warmth

Warmth coming down
between green tree bodies,

You, a moss between shale cliffs
entertaining dust gray
nodules,

Rest before ripping the tear-here tabs
at the edges of orange dusk,

before slow sky plains
into stellate pricks.

Choose a motivation
in knot-tying with grateful people.

You are not to be afraid of your intensity;
cherish it with mighty cupped nerves,

chuckling
to your most distal
callous skin.

While the same street signs in your temporary home
set like gelatin

You protect, of all voices,
your dawn gray thoughts.

(Hi there! I hope you are feeling strong enough to listen for injustice and strong enough to unravel it within yourself. Mostly unrelated to political things, this poem is meant to push the personal mental space to my sleeves. Maybe I haven’t been ‘real’ enough is all I’m trying to say. Okay, thanks for reading, have a fabulous day!)

I wasn’t paying enough attention to my apple and bit my tongue

Tongue (not macintosh)
is another planet reappearing;
incisors mash heavy muscle pulse
and warm your head.

Like seeing the the sun a white
(black) dime in the pond,
glittering too directly
for one small processing unit.

Flip. I
will not stare
into the black hole
in the water.

I will not
redden my eyelids
while pond pulls lost
maple leaves to dam.

Do you see the rest
holding ecstatic sunlight
with pines and birches?
tangible;

how you are not afraid
they are watching your feet.
Your bitten tongue is a crust
of dry leaves at the dam,

modest sun
snail-
mailing planets
back to you.

from the pith

Leaves forfeit after all, dismounting and falling away almost like snow,
their branches and buds are bare.

Red and yellow are the only pure colors left to die.
Blue shrivels up with the sun’s casting-off–

I have pushed lucid hints out
to sea, it is a scape,
a bull, a let-it-go-this-too-shall-pass,

I converse drought resistant Others
with you,
behind closed eyes of silence
and watch mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers and their pithy chlorophyll descend
finally to where we are.

Dear stranger, I have to thank you
for not kicking me or turning a green eye, cold.
I have to thank you, for dancing when I wish to pull the land around me, with all of its twiggy crusts.
And, dear stranger, I am sure now
there is no such thing as being lost, but
we must not let ourselves hollow away.

in recognition of what moves below

I admire the ladies in robes,
how each graceful step
pushes leg by leg
its severe attention to the floor,
quietly evading gravity long stride
from ball of foot to ball of foot to
fabric gathering like inflorescences
and falling back, women’s ankles
strong and genuine, humble
under the effort to move
forward in deep color.

present

you’re looking past your hands
like they are an old man
picking up tennis balls
too slowly, too meticulously,
marveling at the bright yellow gems
he’s putting in a metal basket.

first, human, then perfect.

From beneath a sultry cloud
pokes a brown pair of Birkenstocks
and just above that,
on the side closest to me
joined by eminent bones and skin
exists an ankle,
wholly visible from the pue.
Who would have thought
something so human
such as a well used ankle
lives below Father John’s
white robes?

rainy day

Water only sits in the white chairs
on the back porch
because the clouds kiss the armrests
with their wispy bodies all caked together
instead of a summer sunbeam
or a singular butterfly,
I wonder what it must have been like
to travel in giant flocks,
all those monarchs following magnetic pull
or some navigation
so few of us want anymore.

between two times

indigo blue is the color of the crayon
cursed for infiltrating our perfect
blue colored sky, complete with
one yellow sun and three black gulls.

Suddenly, I find it
wrapped around our suburbian home,
its square shape rising forward
in a full off white shadow

hiding the raw silver pins
that already burn when I cannot see=
after years of putting into the sky
the rest of what we don’t want.

before breakfast

When it occurs to you
that humans are a
renewable resource,
Go to bed
and believe that’s wrong.
Especially when you’re
refreshed.
There will be orange juice
and gasoline tomorrow.
And sunlight on the kitchen
counter, a slow gleam of
window on the rounded corner
and spoons,
What are humans to do
without spoons?

Cursory Screen to an Alternate World

Bright,
where all of the i’s
are dotted and t’s are
firmly crossed by
themselves,
Windows stare
intensely back
with its skinny lines
and nearly invisible cubicles,
perfectly aligned,
blindly uniform
creative templates,
I move like a mouse
in amazement.