Analog Patience began with a simple realization: nearly everything I remember most vividly required waiting.
Before the world became immediate, there was a small ritual attached to almost everything. Dropping a needle onto a record. Turning a radio dial slowly through the static. Waiting for a photograph to come back from the Fotomat. Sitting through commercials because there was no fast-forward button. Watching Channel 3 because that was where the video game lived. Technology asked something of us then. Attention. Participation. Most of all, patience.
These poems live in that space between memory and machinery. They return to the obsolete objects, forgotten broadcasts, dusty stereos, vinyl records, cameras, televisions, radios, and other analog relics that quietly became the architecture of a childhood. But the technology is rarely the real subject. It is simply the mechanism that opens the door. On the other side are snow days and basement bars, neighborhood sandlots and summer lakes, sisters and friends, fathers and sons, and people who exist now only in the imperfect circuitry of memory.
There is something wonderfully unreliable about that circuitry. Memories degrade like old magnetic tape. Details disappear. Dreams splice themselves into actual events. Songs become inseparable from places. Sometimes I can no longer tell whether I am remembering what happened, remembering the last time I remembered it, or inventing the missing pieces entirely. Analog Patience lives comfortably inside that uncertainty.
This series is my attempt to tune the dial backward and listen for whatever signals remain. Not to reconstruct the past exactly as it was, but to capture the strange emotional frequency it still broadcasts on. The machines may be obsolete. The stations may have gone silent. But somewhere beneath the static, the signal is still there.
Man and Boy
A bored boy disappears into the racks of a Main Street institution, where jungle cats, the Wild West, and a chance encounter with a local legend turn an ordinary shopping trip into something worth remembering.
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Friday Night Atari
A Friday night in Syracuse, 1983. Pitfall gives way to Robot Tank, and a ten-year-old boy discovers a new dimension just before his own world is about to change.
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The Ghosts of Skaneateles
A few notes from an old AM radio send me backward through three generations and seventy years of family history on the shores of Skaneateles Lake. From a frightened boy on a dock in 1976, to my parents in 1968, to a grandfather I never met in 1956, the ghosts of the lake were there…
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Starboy
A forbidden basement room. A glowing stereo. An older sister with something to share. One side of 2112 later, music would never sound the same.
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The Den
Hidden behind a forgotten hallway lies a perfectly preserved den where the television still glows, the radio still crackles, and the forgotten interstitials of Saturday morning patiently wait to be discovered once again. The Den is an exploration of memory not as an archive, but as a living place where the overlooked moments of childhood…
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The Cr’apple
Some lurked in closets. Others scratched at bedroom windows during summer storms, fed by half-heard conversations and imaginations running far ahead of reason. The Cr’apple is the story of one such creature, and the quiet revelation decades later that transformed a family tree into a family legend.
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Ghost Runner on Third
There were never quite enough kids to fill every position, so imagination did the rest. Ghost Runner on Third is a tribute to sandlot baseball, unwritten childhood rules, and the quiet code of honor forged on long summer afternoons behind a weathered barn, where friendship always mattered more than keeping score.
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Grand Central Station
For decades it was just a phrase.
Then one day, standing in Grand Central Terminal, the connection finally clicked. A meditation on memory, distance, and the lessons that sometimes take a lifetime to arrive.
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Potsy Gopher
Potsy Gopher is the story of a childhood imaginary friend who felt every bit as real as the world around him. Born from Saturday morning cartoons, spinning vinyl, shortwave radios, and basement adventures, he became a collaborator in wonder, a defender against shadows, and a companion through the analog landscapes of youth. Though time eventually…
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Analog Girl
“Analog Girl” steps outside the childhood lens of Analog Patience and into the present, exploring what it means to navigate a world where everything is instant, connected, and endlessly available. Through her resistance, frustration, and eventual return to something more internal, this piece reflects on the quiet value of imagination in an age that rarely…
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Night Signals
Night Signals captures the fragile boundary between childhood imagination and primal fear, where the familiar refuge of a basement becomes something far less certain. Set against the flickering afterglow of late-night television, this piece follows a young boy’s urgent ascent from darkness, chased not by something seen, but something deeply felt. The cellar transforms into…
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Depth of Field
In the quiet glow of a basement in March 1982, the waiting finally pays off. The signal has been tuned, the record has been chosen, and now the image returns, developed and real. This piece closes the analog loop, where patience is not just endured but understood. In a world that moved at the speed…
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33 and a Third
A snow day, a basement, and a turntable spinning time itself. Before everything was instant, there was a rhythm to waiting. Records played start to finish, stories unfolded one track at a time, and imagination filled the space in between. This piece explores the quiet ritual of vinyl, where a boy begins to choose his…
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Channel 3
A quiet Saturday morning in the early 1980s. Three channels, a Zenith television, and the ritual of cartoons and commercials that defined a generation. In this moment, the boy isn’t just watching the show. He’s watching himself on Channel 3, frozen in black and white on the screen. A fleeting broadcast becomes a memory that…
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Calling All Stations
A boy in a cellar, a man at the dial, and a signal that never quite resolves. This poem explores radio as a bridge across distance and time, shrinking the world while chasing away the loneliness of childhood and the deeper isolation of adulthood.
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The Lords of Stanford Drive
In a quiet valley upstate, three boys ruled a kingdom no one else could see. Big Wheels and vacant lots. Crayfish and cardboard swords. Drive-ins and rotary phones. The Lords of Stanford Drive is a suburban epic about friendship, freedom, and the strange elasticity of childhood time — how it once stood still, then slowly…
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Mannino Acid 