Passing,
always watching
from outside-
it’s dark and alone
and night where I stand
looking at a frame
all aglow
and inside is a family
huddled like
long ago in a bunker
with rations and news radio
though it’s 2016 and the news is fake,
trickling into their pores via HD television…
I don’t see their faces
but the tv shadows and reflections
on the wall
look huge like puppet masters,
training these people
to laugh and cry on cue.
Drowning roller coaster
She held a fistful of Prozac and waved a monkey tail
while crossing the street.
Haven’t you ever had the urge
to spin until naked,
making up anthems about your secret super-hero life?
It’s not only about invisibility.
Tapping away at a happiness button
is meaningless if you’re stuck on orange
but the barista may give you a funny nickname
if you believe fervently in free will.
She felt the pulse of the city
was like a drowning roller coaster
(but she never buckled up).
I offered up myself with a Boboli pizza
and twenty years later we bloomed
to make this poem.
A Rush
Grab hold of a hill-full of fog and the morning slips away
like the hours alone on the rusty screeching swing,
back and forth until loss of shadow reminds us
to take bread and eat for that keeps our bodies pushing through
this space, all green and succulent even when buried
beneath a controlled burn (if the spirit can weather such a thing).
An open hole to sing from is the same place for stuffing bad things,
but what comes out may be beautiful, like how we love
is always more than how we fear and touch is a gift not meant to last…
A rush of migratory birds makes us forget whatever prayer
we were repeating and for a moment we pretend to have direction too,
a place to belong that exists only in moving air.
I tried
I tried singing
but the moon
took it away
to rest on a night wing,
and that’s where
the best dreams
will have to go.
The miracle of parallels
We drifted through pines.
Oh, and such a walk,
not swift or long
but almost comfortable…
I felt his gaze
on the underbrush;
mine strayed to the skies.
We met near the horizon.
The Word Rummager 