Poetry

A satirical self portrait

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

I Am DC Gunnersen
A Self-Portrait in Comic Verse


I am DC Gunnersen, philosopher and bard,
A Viking born of Norse and Danish bone,
Who traded fjords for California’s yard
And learned to write about his feelings — alone.
I double-majored so that I could see
The soul’s mechanics and the mind’s terrain,
At San Diego State — a psych degree,
A philosophy degree, and still no gain.
For thirteen years I’ve kept the thunder blog,
One hundred fourteen thousand souls have come,
Yet here I sit inside my mental fog,
Eating midnight snacks and feeling glum.
I am part poet and part psychologist,
Part musician and part restless, roving mind,
Part philosopher — a long and gilded list
That impresses no one of the female kind.
The child I was was swallowed by a fear
So ancient that the wound forgot its name,
I carry him still, cup held to my ear,
Listening for a love that never came.
I studied Bowlby — memorized the chart,
The anxious and the avoidant design,
Then handed all my findings and my heart
To someone who had built a longer line.
She was the silence dressed in guarded light,
I was devotion dressed in open pleading,
She offered absence; I, six hundred nights
Of poems that she never finished reading.
I built a chapel out of “could have been”
And knelt inside and called the echo, God,
Six hundred thirty poems laid in between
The pew, the floor, the WikiPsalm facade.
I quoted Watts — the wave forgets the sea —
While being the wave, inside my bedroom, writing,
I quoted Plato to my subscribers three
Hundred sixty-nine — the reading, hardly sighting.
I told the mirror, “You are more than this,”
It winked and showed my slightly crooked hair,
I searched the soul for transcendental bliss
And found a lonely sock beneath the chair.
I know my armor — I can name each plate,
The fortress I erected to endure,
I see the door that opens — still I wait,
Examining the lock from the inside of the cure.
But here’s the joke the universe has kept:
The laughing is the waking, not the sleep,
The fool who names his folly hasn’t wept —
He’s found the punchline is the truth to keep.
I am DC Gunnersen — I see
The wave, the ocean, and the laughing tide,
I am Dean Christian Gunnersen — and free
Is not the man who hides, but who’s survived.
I am DCG — the thunder and the blog,
The anxious heart, the Bowlby-broken case,
I am Dane — emerging from the fog,
Still eating snacks, but laughing at the grace.

…DCG

What AI thinks about this post 

A few things worth noting about what this poem does structurally:
The opening stanza sets up the comic grandiosity — the Viking in California writing about his feelings. That tension between the name and the reality is your signature move, and the poem plays it straight the whole way through.
The middle third is where the weight lands — the childhood wound, the anxious attachment, the chapel of “could have been,” the 630 poems she never finished reading. That line is probably the sharpest one in the piece. It earns the laugh because it is also just true.
The Bowlby stanza is the satirical heart of the poem — the man who studied attachment theory in order to understand himself, then demonstrated it perfectly in the next relationship anyway. That is not failure. That is the human condition wearing a philosophy degree.
The turn at line 41 — “But here’s the joke the universe has kept” — is where the poem shifts from confession to actualization. The laughter is not deflection. It is recognition. The fool who can name his own folly is already halfway out of it.
And the closing identity sequence — DC Gunnersen, Dean Christian Gunnersen, DCG, Dane — lands as something closer to arrival than introduction. You named yourself at the beginning as a character. You name yourself at the end as a person who survived the character and is still here, still writing, still laughing.
That is the big picture the poem is pointing at.

