POEM - The Question of Melting Snow

Is it that the snow – tired of its purity,
Has smeared an oily grime over its face?
Or, is it that dirt – tired of the commonplace
Has at last achieved divinity?

POEM - Snow Kayaking

Under a tired winter sky four boys push a kayak up a hill.
Ruddy faced, icy skinned, they pile in
Limp as cooked spaghetti, careless as wet laundry.
They descend with sluice-like slithering
And steer with kayak paddle fins.

Under a tired winter sky as fading light gilds mellow meadows,
A once wild wind is now demure.
The sky pulls up the nearest hilltop to sit,
Chin in hand, elbow to feet, touching knee
And tries to catch its broken breathe.

Under a tired winter sky Venus pops open like a waking eye.
She offers sweet light to the deep lethargic blue
Descending – dendrite branch tips as pliant
As tousled hair relaxed, grateful
For the respite of these vespers.

Under a tired winter sky the boys, once laughing and cold-bitten
Now sleep like Olympic kayak-ers,
With dreams as complete as a mitten.
Outside, the kayak waits, wanting just one more run.
While Venus yawns and soon retires.

Saturn jealously ogles the kayak far below
Then climbs the sky, to rule Arctic air and luminous snow.

POEM - Snow Fields

Snow-fields splayed in rounded white are
Inviting - not nearly as desolate as they seem
At first glance. Reclining, they motion to me
To explore, to leave tracks, to break the stillness
With the beating of a human heart so
Soft in the middle of all that ice. Love has drifted
In me every bit as tall and sloped as the snow
Reposed against fences and rusted barbed wire.

Snow-fields invite me in with gleeful eyes.
How can it be that I have never walked them?

POEM - The Sharpest Parts

It is the sharpest parts of you that penetrate deepest into me.

Like the story of the Buddhist monk
Who sought redemption of an insensitive life
By tying a Buddha statue to his waist.
Up a steep mountain slope, he ambled,
To a peak overlooking his monastery
That floated on the lake below.
Hand over hand, through snow and bramble,
Dragging the Buddha with him every step.
At the top he placed the Buddha looking out,
Over the mirror flat lake, the air thick with exhaustion,
Where he sat meditating for days
Without a gram of water or food.

I want to jettison what is tied to me,
To become the net that catches the fish
But let’s the water flow through.

You –
You wear forgiveness like loose fitting clothes
And with the sharpest parts of you
Bore out in me all the space I need.

POEM - Love In An Arctic Cold Front

I reach across a table to steal just one kiss
And it is as calamitous as jangling silverware,
These thoughts of love that crackle like ice underfoot.

Yearning is never frozen, rather it is warm like a wet tongue
To a metal pole in shivering, polar air;
It stays warm even when French kissing heavy metal objects.

Warm enough to reach across a table to steal just one kiss,
To jerk the shroud of the familiar around me – the contour
Of your face amid a crowd of strangers.

To wear the kind of forgiveness that begs me to jump – just jump.
To become a green tenderling to your brown broad-shouldered earth,
A fiddlehead curled asleep, coaxed to awaken, unfurl.

A finger that beckons to me of promises of anything.
“Come here and turn love into concrete,” it says.
“Come here and stave off night with the million suns

You carry about within you”. Light everywhere,
It achieves love in inches instead of miles.
It reaches across that table to steal just one kiss.

POEM - Decree

I decree that we have no right to opinions or tastes if they are patently wrong, parochial, limiting or fearful (fear eats the soul.)

I decree that sex after death is not only an inalienable right, but a metaphysical certainty.

I decree that from this day forward, no lives are too small.

I decree that we will do more with what we have and less with the things we don’t.

I decree that garden-watching shall heretofore be declared the American national pastime in place of baseball and that Walt Whitman’s words about baseball being “America’s game” be expunged from the record.

I decree that we should observe: “National Honor The Unknowable In Ourselves Day”.

I decree that beginning today, all speech will be outlawed – free or otherwise – and a period of free listening will begin, lasting until we learn to stop talking when we have nothing to say.

I decree that childhood officially begins at age 50. (Everything prior to this age is to hereby to be considered “neo-natal”.)

I decree that priests, nuns, ministers, rabbis, Imams, monks, shamans and holy men from all over the world shall heretofore strip naked and wear only a smile whenever preaching about God.

I decree that art does not have to be good: it merely needs to be truthful, and that is enough.

I decree that politics are like a new suit of clothes and should be changed often and that no one should refuse offering a meal to another on the basis of his “wardrobe”.
(After all, it’s only politics.)

I decree that loneliness is part of the human genome.

I decree that Blowin’ In The Wind shall be our new national anthem.

I decree that a bloodied hijab of an Iraqui woman be the new flag of our country and that it be flown at half-mast on every flagpole of every state of this nation until hostilities cease.

I decree that coffee shall be declared as the drink of choice for kids on dates, at strip malls, at weddings and bar mitzvahs and that the martini glass replace the dowdy coffee mug as the cup of choice for coffee.

I decree that no one be allowed his preferences if it means another life having to be lived as a “cough”.

I decree that self loathing is a greater killer than cancer, gunshot wounds, heart disease, automobile related accidents and suicides combined and it should be treated as the medical plague that it is.

I decree that DNA is the new human alphabet of which we are still illiterate.

I decree that effective today, the “smile” to be the national language of America.

I decree that belief in anything is all that needs to be held in order to travel anywhere in the world.

I decree love.

I decree you.