by
Four haiku with a tanka couplet
The last bits of blood
And flesh licked clean long ago
By a parched dead tongue;
The dry wind scatters
Sand across the blasted sky.
No one sees the bones.
What are words, but dust?
An unwritten love letter waits
On lovers to wake.
The bed’s rumpled sheets
Lie tangled across the floor,
Seaweed on the beach.
Unrelenting heat pulses
Well after the setting sun.
(November 5, 2017)
Around the house.
They wait smugly to tell you
Who you are, who you’re allowed
To be; they speak your new name
Like Rumpelstiltskin to control
The way you see your own skin,
The way the story must end.
Each word that’s spoken provides
A direction, a tangent,
A torque to turn with finesse
The driest straw into gold:
The way the story must end,
The way you see your own skin.
We are no more who they say
We are, than who we say we
Are. We Cower in our caves
Trading tales like bits of flint.
The way the story becomes
Begins within our own skin.
(November 4, 2017)
I’m worn,
Exhausted,
Without laughter.
Each moment haunts
Anxiety’s edge,
And waits
With a studied
Grace, for chance
To become propitious.
Hold me here
To outwait
The passing fear:
The troubled night,
The knife at my throat.
(November 4, 2017)
Presumptuous tropes
Slip like ropes around my neck.
We are never free.
(October 31, 2017)
so studied
in his circumstance,
each vibration sings
into a new key
like kisses
yet to be
as the combination
of the small
falls like tumblers
in a lock
and all we ever were
becomes fractured
yet secure
(October 31, 20170
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“We live between walls.
We inhabit conditions we term chance,
Sequence, and agency, this is a place where things
Happen, we can say “on that date things.”
and things do– daily,
happen, but only just
out of site, some else
not you, not me, not
a place nearby, only
just away unnoticed—
still, close to claim
a space, not your you,
but some other coheres
as now, then, the same
depends so much
upon another word
as sound to change
a difference only
just enough to care
which box where
you’re shoveled
with other things
until gone and things
do daily without you
(October 31, 2017)
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