste.

She does not know a single man
for whom she’d lose her name.
Yet being bound to paper and pen
is the union she would claim.

Her words are light and airy
but can be deep, as well.
Her subjects, bright and merry,
or dark as a witch’s spell.

Her poems are like children
tucked away in verse.
What on earth becomes of them
without their mum or nurse?

Never could she wear a ring 
to lead her life around, 
yet love forever makes her sing,
and language is its sound.

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Love asks that we risk
being the one who reaches,
being the one who names it,
being the one who needs.

What we rarely admit is this:

love does not only want our hearts,
it wants our hands.

It wants us to show up
as if the days matter,
as if a life can be built
from the honest repetition
of choosing.

Again.
Again.
Again.

Not forever as a promise,
but forever as a practice.

And yes,
it asks for the terrifying miracle:

to let someone touch
the parts of us
we’ve been calling “unlovable,”
and call them
home.

If I remember correctly, Carolyn’s prompt from a January 2026 post, “The Experiment,” was “What does love ask of us that we rarely admit?” I believe the response was posted on Carolyn’s Words in Bloom late January or early February 2026.

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I never lost my faith;
it just found a different address.

It packed its small suitcase of mornings,
folded the hymns like shirts
that no longer fit the weather,
and left as quietly as it first arrived,
no slamming of the door,
no thunder,
no dramatic liturgy of departure,
just the quiet click of a latch
in the back of my heart.

I stood for a while 
in the empty room 
listening for its footsteps
the way a house listens
after someone moves out:
the settling pipes,
the long breath of walls.

But faith was already elsewhere,
learning new streets,
making friends with different light.
It moved into a smaller building,
no stained glass,
no choir of certainty,
only a window opening 
to whatever it counted as real.

Now it lives above a corner store
that sells salt and sorrow,
where the cashier knows me by name
but never asks me for proof
of anything.

Sometimes faith returns here late,
smelling like rain and questions,
wearing a coat it bought secondhand
from some ordinary afternoon.

Sometimes it doesn’t speak at all,
just sits beside me
on the front steps of my mind
and we watch the world go by
without demanding either of us
make sense of it.

I used to think faith was a key
you could hang by the door,
brass and unquestioning,
always ready.

Turns out faith is more 
like a forwarding address,
a letter that keeps arriving
even after you’ve changed,
even after you’ve stopped believing
in the version of yourself
that needed a miracle
to feel loved.

I haven’t lost anything.
I’ve simply learned
my soul has more than one home,
and faith, wandering tenant that it is,
has finally found a place
where it can breathe, 
not louder,
not smaller,
just true.

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We speak as if something 
is still arriving, but the door 
has already closed on the sound 
of your name.

The room remembers you 
more precisely than I do,
how you leaned into corners,
how your silence gathered like light
on the backs of chairs.

I have misplaced the moment 
it ended—not lost, misplaced,
like a key set down in a life 
I no longer live.

There is no edge to point to.
No clean incision.

Only this:
the way everything continues
without permission.

Even now, while writing this
I find myself saving things for you:
a line I almost understood,
the last warmth of a cup
I did not finish.

As if the ending were a rumor
we could outwait.

But it has already passed through us,
quietly, taking the weight of every future 
tense with it.

What remains is not absence.
It is a shape that insists on being held,
and the strange, unearned knowledge
that we are holding it alone.

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