by
Static allowed no pauses
to slip his supplications
into their conversations.
Filled with honey, his mouth,
spoke too slowly, too low,
to be heard over the swarm
of bees infesting her ears.
The tea cup had no depth
beyond the damp leaves
he fingered metaphorically.
It was too late to go back,
to be what he was not,
to grow his silent desires
from the salted earth.
(May 28, 2018)
Despite my resistance,
or perhaps as a result,
I live within boundaries,
yet am unable to discern
clean edges, as all walls
fall into grey on approach.
The poem is dark, as you,
who like a peeping Tom,
slip through these words,
hoping to glimpse more
at the window frame open
before you than can be
imagined on your own.
This is a portrait of me
within a frame, a simple
frame, not minimalistic,
certainly not ornate,
for either would provide
far too much that is not
a part of me as if it were;
and, you would believe
these thick lines to be
exposing more to you
than I could possibly
reveal on my own,
as if I do not know
what it is I write.
It is arrogance to think,
on my part and yours,
without blinds one can
see all that exists
within a well-lit room
while standing on the street,
as if life were a simple
sentence tucked neatly
in a proffered book,
like a love letter
marking a certain poem
lovers shared in secret.
Oh, do not tell me how
to see the lines I write,
nor open my words
to finger a wound,
probing for pock marks
to read like Braille
along bloody bones.
Yes, this is me here.
Yet, it is just as much
not me. My borders
extend like language
blurring dialects
with familial tongues.
I refuse to speak
Into the silence
simply to speak,
as if any sound
by itself could be
enough to save us
from our muffled
dread always near.
(May 27, 2018)
I never answered
the question you did not ask
but I wanted to
(May 26, 2018)
With each choice
but a shadow,
rhyme’s echo
adds confusion
to the forest tumult.
Do you see
you are lost
in the leaves?
Or like the mantis
do you pray
to a different god,
bending yourself
toward some shade
of urgent green,
which could be you
as no other?
Where one begins
and leaves off
is indiscernible;
the coherence
of patterns
ripple like wind
across wild grass,
fluttering light
into shadow,
mimicking starlings’
murmur in the sky.
(May 22, 2018)
by
I write into the fissures
which slip across my façade
like ice cracking in early
spring rivers. Nothing’s fixed,
but changed. A broken cup
is still broken. Like now,
after years of sadness
inscribed into my skin,
I’m still who I was at ten,
but changed. Each line I write,
each word, fits another bit
into the kaleidoscope’s mosaic.
Each moment becomes a whole,
before fracturing to reform again.
(May 22, 2018)
One does not want to find
the body on the floor,
bits of brain and blood flecked
in patterns on the walls.
After decades scribbling
these poems to the page,
reading hundreds if not
thousands of others ,
apparently, I just needed you.
So, please, tell me, my child,
what my poetry means
to an ignorance like mine.
Keeping in mind, the reader
finds what he wants to find.
(May 16, 2018)
The words above the door
replicated and smeared
themselves along the wall.
With one stroke, I saw
what drugs decades before
revealed in delusion:
For a surety,
our projections turn
back proffering chains.
Yet, no chains exist beyond
our myopic visions;
the earth begins and ends
with a whisper, with a shout,
with inarticulate gargling
(May 15, 2018).
by
My mouth is my wound,
a stigmata of broken teeth
and words. My tongue’s slashed
like ribbons flapping
in the mountain’s wind.
My prayers snap violently
into the icy air’s silence.
I don’t know what to do
now: swallow my own
blood, and drown; or spit
my life onto the ground
to call forth a bitter
beast which I fear
will devour me whole?
(May 11, 2018)
The days and nights pass
in calm acquiescence. As
expectations lurk without
patience, sad laughter slips
into conversation’s pauses.
We each drink to avoid the
silent ramifications: there’s
nothing to say; and, what’s said
means nothing. A stock phrase
spills from a stock question
in a communal recitation.
Only empty gestures remain
to conjure, with a hollow
dance, the clichés of love.
(May 10 2018)
The tree grabs the light tight
against its lithe branches,
a quick embrace, then release
into the slow evening air,
like a child running to her mother,
hugging her in affirmation,
then dancing away in delight.
(May 10, 2018)
I have no shadow,
it faded like cloth
in the sun.
Light passes through me,
no wall marked
with my absence
to imply a presence
now lost in light.
I sweep my footprints
from the trail
like gardener monks,
leaving all behind.
Not knowing how to fly,
I walk close to the ground
between pulsing shadows;
condemned to watch
the butterflies flit
above the flowers
blooming in the sun.
(May 9, 2018)
We peel back skin’s layers
as if caressing a book’s
tissue thin pages,
each bit of viscera
detailed.
I tell a story
to make myself whole—
so many revisions to go.
In corners,
the old murmur softly,
placing the past
back into an order
extent only in dream,
which none of the young
care to hear.
(May 8, 2018)
Repetition runs counter to chaos.
The steady tap-tap declares one
to be; it belies the random
scratch upon the prison wall.
Only for a moment one rises
above the skitter of rat’s feet
through dry straw to say it
again: I am here, I am here.
Too often ritual’s condemned
as too difficult a constraint
to work within. Yet, there is no
freedom in the sun’s fire and fusion.
Freedom’s found in the patterned
improvisation of predictability.
(May 7, 2018)
by
You were a dream, as was she,
but neither of you were the dream.
She kept shifting from dark to light.
Both of you were, simultaneously
light and dark, entwined like lovers
tangled in a kiss. He watched, intrigued
and somewhat guilty, as if a voyeur
peering through bedroom blinds.
The dream kept returning to you
and her together, but not together;
separate in your costumes and colors:
red and black lace against warm skin;
a part of the ambient background
reasserting itself again into day.
He woke often, then returned to you,
in the dream, with her. The dream
turned the morning back into itself,
until where each of them left off vanished,
like promises which were never made.
(May 7, 2018)
