POEM - The Ways of Broken Things

Do not be afraid of broken things.
Do not be alarmed over the loose parts
You find unexpectedly in your hands.

My dear, this is what makes up everything:
It is a flimsiness that wedges deep
Into the steely edges of the day.

Let’s completely fill up the holes, the ones
We are embarrassed to speak of with courage.
Let’s make them solid, press soft putty between

Fingers clinched; smoothing scarred surfaces.
There are gaps in the galaxies, my heart,
And if stars can bear such imperfection,

Who are we to deny such a kinship?
Do not be afraid of broken things,
Or the random pieces we find shorn off,

Strewn wildly about; held with panicked strength.
It is into this shared emptiness that
We pour out new and made up kind of love.

It is how we find each other when nothing else is true.
It is how we know that nothing else will do.

POEM - Venice

If I could visit Venice

How would my poetry read?

Would it sway like the easy slung back
Sunlight off of canal waters?
Would it hold the ciarroscurro shadows
Of statues, bridges and spires?
Would it peal majestically like church bells?
Would it feel as expansive as those stone plazas?
Round as the rolling Venetian tongue
Rippled like cobblestone?
Would love inch through me, muscle by muscle
Like a gondola, leisurely and expectant?
Would home fill my nostrils
Unlocking the memory held in my DNA?
Would I comprehend romance as my native language?
Would it turn me into a fountain
Of lasting beauty and would I
Finally come to see myself as “beautiful”?

If I could visit Venice
Would I fall in love with my life again?
Know that desire has geography
And borders and requires passports?

And how would my poetry read?

Would words avoid me, fly from me like birds?
Would the city devour me? In its breezy hustle, be
Digested whole, spit me out into the sea
To be caught by local fisherman the following
Day and haggled over at the market place?

Could I ever sleep again?

Would my heart ever return to its normal size
Or would it simply explode?

POEM - Mother Christmas

And just what does it mean to give thanks?

That day in Bethlehem
When those three kings came with
Gifts for the little Baby King -
Did even one of them stop and say to Mary:

"Thank you for salvation" ?
"Thank you for showing me the way home" ?
"Thank you for your efforts, for the
pain you are about to endure for all of this" ?

Did they?

It is no mean feat to traffic in
The joy that you've heaped upon this world,
Creating nothing less than a brand new landscape.
It is a revolutionary act to raise a child –
Threatening Herod in his dreams with Baby Kings,
Born in some hangnail of a stable,
Not even fit for the animals that lived there.

Dear Mother, can you feel the rising thankful blood
That flows through these hands of mine tonight?

Here on this paper in fragments like bones
I spill words like the gifts of aimless Majii
Who come to bear witness to a new terrain that
You’ve carved out with your own heart space.

For this is what you bring forth like December snows:
That each time we make contact with another,
Is one more chance for us to be changed.