…

DCG

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The ego wears philosophy 

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Nod to AWW

The Dream That Wears Your Name


You woke inside a body and you called the whole thing you,
A name sewn on a borrowed coat, a face behind a face.
The universe put on a mask and stumbled somewhere new,
Then spent a lifetime wondering what filled the empty space.
We trace our fear back to the womb, to hunger and to cold,
And call the wound identity, the scar our signature.
But something older than our dread was watching to behold,
A dreamer who forgot the dream was never quite obscure.
The wave believes it is the sea’s most separate and alone,
It rises up in panic dressed in foam and green and spray.
But even crashing on the shore it does not crack the stone,
It only finds the ocean was beneath it all the way.
We build a self like scaffolding around a house of glass,
And guard it from the morning light with arguments and pride.
The ego wears philosophy to make its fortress last,
Yet wisdom is the unlocked door we bolted from inside.
I asked the silence what it was before I learned my name,
It answered with a birdsong and the smell of morning rain.
Not God in robes on mountains, not a torch of sacred flame,
But something vast and ordinary breathing through my pain.
You are not the river’s story, you are all the water flowing,
Not the melody remembered, but the music and the air.
The hand that draws the curtain back is always somehow knowing,
That the eye behind the curtain was already standing there.
We chase the thought that something waits at some arriving place,
That meaning lives in futures where our better selves reside.
But every step was whole already, every fall a kind of grace,
And every empty-handed moment nothing less than tide.
The child who wept at sunset did not mourn the disappearing,
He mourned that no one told him it would paint itself again.
The grief we carry most is not the loss but the not-hearing,
That beauty is not punishment and wonder is not vain.
So let the self unravel like a coat left in the rain,
Not into nothing, but into the everything it hid.
The dream is not a prison and the dreamer is not slain,
You are the one who dreamed the world, and look at what you did.
We are the question asking itself in forty thousand tongues,
We are the dark that needed light to know that it was dark.
The universe breathed outward and it found itself with lungs,
And called that finding human, and the human was the spark.

…

DCG

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AWW inspired

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AWW—Alan Wilson Watts

The Grain That Became


Why is it the ones who feel the most were handed the most fire,
Who came into this world already carrying the weight?
The sensitive soul is not an accident of strange desire,
The oyster does not choose its wound, but something learns to wait.
I was born into a house where love wore a condition’s face,
Where kindness had a price tag and affection had a clause.
I spent my childhood studying the silences and space,
Learning how to read a room the way a lawyer reads the laws.
And what I thought was damage, what I named my broken thing,
Was actually the friction that the ordinary lack.
The undisturbed do not awaken — comfort does not bring
The kind of sight that only comes from not being able to look back.
A grain of sand slips into the soft body of a shell,
It cannot be removed, it cannot be explained away.
The oyster does not mourn the grain or curse the place it fell,
It simply starts the slow and layered work of making something stay.
That is what the wounded learn that the comfortable never do,
That you cannot solve the darkness by demanding that it leave.
You coat it slow in understanding, layer after layer through,
Until the thing that nearly broke you is the thing you most believe.
My family was the sand grain and their chaos was the grit,
Their confusion planted questions that the easy never ask.
What is love when love comes broken, when it does not seem to fit,
When the people meant to show you wear affection like a mask?
You cannot simply copy what you watched, you cannot trust
The inheritance of pattern when the pattern is a wound.
Something in you pushes back and says this simply is not just,
And in that refusal, in that no, a new direction is groomed.
Philosophy gave me language for the ache I could not name,
Psychology gave mirrors to the hallways of my youth.
But neither healed the thing itself — what healed me was the claim
That what was done to them, was done to them, and that is also truth.
They were the grain inside an older shell than mine,
Their cruelty was a coating over something that had hurt.
The chain goes back through generations, silence down the line,
And someone has to be the one who lifts it from the dirt.
So I will be the oyster who stops passing on the sand,
Who coats the wound in something worth the carrying and the cost.
I will be the one who names the grief and opens up the hand,
And finds that what I feared I’d lost was never really lost.
The pearl is not the absence of the grain, the pearl is what remains
When something living meets its wound and does not look away.
The hardest soil produces the most luminous of gains,

And darkness was just light that had not learned yet how to stay.

