Eve or Dusk

Sometimes numbers inexplicably change, so we continue counting – hoping through the repetition of ones, twos, and threes, that one will remain steady enough to append a value to.

There was a beautiful girl from Boston.

Value is a quality all things want to be noticed as having – to be a thing suffused with dignity, of being noticed as a distinction, of being worthy of the soft or hard hand of love.

She believed, and believed mightily in loyalty.

Once upon a time there was an oasis in the mind of a child, lush with forgiveness water. Twice there was a moment of bending. Three times there was a fall and a rising of breath.

For her, loyalty was like the sum total of everything.

So what that the stars were disappearing, that fog stayed heavy, that a chance at anything is in and of itself a wager with a higher authority, that nothing can be counted on

Except the apple, and the hallucinations of Eden…

The Secret Garden

There was a garden in his head, not
a magazine garden, nor one painted
by Monet desirous of lilies

The garden was bug full and worm
wood holy, and its mist rose with
tactile antics and startled airs

It was a garden that Wilde might
have discarded from an off poem,
or Byron might have thought about

but forgotten…

So let us thank children for the kind
of garden it turned out to be, messy
with pails and forgotten halos…

The hobos for planting its lettuce and
bean stalks – and for saving up to bury
so many secret pennies…

But not the man who once wandered
there, he’s busy fetching canaries and
is not safe, until his mind trumpets

warnings to wearies…

Your Concept

Sip me like honey, and you will never be thirsty…

Tag me, bag me, and remake me; tell yourselves “He’ll be
alright after our effect upon him.” Swirl me in your
culture, until you have righted me from how I had fallen.

After all, I am an affect of your construction…

Cut me, paste me and reword me; wonder how I might
splay in the book you’re writing; make me agile, because
you do know better; always will.

Me? I will not deny your crayon colorations…

Make me, me. Tell my story – guide me from the hallway
I was in, away from the handle I am not suppose to cling
too, plan with others all about me.

I’ll be your concept, when drawn thicker than thin…

shhh…

At the arch, the bend, the breath, and the sigh;
yesterday heaving – panting – a soul cadence of
chanting – light dimness, and attentions, reverbs,
and echoes; footsteps near a door – both of us
arriving from somewhere adroitly.

At the seance – the movie of shimmers, the wall
of painting – worshiping, and genuflecting – bows,
whispers, and spells – reaching, touching, smelling -
the inconsequential memories of others, and you
teaching me to dance as only love can.

At the clock, snare snap rim tap playing; and we
are Latin with passion; dark heat night cream, star
burst mouths laughing milk sweet melodies – teeth
grazing fingers – eyes mixing fire steam into pores
of late night, once again un-lost, uniting.

At the shore of sailing, at the moment of our time -
our wave precipice, our during, our deciding, is the
new thing altogether – the smiling, the collapsing -
the felt; made again from the unmade, at rest and
finally what we have wanted to be without dying.

A Birthday Question

…No, not that it’s incredible, but more like, is it sustainable;
the years and the advancements marching in red suits
unaccountably happy to have their shoes free of fear…

…A hand, and a sliding, two maybe three moments passing,
and me guessing that a meander is as much a plan as any
other planning; under the sun working.

…I knew; as a child even, that a time would come to ask
“Will there be a later, a sprinkle or a mist or a rain to cool
what is hot in me, what wants not to burn in me?”

…Or, and this is vital, even if it becomes unimportant later,
unknowable even – are there aspects of tomorrow already
moving slow enough to remember any of this?

.
.
Poetman Turns 53, Now Say, Happy Birthday…

News Chatters Faster Than Maybe

I am a chatter house, an inscription of italics – a font,
if you pardon my word play, of sound splashing on a
stone in a yesterday courtyard with Rachmaninoff
streaming through an above time open window.

And what might they be… these letters home, these
sound shapes, these whistles – tiny lip and tongue
click clacks, but diversions from the more important
memory of me touching the shape of life’s outline?

This is how I come to stutter, to jaw drop downward,
to whimsy worry about what stops: the little gaps, the
literal memory of the too much, the wish maybe, the
taste of candy with its almost sweet certainty…

On The Day Before It Rained

At or before the beginning there was something tall something
small and the tiny space between them called everything – the
possible, the almost, the maybe because…

At least the beginning was a point of reckoning, of gaining ones
bearings, but now has shifted away from everything, and this is
how – the fact of this, that we came to decide we were alone –

And since, by this I mean the beginning, we have donned sailors
garb and screeched into every kind of night, stripping mountains
of their iron, zeroing like magnets towards home.

All origin stories have at their root a tale about nothing – some
myths about the empty, of a stillness that so rattled nothing, that
nothing’s only recourse was to exercise its only option and move.

Apt as actors and motivated like sinew, but still only apes, we fell
from certain trees onto savannas and moved clumsily from their
stillness – away from the calm, into the whatever…

And have since conquered what?