POEM: Mission

There are people that I love being in orbit around and then there are those to whom I am just polite. I find there are more and more of those sorts of people taking up more and more of my space and time, but the thing is this: you cannot always dictate who pulls up a seat to your table, so what is one to do?

There are even more people who see no value in being polite at all, no matter what the circumstance. They city the “brevity of life” as their motive as in the common phrase with which they regale others: “who has time for this sort of foolishness?” not realizing that all of life is foolishness and it is his seriousness that is out of place, time consuming, an endless purgatory of sitting around , throwing rocks at everything they believe is really a hornet’s nest. There is an aspect of self-punishment to it, really.

We need to dig out soft places, people, soft places around us to house the most vulnerable parts of others in safety, those things that we carry with us and have nowhere  to rest them while we put on our heavy armor and mail to do battle with dragons of every shape and color and size.  Events buffet us all day, everyday, like radiation, like pollen, we are constantly under attack. Who doesn’t need the soft wind at our back every so often, if for no other reason than to remind us of what our destiny truly is?

POEM: So I Am A Brick

A red brick, solid and stiff accustomed to inclement weather
Stiff and sharp where I have never been sharp
Chipped for all my years of being steppe on
Green from the algae

In my head I want to be softer
For everything wants to be softer where
They are hard, where there is chipping
And a rough surface.

But as a brick I am incapable of dreaming
Lacking a brain stem, the limbic matter,
A prefrontal cortex.

When I awake the light is trembling
And I speak this language.
I am able to interpret it.

It is fall and the light catches the tree tops
Looking down at me, singing
At the tops of their tree lungs,
Burrowing with knotted fists into
The soil-gone-mud.

I make my way through rounded objects.
Light is one of these rounded objects
Dripping onto the walkway bleaching
Everything in its path,
Those other bricks asleep, tucked in
By moss and the smell of nuts in the air
(This autumn tastes like walnuts in the back of my mouth
Whenever I suck in the cool air.)

But the light avoids me, though my blood
Is a ruddy red. A port wine of clay aging
Aging in the yellow laughter of a folding sun.
I am geologic, granite bends to me.
I wear limestone for fingernails
Everything I write is whitened,
White, white, white hot.

POEM: Muscle Memory

This ocean is a gray tidal yank
That speaks with a blurred accent
of wild  greens and geese – the yellow
skin of sad-eyed light
makes up  the neurons of dark storms.
This frame is a blight of opaque water, is a dying
movement: go on and be brave.
Sea birds carry word to all the lost faces of a
                                 drowning in the canals,
flying against the pink buildings. Helium
lifts mylar thoughts. Salt drops everywhere are alive.
You slog on, not knowing how, unfocused on the place
where breathing can no longer be felt: where
this is not the kind of  music we can play by ear.