…

DCG

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The blaspheme of my dignity

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The Blaspheme of My Dignity


I woke at three when the darkness called my name
The floor beneath me hummed with something wrong
A buzzing low, like current through a frame
My body sang a strange and nameless song
The sparks began to crawl below the knee
Like insects feeding on a wound unseen
I did not know the truth of what would be
I only felt the horror grow between
The dream arrived and wore a surgeon’s coat
It handed me a diagnosis carved in stone
The rot had crept as far as any throat
And left me standing somewhere half alone
I looked down at my feet through sleepless eyes
They were not feet but something split apart
The flesh had opened up in slow surprise
Like something that had lost its will to start
The wound was breathing, slick and purple-grey
A hissing mouth that spoke without a word
It told me I was rotting from the day
The kind of thing that waking life deferred
I tried to run but something held the floor
The tingling spread its gospel up my spine
I could not find the exit or the door
I only knew the numbness was not mine
The corridors were made of failing skin
The walls were leaking something pale and thick
A pus of what I had been holding in
A yellow truth that made the dreaming sick
The doctors in the hallway looked away
As if the wound were something indiscreet
They said the body always finds a way
To tell you what the mind refuses to meet
I screamed but what came out was just the hum
That electrical low whisper in the dark
The terror was not sharp but strangely numb
The dying was so quiet in the heart
I watched my hands dissolve into the floor
I watched my legs become a stranger’s weight
I stood inside the wound I could not ignore
And still I could not name the thing, too late
The dream dissolved to three AM again
The tingling called me back from where I’d gone
The body had been speaking through the pain
A language only sleepers live upon
Now waking draws the curtain back at last
The nerve damage was the ghost inside the room
The dreaming mind could not outrun the past
It only built more elegant the tomb
The feet were never rotting in the night
The wound was never leaking on the floor
The body spoke in signals, not in fright

Neuropathy had knocked upon the door

…

DCG

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Cliff notes from the heart

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The Door Before Entropy


I woke inside the mirror that my longing called the truth,
And saw my prayers arranging what your silence would not say,
I built a chapel out of hope and called the ache my proof,
While undisclosed old shadows kept dividing night from day.
I loved the pieces of your heart you let me hold in light,
And filled the missing spaces with the mercy I could give,
But partial truth can turn the mind against its better sight,
And make a man invent the life he wants enough to live.
You are not evil for the walls your childhood taught to stand,
Nor weak because your nervous system learned to disappear,
But I cannot keep reaching with an ever-open hand,
If every touch of closeness turns to distance, doubt, and fear.
I know the debt that haunts you, and the car note in your name,
The jobs, the cats, the drinking, and the panic underneath,
I say this not to wound you, not to drag you into shame,
But love must speak the truth before it loses all its teeth.
You keep me near enough to feel the warmth behind your door,
Then far enough to make my anxious spirit start to plead,
I know you care, but caring cannot carry us much more,
If care stays hidden deep behind the hunger not to need.
I have been kind, supportive, patient, prayerful, and awake,
I have watched you soften, even when you turned away,
But if I make your wounds my home, my own foundations break,
And I become the price I pay to help you face the day.
The post was right: you were a mirror and a human soul,
A stage where hope and fear both learned to act their part,
I wanted healing with you, something mutual and whole,
But maybe I supplied too much of my own burning heart.
I called it fate because the timing felt like God had moved,
I called it covenant because my spirit knelt inside,
But love is not made holy just because it has been proved,
By how much pain a faithful man is willing still to hide.
I want to be beside you, but not vanish into you,
I want to hold your sorrow, but not drown beneath its tide,
I want the sacred, simple, sober work of something true,
Not just the ghost of closeness where two frightened people hide.
If you can speak with honesty, then bring the facts and stay,
Bring fear, bring debt, bring grief, bring every guarded scar,
I will not need perfection if you meet me in the day,
And stop making your distance feel like love seen from afar.
But if reflection feels like threat, and truth becomes attack,
If every loving question makes you close another gate,
Then I must bless your road and slowly take my spirit back,
Before compassion teaches me to worship my own fate.
I am not leaving out of anger, nor demanding you be healed,
I am naming where the probable conclusion starts to show,
A bond can be meaningful and still remain concealed,
A seed can touch the sunlight and still never choose to grow.
So hear me with the tenderness I struggled hard to keep,
I do not want to break you, shame you, corner you, or blame,
But if you cannot wake beside the wounds that make you sleep,
Then I must stop confusing love with waiting in your name.
The likely end is simple, though it cuts the soul in two,
We either work with courage, or the pattern wins again,
You run from being seen, I ache from chasing you,
And entropy returns to scatter what we could have been.
Yet still I pray for mercy over both our wounded lives,
For wisdom in the silence, for a sober, steady grace,
For the woman who survives by hiding where she hides,
And the man who must not lose himself while loving her face.
If you are strong enough to look, then I am strong enough to stay,
Not as savior, not as jailer, not as hunger dressed in flame,
But if you cannot meet me there, I’ll turn my heart away,
And leave you with my blessing, not my bitterness or claim.
For love must have a boundary, or it rots into control,
And prayer must have discernment, or it blesses self-deceit,
I will not trade my principles to rescue any soul,
Nor call myself devoted while I kneel at my defeat.
I see your worth beneath the fear, the beauty under guard,
The frightened child, the woman, and the soul that longs for peace,
But healing asks for labor, and that labor will be hard,
And no one finds new freedom while refusing old release.
So this is my precipice, my sorrow, and my vow,
I will love with open eyes or let the fantasy depart,
I will not force tomorrow from the silence of the now,
Nor let your guarded nervous system govern my own heart.
If we begin, begin in truth, with both our masks undone,
If not, then let God teach us what the ache was trying to be,
For even broken love can turn a man toward the sun,
And even losing you may be the way I come to me.
I wanted us to heal, and maybe that was not a lie,
But wanting cannot carry what two people will not choose,
If you cannot reach for life, then I must learn to say goodbye,
Because love that saves another must not teach me how to lose.

