Thanking You Today

For the music of your voice,
The noise of meaning,
The silent purpose of sound -
Your comfort and my company.

For your open heart,
The slow and steady beat of truth,
The fast and furious race to love -
Your smile reflecting mine.

For your thoughts,
The attention paid in full,
The depths and the details -
Your sentences start mine.

For your memories,
Mostly the good over the bad,
Mostly of friends and family over strangers -
Your embraces complete mine.

For your presence,
Limbs and digits all accounted for,
Origami valleys and mountains folded-unfolding -
Your divine wind calms my night-soul.

Pure Pollutants

We toxify the air we need to breathe with burning plastic kisses,
With the heavy metal hug of plumbous, and the lightness of coal dust
Like diamond glitter tickling like a Tiffany heirloom in my throat.

Cement dust is a certain particulate matter I use to build
A house of pain in our chests, and I prefer them all to hurt in no particular order.

I inhabit an OMG zone at ground level among other organic combustibles,
Reactionary explosions in your lungs when the mood suits me, and when it doesn’t.

I suffer from an addiction to sulfur, to the musical flow and hiss of lava,
And the sweet violence of the volcanic - some ashes for the ashen.

There’s the tree I planted, twisted into leaflessness, made out of thickened air.

There’s my car idling at the green light.

There’s a slow extinction building for us.

I feel weak without the air filter of my spiralling curls, my own twin horns.
When they grow back I’ll add my tail and a new bident
Before the final feast of tainted fallen flesh commences.

Life

A breathing into.
An exhaling of sound after.
A dance of bone marrow within.
A familiar face in the window during.
A pursuit of happiness for.
A fluid drumbeat of red on top of.
A ratio of destiny to serendipity onto.
A slow burn of growth through.
An articulation of self to self to other regarding.
A desperate triumph notwithstanding.
A kiss from the heart as far as.
A making of more life despite.
A retirement of dreams about.
An exit out of.

Returned to Sender

Boomerang words thrown at the target,
Licked and spat
Flat on the page -
To be held and put in their place.

I write them in a letter to my love;
I send them slow like a male, in the mail,
In the belly of a snail,
A beast carrying post to the past.

She’ll smell my cheap aftershave,
Remember the expensive red wine she spilled
Into her mouth that night,
That night she left the bottle empty.

And she’ll remember the gentlemanly pecks I gave her cheeks
With aloof lips (dry and disappointed),
And maybe she’ll forget the unfriendlier boyfriend
She dumped me for.

If only she loved the caress of my words
As I do, as when I say
I do (I really do),
I will carry her over

But she returns all I send her,
Not even an echo whispers from beyond
Her final resting place:
The unmarked grave

Of our divided past.
A locked mailbox sits within a rock -
My messages are tangled, bent and broken
In the untranslatable wreckage of her car.

Never Too Late

Do not be afraid
To stop at the sign.

The signs might be many.

The many signs may say stop
But it is you that finally decides:
Enough. I am done. I rest.

I will stop doing what I'm doing.

Life, Briefly

Like a comet traveling

The brevity of its own oceanic
Reflection, rippled by the night’s imperfections,

We make waves in time - moving
Towards the darkness of a private extinction

In an arc gone too soon, too far,
To be seen, and then, to not be.

Dust to be Dusted

We are all Dust waiting for the touch of the Featherduster.
For life sweeps the lucky ones gently into Dustpan purgatory,
While the unlucky are sucked through the hell of the Dustbuster.
Life finally places us with all the other Dust in the Dustbin.

Some finer Dust escapes into the Sacred Gardens,
To paradise where weary allergic angels tread
Under Dusty Halos, tethered and tame as camels.
Most sneeze once with a Bless You, Brother,
Some curse in silence, smiling holy smiles of eternal penitence.

The Master Gardener uses all the Dust in this Desert,
Watering each soulful dune with her tears -
She prays for another flower worth saving from the mud.

Being Human

I think before I am.
I am before I do.
I am soul before I am dressed in fresh flesh.
I am remade whole before I’m born again.

I’m waterborne before I’m airborne by arms bearing arms.
I’m carried as hand luggage before I can carry myself.

I hold myself up before I can carry you, my child.
I hold you close before I lose you to your being.
I let you go before I let myself go to ground, spent.
I am not what broken thing I think I was before.
I am before and I am ever after now.
I have always been human before.

I wear myself thin before the crowds.
I am not what I am - before I was, I will be again.

Beauty is the world (the world is in you).

Beautiful people surround you
(your perfect circle has no corners).

Words rise up from your soul bathed in beauty
(the ear is home to hammer, anvil, drum).

Your brief life is purposeful and gorgeous
(your oiled bones only dance at the joints with muscle).

You exist eternally in swallowed tales
(you feed your own stomach with stories).

Beautiful person, be who you are
(be the hidden and be the found).

Be the illusion of reality and the reality
(for fantasy feeds the real world).

Chopsticks

Poetry of the hand
In conversation with the mouth -

Small portions clenched
Between two sticks then teeth -

We chew mouthfuls before we swallow,
Digesting text spiced with subtext -

After separating fake wasabi
And Kikkoman soy sauce

From the palate-cleansing ginger,
We work the meat from light to dark;

At our sushi bar raw art is edible
In smaller portions of incredible meaning -

Read my seaweed tongue in the darkness
As you deep kiss dead fish and rice.

On the run

Arms held out like parallel bars,
Lines,
Wings.

Head front and center,
Erect,
Predatory.

The four gold punctuated bricks
Are worth jumping over.

The map of the heart

She hacks at him
With her words
All sharp, and swinging
Hard.

He hacks back
Equally mean,
Because they still love
Each other.

Only their ex
No longer marks
The spot to
The treasure.