what giving creature is this

something like a whispered song

mere touch

her meaning is like the texture of the perfect

my mother has escaped love

that love is no mere enthusiasm

savannah

how comes the muse to the latched-upon artist

swing

she wears galaxies of memorabilia

Saturday, December 15, 2018

the bed

the bed is not
made where
they laid last night,
the covers holding
the passions like
air in the lungs
and i stand there
in a state of staring.
the next morning
came, of course,
the next conversation
over coffee came,
the next movement
around each other came.
i remind myself
of my worst self,
how the fullness of
life evaporates into
sin sometimes.
my lover and her
lover here in
this epic solitude;
i smell their serious
versions.
and i pretend to
not play with
pretense as the
light of the day is
shunned by a
drawn curtain.
or the bags on
the floor hold
within them the
story of another
calling.
or the carpet
upon which their
bare feet have
padded echoes
with secretive sounds.
or the pillows
dance askew and
and say the words
said in the balance
or counter-balances.
or the empty
bottle bans me
from tasting the
salt of lips.
this is a church
in its magnificent
silence and towering
prayers said in the dark.
what is so
unrecognizable
here?
the tangible is
not a metaphor
any more than
the river is when
i stand in it
up to my knees.
it is an
object to action
separation, really;
it is holding
no new hand,
kissing no new
lips, it is swallowing
no new windy word.
it is a bed
in a quiet room
and harbors no ill
will toward light
or dark; holds
no malice toward
head or heart.
i leave less
grieved and walk
among Douglas firs
and bowed birches
that have looked
down upon these
lovers with no more
affection and gratitude
than they do for me.
and in the bed
the covers remain
and the world outside
is moving and the next
morning came, of course,
the next conversation over
coffee came, the next
movement around each
other came.
with me.

Friday, December 14, 2018

lovely receiver

my blanched smile,
scalded to slip off the
outer skins that have kept
me away.

i sit near a drafty
door in order that i
may calm the new fever;

the cold coming from
beneath the crack
is a spectral wash
in her reaching up-toward.

where is the calm
quiver i've come to
love so much,

but in the invitation
of your timid smirk,
your peculiar increase?

the pearl is there
waiting when my
lovely receiver sends
herself unguarded.

now there's an invitation
to lurk at her door,
peer into the color of grace

(or the sea, which
gives and takes likewise;
flowing with the lull of tides.)

say something here of
the predicate of good love,
i tell myself,

but come up empty-headed,
weak with the exertion
and lowered in my humility.

when you find someone
who receives you, you
have unearthed the stones
of the gods,

and the white-bright
pageantry of gifts
purchased by the balance
in the universe.

because, really, when
one receives one gives
if the intention is there.

to make oneself
vulnerable as the
conquered land -

to make oneself
inside-out and
exposed as the autumn
maple -

to make oneself
hold back the head
and put forth the heart -

is the mark of
a lovely receiver
who is free to fall
and fall fully.

Monday, December 10, 2018

a road, at night, cold


i have a lover,
mutable in her dress
and bra, sitting
there with the
countenance of
the goddess of chance,
fate and fortune.

my lovely
tyche, she weeps
and then smiles
and goes back to
weeping, while
outside there is
something moving.

i would have her
held while holding
her; have her
loved while
loving her; have her
sung to while i
sing alone.

we met at the light
that cut the path
of darkness, caught
each other on an
intersecting plane;
a slice to the hands
and we bled together.

i am in her, as
much as she is in me.
our chambers are
guilty with it: this
passion of the deep
and willing limitations
of the flesh.

yet there is more.
always more; and
when you love a soul
you say to the rest
of the world that no
one thing can undo
the mystic's work.

she is in her winter
now; the dream-state
that calls for the
long-coming resurrection
so long as
i let the beauty lie
and not disturb the soil.

the Mother has taken
her in again, like every
year, and i stand alone,
waiting for the enslavement
to end so that i can
dance in her fields
soon.

i stand on a road, at
night, my feet
frozen to ghosts and
thoughts that won't
have leave of me, so
i must talk to myself
aloud, shaking.

the sky at night is
a friend of this type
of pass over, when
a man is yelling at
himself, at the woods,
at the unsolvable
sentence he's been given.

why must i push against
the evolution of lovers
when i accept the passing
of seasons? they are no
different, really. a violent
circle that rotates in
the womb of the Mother.

i have a lover,
mutable in her dress
and bra, sitting
there with the
countenance of
the goddess of chance,
fate and fortune.

my lovely
tyche, she laughs
and then sighs
and goes back to
laughing, while
outside there is
something moving.

cast my body into
the best of this night;
broaden my eyes to
let it fall upon me;
feel the presence of
god in the spark that
glows in her bosom

as she lies there,
buried in the Mother,
resting and curled
up, waiting for the
rise; accepting her
evolution, waiting for
the indisputable.

while this man stands
in his cold feet and
yells at the stars and
tells himself that all
good things loved are
best felt when loved things
are left to love.