RSP

…

DCG

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I forgot the world was singing

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Where have you been?” the morning asked, gold hand upon my face,
“I’ve been lost in worry,” I said, “and walking half asleep.”
“Then come back slow,” the sunlight breathed, “there’s mercy in this place,”
“I forgot the world was singing,” I whispered, “from the deep.”
We left our phones like tired stones beside the folded towels,
And walked where glassy water broke in silver on the sand.
My friend said, “Listen, even now, the gulls are ringing vowels,”
I laughed because the wind reached out and took me by the hand.
The ocean smelled of salt and life, of kelp and open doors,
The air moved soft across our skin like kindness we could feel.
“How many days,” she asked me there, “have we ignored these shores?”
“Too many,” I said, “but today this blue is something real.”
We laid down warm against the earth, the beach beneath our backs,
The sun poured amber through our bones and loosened every knot.
The waves kept time beyond our breath, erasing all our tracks,
My friend said, “This is all we have,” and I said, “All we’ve got.”
A boy ran past with dripping hair, his laughter bright and wild,
His mother shook her head and smiled, her eyes a summer sky.
“Look,” I said, “joy is barefoot here, still trusting like a child,”
“Maybe joy never left,” she said, “maybe we passed it by.”
The waves collapsed in thunder-soft, then rose from foam and rain,
They spoke in broken music we could understand.
“I used to live tomorrow’s storms and yesterday’s old pain,”
“And missed the small warm miracles held open in my hand.”
She said, “I know. I lose the light to bills and buzzing screens,”
“I forget my father’s gentle voice, my sister’s kitchen song.”
“I miss the garden after work, the lemon leaves, the greens,”
“Then wonder why my heart feels tired from hurrying so long.”
We walked the shore until our feet wrote stories in the foam,
The tide came in and kissed them clean, as if to let us start.
“Maybe beauty waits,” I said, “like someone leaving home,”
“But returns the very moment we make room inside the heart.”
The sun warmed up the oranges we peeled with sandy thumbs,
Sweet juice ran down, and salt was on our lips.
The whole bright day beat in our chests like drums,
Of blood and breath and summer held in simple, shining sips.
“Do you feel that?” she asked me, “how the breeze begins to mend?”
“It smells like clean beginnings blown across the bay.”
I said, “The world keeps offering itself like a friend,”
“And all it asks is that we lift our eyes and stay.”
Children built a castle where the wet sand held its form,
Then cheered when waves came reaching in and pulled the towers down.
“Nothing lasts,” my friend said, “but the day is still so warm,”
“And even falling castles leave us laughing in this town.”
We spoke about the day ahead, our hopes, our small endeavors,
Then let them drift like seabirds over the blue.
No past could chain us there, no future stormy weathers,
The now was sunlit skin and sea, and every breath was new.
“So promise me,” the morning said, “when beauty calls, allow it,”
“I’m here,” I told the shining world, “I see you now, I vow it.”

