crashes that are not mine (move the rest of the day in waves)

Light is shattering
Across I-70, shards.

Clutter redirecting
open mouths, glistening (Impact, they breathe)

As if I could hear anything but the road
demons braying by my outside rear-views.

It keeps shattering:
a car spilling

across lanes, trucks, tires,
bouncing lights farther

and more comes.

The day shutters

until the unlimited light pinks
at a Maryland rest stop.

My coin slips into the maintained silence
of vending machines.

My coin shatters once blank
noise.

[opening the lid on dreams]

opening the lid on dreams,
anti-light pours in.

We shake ourselves out
as if dragged down a steep flight of stairs,
as if undoing the work of blue/black waves.

We shake ourselves again
into our legs, into our eyes.

In sleep, light is negative. The blinds
bleed a blue/black/green friendly
ooze. Your arms glow, even
if you’re missing some fingers.

It’ll be made of moving parts:
tops and floaters and stars
into and around your hand,
a phantom pillow attached to your face.

But slowly, you move, slowly so you can’t
remember yourself, or
as if your real body can’t let you
reach the door, can’t let you
off the ground, can’t let you see
if the sirens are for your friend.

when we’re live

I guess
it is toughest
to write when I’m doing nothing.

Because what lives once
in passion
is never the same

as the next moment.
And I’d rather not write you
as a memory.

A little bit of motivation

I know I have potential for something,
because some slowly bubbling mush inside my chest
fills with sun,
The ray slows my heartbeat heard in my ears
and fills me inexplicably full;
With more worthwhile breath
than I think possible.

Oh, this

a sunbleached orange color
jumpsuit-
there’s something in my mind
sitting like a baby-
knees bent, legs parted
to balance clumsy body.

It’s the question of taking a
deep breath
before near drowning
just to satisfy the waves,
to fight off the bends.
But I’m still an escapee
in a less-starched jumpsuit.

dementia

It is just before dinnertime in late September.
We are unsure of the sky’s color;
blue, gray, creme, gold,
Autumn falls gently
and squints up at the light:
gold, creme, gray, blue,

my family loitering around my grandma.
80 years is a long time to be here, a
long time to see faces, to talk, to
walk, to see time fly-

we laugh at Auntie’s sunglasses on Grandma-
cool, sleek, reclined in a pocket of earth
and she looks, Mother to
My mother;
“Be careful.”

We rejoice,
words
we say
are important, but
not so much as actions.
Autumn falls gently,

Her eyes blue, gray, creme,
gold, open and squint
up at the light. She
closes them, and naps.

greens

the wet willow moves slightly.
a thunderstorm,
over the trees and
Euthamia, Eutrochium, Artemisia-
color block
something-
is it shadowed horizon
or me?
or the two swans, one gray
one white
making paths through lily pads?
what is the quest for knowledge
if not to name it all
home?

Fish Eye

I am a slippery,
a silvery purple
fish; flickering.
Looming shape by the sun.
A row of wet muscle.
Feed my expectant
eye.

A memory is
an echoed drop of salt, one
million times one million times
rattling in
some gray direction by
a propeller
air rushes up.

legs, lungs, and the ocean, again.

Legs are made of fire,
of a slightly differential black and
white tingle.
Ready pulse
while the I floats,
a broken packet of color-
for a moment spread in mid-air.

Then, there is the ocean.
Clear/black circle
from which everything with lungs
will crawl, perhaps.
Those in the ocean
don’t worry about the heat of limbs,
it flows in and out.
But it’s always in.
and it’s always out.

Lungs are large, almost top heavy
but like a perfect tide
air goes in, and out,
keeping arms from lightning
and legs from falling still.

see

light;
a morning dust.

Rise. thin and quiet
slow, mist:

a million eyes
empty, one hushed deity

tinseling in space
of leaves of grass,

dew shaken, suspends, monotone
the memory on a seashore;

watching a uniform pattern
lapse again, again we see=watch

half dark
half light

a bead on a string
between brows, never expected

to be a curtain. to find anything
in a place half built.