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

let lovers leave


this clearest-stated, calmest-kept
place within my deepest mind
woke upon where life had slept
and left my fears therein to find

let lovers leave as they would want
in knowing they'll return to you
let go the rooms that fears will haunt
and all the gods you thought you knew

there's something good in the decay
of life's conventions held too fast
by those of you who'd wish away
the only thing that's meant to last

i'd rather that my lover be
nothing more than what she should
returning to imperfect me
in such a splendid, cluttered wood

Thursday, November 15, 2018

hold the balance


hold the balance of the
hours in one palm,
and with your
dirty knuckles go
into the world.

moonlight havens
and sunrise gravity
can be wretched things when
you're infused with darkness,

so be the nearest
star and skim
the surfaces of
lakes on your
quest for love.

there are salts of passion
in all things, and
the trick is to ameliorate
every taste of this life
with the tongue of the heart.

you have your father's
sense of lost direction;
the wanderlust of a boy
racing away from the
fevers of a thousand marks

left on perilous skin
by the lashing barbs
of the wicked and cold
wingless fools.

how are things?
how are things in the
eyes of a boy who
loses sight of the
footsteps of poems?

to be standing with you
in the upswing of your
glorious springtide is the
ascension of good souls.

i have dreams about you
and how your cells were
different, and how your blood
was different, and how your
first vision was that of another
father.

i can't fathom the depth
of that loss! to think
that you could have come
dancing into another
man's life! not my son.

i am cold without
your comfort; a bleak
waterless tide; a sound
of wasted wailing against
a tripping wind.

to my thinking - the
thinking of a smaller
man - you are the fingers
on the grass, the singing
bird in his branch; the
taste of green.

make still any tempest
and climb from within
your wildly beating
wings and solidly craving
soul to meet me.

you are the son of a
man who paints with
a feather upon the
canvas of joy and pain
and are the bright ink
therewith.

so:

hold the balance of the
hours in one palm,
and with your
dirty knuckles go
into the world.

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

she said


i'll tell you what she
said to me once,
spoken from her slender
current, the one that runs from
top to bottom:

she said -
          and i relay this
          as a boy would
          because i was a
          boy when she
          said it

she said -
          and i find myself
          of a changed mind
          these days, reflective
          as onyx-colored ice

she said -
          and by no means
          should you, my friend,
          feel the least bit imposed
          upon to be quieted

she said -
          and this was at a time
          of lots of turbulent records
          playing in my brothers'
          bedroom upstairs

she said -
          and i am as diminished
          as dust blown from the
          corners of long lived-in
          rooms made of sand

she said -
          and truth be told,
          i was one never so
          possessed by the flavors
          of love as i am now

she said -
          and i recognize the
          sin-stained look on
          your brow when you
          smiled at your hands

she said -
          and we had a wonderfully
          lunatic german shepherd
          at the end of our road that
          chased kids on bikes

she said -
          and it was in the summer
          of the year my oldest brother
          left for college and took all
          of his albums and his long shadow

she said -
          and i am leaving out the most
          purulent parts of this life;
          the parts in which there was much
          crying, because they came a bit later

she said -
          and outside the heat did
          a dance of solitude with a
          good enough breeze that
          i could feel in the eyes

she said -
       
she said -

          "stop crying. you'll be ok"

          and that rank flavor
          of blood from my tongue,
          and the rash-burn down
          one arm, and the skinned-
          swollen knee, and the
          fucking bike that bucked me
          off, and the laughing sister,
          and the holy hymns thumping
          down from my brother's room,
          and the german shepherd who
          got in the way ...

she kissed away with coveted words

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

you look at me like


you look at me like
you're looking at an approaching
storm that

growls across the horizon,
the colors of godawful
bruising and retiring embers.

so i whisper something into
your neck, perhaps a prayer
to the moon and her lover;

something about wanting
or about will or about the
salt of passion in tears.

we lovers all begin with something
to die toward; it's the bellows of the
heart that keep it stoked.

my kingdom for the keys
that would unlock these manacles;
the fetters of my soul-sinews,

that i might release
myself from the Mother and
into the harmony of free-life.

i don't like the strangers
in our town, with their half-closed
faces and shattered hands,

but i'm not pure so i will sit
in silence and beg forgiveness
'til the day they die;

or swallow the hemlock blood
of the best people i've known and
be done with it.

love is edible and her consumption
is a rite of all the warm-blooded
fools who dare.

it props you up and splits rocks
and draws venom from blood and
expands eyes to the point of being crazed.

i look at you like
i'm looking at the beginning
of a wave

that growls on the horizon
of the sea, the colors of
fallen sky and doomed angels.

you're not supposed to
be made sense of like
an algebraic cloud of sand.

and that's been my mistake,
(i apologize)
but you're too beautiful.

so i ask for your mercy;
that you break the rules
of natural law for this one time

and allow me the chance to
love you with the power
and uncertainty of blind yearning.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

i want wondrous moments


i want wondrous moments
of half-holy corners
cleaved into glass; with your
splintered shafts of errant
radiation now beacons well-spread.

i would grieve in my words often,
how weak they became
in the face of your
tempest eyes and
heated host.

i could not find the
words i needed to
disallow the things
i had feared lost
that were never departed.