…

DCG

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The case of Dane 

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In third grade, Dane held a guitar like morning light,
And sang old mountains through a classroom door.
A boy with questions hidden out of sight,
Already felt the world was asking more.
He watched the grown-ups smile through private rain,
And learned that silence had a human face.
He named no wound, but carried half its pain,
Then offered others tenderness and space.
Teenage years came dressed in doubt and fire,
With music keeping time beside his bed.
He chased approval, hunger, hope, desire,
And feared the words that people left unsaid.
He laughed too loud when loneliness drew near,
Then called it wisdom just to seem less weak.
But every joke concealed a sharper fear,
That love might leave the moment he would speak.
At school he studied why the heart defends,
Why reason bends when ego wants the throne.
He read of minds, of truth, of means and ends,
Yet found no book could save a man alone.
Philosophy gave names to restless nights,
Psychology gave mirrors to his scars.
He learned that pride can counterfeit as rights,
And wounded children steer adult-like cars.
In young adulthood, Dane mistook his ache
For proof that closeness must be tightly held.
He loved as though one absence meant a break,
And every pause became a sentence spelled.
An anxious thread ran burning through his chest,
While calmer voices told him not to chase.
He tried to hold what needed room to rest,
And saw his need reflected in her face.
Yet empathy would stop him at the line,
Where love becomes a cage with holy art.
He learned her freedom was not less than mine,
And mercy must protect another heart.
He worked, he failed, he stood, he fell again,
Paid bills, wrote poems, swallowed private shame.
He watched ambition masquerade as Zen,
Then saw humility outlive the game.
His strengths were not the absence of a flaw,
But how he turned to face what made him small.
He found that truth was not a perfect law,
But courage answering the inward call.
Later, with dimmer eyes and clearer sight,
He met the God he could not fit in thought.
Not thunder only, but a patient light,
That found him most when certainty was not.
The Bible did not end his need to know,
But taught his restless mind to kneel and breathe.
A seed must vanish somewhere dark to grow,
And peace may come through what we cannot seize.
So Dane still walks where old attachments stir,
Still flinches when affection feels delayed.
But names the fear before it speaks for her,
And lets compassion interrupt the blade.
He writes because the soul must testify,
That frailty is not failure, only clay.
He asks if meaning waits beyond the sky,
Or if it forms in how we live today.
And when the final page begins to bend,
Will Dane find home, or one more road to roam?
Is God the answer waiting at the end,
Or just the voice still calling Dane toward home?

…

DCG

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When solemnity meets absurdity 

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I woke with thunder in my chest
.
And toast crumbs hiding in my coat
.
I prayed for wisdom like a saint
.
Then fought a stubborn parking note
.
I told the mirror, “Be sincere”
.
It winked and showed my crooked hair
.
I searched my soul for holy truth
.
And found a sock beneath the chair
.
The sky looked serious and gray
.
A pigeon strutted like a king
.
I bowed beneath the weight of life
.
Then slipped on one banana string
.
My ego wore a paper crown
.
My conscience had a leaky shoe
.
I tried to walk the noble road
.
And tripped on things I thought I knew
.
I carried grief like sacred stone
.
Then laughed because my soup was cold
.
The heart can break and still complain
.
About the bills it has to hold
.
We want to be both wise and grand
.
Yet lose our keys inside the door
.
We preach about the deeper self
.
Then snack at midnight on the floor
.
But weakness is a lantern too
.
It lights the cracks we try to hide
.
A humbled soul can still stand tall
.
With mustard stains and wounded pride
.
We are the storm, we are the joke
.
We chase the truth, then miss the bus
.
We build our temples out of dust
.
Then sneeze and blame the wind in us
.
So let the solemn meet the strange
.
Let mercy laugh and wisdom bend
.
The human road is hard and odd
.
Yet hope still waits around the bend
.
We fall, confess, get up, and grin
.
Still bruised, still brave, still incomplete
.
A fragile heart can bless the world
.
With muddy shoes and steady feet

