POEM: Runners in Pre Autumn

Off they go in a spandex flurry
Those famine-boned runners
whose skin is anerobic-mushroom-white,
whose hearts are larger than organic cantaloupe -
(I imagine them as pickled tomatoes floating in
magnifying mason jars larger than my fist!)

There they go - off in packs like wolves or some religious order -
These predawn priests who spread their gospel in beats-per-minute,
In recovery times, and later, in personal-bests over lattes.

They are trimmed in the fur of Velcro watches and Ipods,
And flexible wallets that stick to their shoes
They are the trappers of asphalt,
& the assailants of hills, hatted & visored,
gleaming gimmicked with GPS and altimeter -
Past colleges, around flower-skirted ponds
Over drowsy streams, past panting dogs
& cats aloof with puzzled faces,
Enrobed in the prepubescent season.

All around, leaves are stricken with the color of weakened tea.
Outdoors is a shivering pulse on the treadmill of a winter.
It waits for them, limbering up, performing calisthenics,
& the tuning fork of sinewy limbs, ready for the day’s route.

POEM: TO GET LIFTOFF SOMETIMES YOU NEED TO PUT YOUR HEAD IN A CLOUD

Land Of Do As You Please
Land Of Know-It-Alls
Land Of Cholesterol & the
Land Of Missing Organs
Land Of The Inverted bordered by
Land Of The Slanted
Land Of Change
Crayonland whose money is wax
Land of Heroes
& Land of Cowards (the capital constantly moves for fear of invasion!)
The Land of Breastless Women & the
Land of Contraindications (a headache to visit!)

Passports all in order please
And no pushing in line.

We are all immigrants, after all.

POEM: September

the dried mud look of disgust on your face
covered me with a skin of lurid air one
that draped humid over us like spilled ink
& the sharp smell of chlorine was present
that we used to clean up the mess
it erased that greasy part of me away
with the sibilant strength of air
released from a derelict tire
soft, & pliant so mercurial
the way we are told to let things be.

Nothing was the same now with the sun-as-truth returned:
not our plans not our love not the "we" of our youth.

POEM: The Surface of Things and Its Effect On Inspiration

lazy water carry my body
home cicada this lawn-mower sound

these coughs that flit through drowsy light
this lady damsel silk-delicate

that skims saffron lillies by day
ephemeral sprite by night

plays tag with the meniscus
that is the surface of things

spindly legs ripple skin
now torn up like first trod snow

flowers just ghosts
drift suspended - just veneer

air hangs itself upon the accretion
of yellow which also drifts alone

suspended too as if embraced
by the cool licking shade

i am present to the song
so holy, so upright, so free

i open up my notebook
i draw my breath my pen and pray.

POEM: The Last of It

There are those signs that you see
PLEASE NO PARKING
FUNERAL
in front of those overly
sincere funeral homes.
(How do we have the nerve
to call them "homes"?
Just whom do they house?
And who sits around the dinner
table, arguing politics,
getting into family arguments?
Who storms out the door?
And who fights for the bathrooms?)

We bark our orders from beyond the grave
we try to pull strings that in life we would
never have the power to pull.

it's all a matter of our position on the great food chain -
from single cell plankton on one end
to spirit seduced by seance,
grieved over,
missed and mourned
on the other