POEM: The Path - If it is to be me

If it is to be me,
Then let me be ready.
Let it be my heart that is
Clear spring water
Quenching the great thirst
and the place earth herself calls
home.

POEM: One Second

Is the time it takes for a cesium atom to bounce around a special container that a very specific few people measure for the very general masses.

It is as motion & wasted motion,

It is as the object of early time studies done during the twentieth century
Or as money, as goods and services produced in an expedient manner as possible, as efficiency, and as part of the GDP. It as of employment, as of a rate that is at 8.6 percent,. Can time be measured by the bouncing of the unemployment rate?

It is as wealth.
It is as families & taxes for schools & road repair. For snow removal in winter in the northern states.

It is as the impoverished social fabric, stretched taut & anguished

When we discovered the relationship between time & motion & then motion & money & then money & family & then family with community & then community with democracy & then democracy with equality & then equality with spirit & then spirit with a universe that never measures the vibrations of cesium atoms neither does it calculate leap days or leap minutes or even leap years.

Music too, is vibration.
Can time be measured by Mozart’s brain? Always composing in ever radioactive decay

POEM: Chemo Mother

You walk in grace
my Mother, my daughter,

A rising love as steel.

who carries life like water
in hands shaped from prayer

said life dripping unabashedly from between fingers.

You are invisible light
Radiant faced, a chemo-mystic

Caring lunatic, patient visionary,

Balanced on a high wire
above the pit of my stomach

Freefalling these dreams I have

these own bad dreams that
I cannot honor: of you in bed,

holding me hostage, rife with unable.

You walk in grace
O grandmother & sister

abandoner of logic,

whose upturned heliotrope face turns
toward weakened light

quivering at night, a weakened night, a

fevered flesh, a weakened night of shivering
and a mouth full of sores,

clutching one day tight as a fistful of spring grass,

and me, with insomnia that is my shivering,
at last cut free from my own wings of pain.

POEM: Poetry As Religion

There is a stillness in humans that can unnerve poplar leaves. That entreats us to surrender. That avoids the velvet space, the terror that can be heard in voices, voices that bubble like air in a water cooler. It is religion for those who cannot stand large crowds, for those who prefer the comfort of pajama bottoms and sweatshirt over Sunday bests. Baptism is by silence. A tattoo is burnished into writer-skin by needles of language. Fire consumes wood. Water extinguishes fire. The hollow sound of pen, the clackety-tack of a keyboard, is Latin. Writing as an earthmoving tool uncovers prayer. It is an archeology of spirit. That empty hole in the sky is target we aim our metaphor toward.

POEM: Origami Christmas Ornament

Marvel at the purples of a King that
Rises to greet luminous corollas.
An uncertain heart swells and you wonder
Is it just the heat of the fireplace?
In a moment of insecurity,
in amiable light that catches an
ambling dawn, the stockings dance. A quest of
night air, in cat whiskers, the somnolent
fur of dark scrapes walls, a soft fir leans in
the corner. The tree is a dogstar of
illumination. Flakes cling with panicked
abandon to the mascara brush of

lonely frozen eyelashes.

POEM: On The Edge of A Preposition

Your scent rises like that of
laundry, stingy as thermometer-mercury, through
miles of
arterial roadways, through
stringy muscles, through
a fibrous jungle through
branches of
bone, wrapped in
a web, around
lumps of
flesh, around
growths, around
striated meat, around
a skeletal frame, spiraling upward through
the skull, through
the scalp, through
the spot that was once the fontanelle, before
your bones knitted together, when you were a baby, before
speech, before
the genes lovingly molded by
the hands of evolution that enable walking kicked in, before
you knew what words were, toward
the centrifugal identity of your soul, on
your deathbed perhaps, toward
the centrifugal Milky Way, with
its gawky spiral arms flaling hapless as a drowning man, beneath
the very nose of
God, Who returns all motion with
Countermotion & Like lips, like the shape & pursing of
lips, proffers
a kiss.

POEM: Defund This!

Defund my high lead content crystal privilege
Defund the way art & music programs must beg for scraps
Defund carbon every chance we get
Defund the name-calling & Tea Party effigies, the Hitler & Gucci knockoffs

Defund corrupt union bosses but also soulless corporate hands locked
around our throats.
Defund myths about our slave owning fathers & just what
Exactly Paul Revere said

Defund the quiet dismantling of town commons & the privatization of
charity
Defund drone attacks

Defund bloodied brown children & keening mothers
Defund knot-headed dictators
Defund brutality in the name of the helium balloons of freedom or faith

Defund cardboard box homes
Defund machismo & marianismo –

Fund bread & hands & Arab springs, fund work & soulful eyes.

POEM: Drink The Woods

Get drunk on the reunion you have always desired,
On humid air that splits summer like a melon.
Drink green shade of tree canopies,
The morning vespers of the woodpecker with its morse code,
The secret language of water, wending its way through humus,
The flamboyant choir of birds,
Step over colorful mushroom,
Over decaying pine,
Over kestral piping, long and high,
Over the soft-shouldered mount:
Take a drink of the woods.

POEM: Red

Red in the morning, sailors take warning, but what if it is red all the time if eyes are not bloodshot, but if the color of the air were red, if the red was inhaled deep into your lungs. What then?
Waiting for the swelling to subside, this is what the day is for. Anger as red, passion as red. Blood is red because of these things. As signs go, red is a good one. As a sign of infection, it sends a clear warning.
Sailors aren’t the only ones who need to be warned though. We sway over swells of ancient seas, where is the courage to examine these? Who put those away and why can’t I find it? Life requires Dramamine.
Red as a balloon speaks of childhood. The pimples of teen-hood too. The red of your tongue that can savor everything also speaks to me of love, which is also red. A dentist or doctor who cannot discern red
Is a liability to his craft. The red of day break and sunset vary slightly. There is a way to tell the difference you must look into its eyes and see how much softer the light in the evening is.
The red is less swollen, but that doesn’t mean it is not a warning just the same. Sundown is just light that drains over the horizon, dripping into the dreams you eventually have at night –
Dusk is the great hush that ends all the commotion.

30 Poems In 30 Days - 2011

http://30poemsinnovember-2011.blogspot.com/