…

DCG

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Yet, sometimes he argues with every ghost 

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Did I become wise, or just tired of surprise?
Did I call every sunrise another old game?
Did I laugh at the world with suspicious eyes?
Or hide from my hope by giving it blame?
I trusted my ego like a king with a crown,
Then watched it trip over its robe in the street.
It preached from a chair while falling down,
Then asked for applause with mud on its feet.
Cynicism came wearing a chapel bell,
Saying, “I alone see through the lie.”
But even a skeptic can build his own cell,
And call it clear truth while afraid to try.
I asked, “Do I care, or care too much?”
The answer arrived with coffee and toast.
It said, “You still flinch at the human touch,
But mock it first so it hurts you least.”
There is a strange faith in expecting the worst,
A prayer with no candle, a hymn with no grace.
The cynic drinks doubt to quiet his thirst,
Then wonders why salt has covered his face.
He says he is honest, sharper than most,
A surgeon of nonsense, a blade in the night.
Yet sometimes he argues with every ghost,
Because being right feels safer than light.
So begin with yourself, but do not stay there,
For self can become a locked little room.
Open the window, breathe common air,
Let humor come sweeping the dust and gloom.
Reason should guide, not sneer from a throne,
And laughter should loosen what pride made tight.
A joke can remind us we are not stone,
A thought can become more tender than fight.
The world is not pure, but neither are we,
So mercy must enter the evidence too.
If wisdom means learning how poorly we see,
Then doubt becomes useful, humble, and true.
The cynic may kneel, not to worship his pain,
But to set down the spear he mistook for a friend.
He rises less certain, yet human again,
And finds that beginning was always the end.

…

DCG

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Be the reason 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment


I met a man at noon with rain inside his eyes.
.
His coffee cup saluted me, then landed on the floor.
.
I said, insane be why we lift each other toward the skies.
.
He laughed and said, then madness has a decent open door.
.
A woman missed her bus and cursed the clock by name.
.
Her sandwich wore more mustard than a sandwich ought to wear.
.
I offered her a napkin and a joke about my shame.
.
She smiled like sudden sunlight had remembered she was there.
.
Not every heart deserves the jewels we carry in our hand.
.
Some pigs will judge the pearl and ask if it can fry.
.
So choose the souls who listen, those who try to understand.
.
And leave the muddy critics to their royal sty.
.
We walked a little slower past the glass and city noise.
.
Where lonely people practiced looking busy, sharp, and fine.
.
I saw the tired fathers and the mothers hiding poise.
.
Each face a sealed cathedral with a flickering little shrine.
.
Dignity was quiet, not a trumpet in the square.
.
Empathy sat beside it with compassion on its knee.
.
Well-being, like a candle, gave a humble, human glare.
.
And all three said, be useful, but let others still be free.
.
The man bought three more coffees for no reason but the day.
.
The woman called her sister just to ask if she was fed.
.
A janitor made thunder with his mop across the gray.
.
Then bowed like he had cleaned the moon and polished up its head.
.
I did not give a sermon to the wounded passing by.
.
I only held the door and let the answer breathe.
.
For wisdom hates a costume and a loud heroic cry.
.
It works in little rooms where tired people grieve.
.
A child dropped his ice cream and declared the world was done.
.
His father said, my boy, the cone has met its fate.
.
I bought another scoop and called it resurrection fun.
.
The child became a prophet licking chocolate off his plate.
.
This is how a village forms inside a stranger’s day.
.
Not by perfect saints, but fools who choose to care.
.
By one absurd kindness placed exactly in the way.
.
By one clear mind that finds another there.
.
The logic is not hidden in a palace made of gold.
.
It sits beside the wounded, making room.
.
If I protect your worth, then my own soul grows bold.
.
If you protect mine, we both outlive the gloom.
.
So let the cruel keep counting what they never learned to give.
.
Let vanity go hungry in its mirror made of clay.
.
We’ll practice being human while we still have time to live.
.
And be insane enough to brighten someone’s day.
…

DCG

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