so.

i want wondrous escapes
beneath the canopy of
your longest horizon;
to let fall the rain and the
fire of that beating organ.

so that we might meet
in every way and smile
at the stars that have
chosen us as friends like
fingers within fingers:

the hysterical strength
of the moon on her
beloved child is how this
started after all, and now
her tears are pure petals.

so.

i want wondrous anecdotes
from your fine lips and into
my palms breathed at a
distance no greater than
the thought of a lit candle;

so that once spoken i
can shift my mind to
better, more elegant
answers to the foolish
questions about life;

holding the balance
between us two in
such close proximity
that your faith is felt
in the pulse of my eyes.

so.

i want wondrous moments
of half-holy corners
cleaved into glass; with your
splintered shafts of errant
radiation now beacons well-spread.

i won't break nor bend,
really, now that i know
that you are sitting here
in my company and
casting gently toward me.

telling me, in your own
small-voice way

that you love me.

Thursday, November 1, 2018

this prophecy is the baby on the hip of my love


this prophecy is the baby
on the hip
of my love,

who stands there, in a
vast solitude, looking
with delicate pupils
toward something.

perhaps toward that
town you left me
for, the one with
the oily black-sky
sorrows and salted air?

you joined me.
why, again?
and again, why?

because i am dubious,
at times; entrenched
and needing to be pried
from the ice of a self-inflicted
menace.

i was no match for
your alter; i had no
armor against the
incense of your
sweet summoning.

i knew, somehow, you'd
hold the answer
to my paramount
question,

and if it takes my whole
life to reach that
mark, it will have
been worth it.

for this prophecy is the baby
on the hip
of my love:

the burning-meteor progeny
of our delirious elopement
so many years ago.

and i've not had to close
my eyes more than once
to see framed the
image of you and her
standing there
together.

how many times since
has the temptation arisen
for me to cross the room
of that vision and take
hold of you by those thin,
subtle lips
with my own;

to return to the
source of my
passion's passion
and throw (once again)
a line toward
you before going
too far adrift?

if you think
i'll ever be extinguished
you're wrong,

for this prophecy is the baby
on the hip
of my love,

who stands there, in a
vast solitude, looking
with delicate pupils
toward something.

perhaps toward that
pain you felt
with the arrival of
so many old, latent
mornings,

when it was supposed to be
easier this time around?
we found that if we
had to change our lot
we had to retire our
losses.

you joined me.
why, again?
and again, why?

because i think you
knew, in your threads
of twilight, in your
secret deaths, in your
infinite dreams,

that you saw the future,
peering out from some
glittering moment
when we were entangled,
a prophecy that held

in it the stitched fire
and braided ancient
waters of a love
that blew up the world;

that came from the blood
womb and the cream heart
and forged, for you and i,
the beginning of this good life.

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

the truth about trust

my natal fear is that
of being prised apart
with the economy of wind
against october leaves.

when she departs
the bedroom
my hands occupy
themselves with the salt
of her gone flesh;

while in the forest, at night,
trees are made recumbent
following the swift
ejaculation of windy-ice.

the moss and earth,
exposed at her felling,
are flipped up and fanning;
this alluvial, dark spread

confronts the fool
whose curiosity after
the storm took him
to where he lost the moon.

i'm merely being cautious,
making myself ironic,
deciphering all the new
coded perforations in my skin.

she is
as she ever was,
standing unabridged,
full-lipped, free and
considering;

a magnetic stone,
air within air,
water within water,
consistent as time

and swaying in no
other direction than mine,
bending to a cause of her own,
deep-welled and flourishing.

so her departure
is departure not,
but a ranging out
to find sanctuary.

only to return,
emboldened by
certain answers to
her own selfsame
fears.

it all begs this question:
do i find my own self deeper in
by dint of some dark
magical summons?

or do i find myself
out from the sheer
exertion of will against
the tide of calcifying angst?

i believe in love
and her attendant
earthly endowments
of flesh and blood;

i believe the river of
a lover's touch runs
a course over all
the minerals of this soul

and goes dry only
when the tears are
denied their rain
upon the wary heart.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

my weakest cause

i once thought that this is what i deserve:
this caustic imbalance
this toxic enfolding fear;

but my weakest cause
these days
has eroded the tissue surrounding
the head, finally

so i let the collapse
begin, having hope
that the attrition will
reveal, in time, the hot
marrow of my heart
and leave me in a fine stupor;

receptive of the best
signals, the warmest
impulses that once thundered
in the vein and drove me
to far fields and left
me the master of stars and moons

some days, yet, i'm
again small in a smallest of rooms
where the voices of the most
violent stay me here fast,
wondering ever wondering:

what did you do to you
to do this to me?

no matter
really no matter

the head is ceding the victory
to the heart
and hope is due,
while my weakest cause
erodes
and erodes

Friday, July 20, 2018

feather on the floor


come walking over
and find me in
your own way
and tell me who
you've found

with a flower
between your lips
and dew pressed
beneath the tongue.

i am happy
you've found me
sitting beneath the sun
with eyes closed.

i tend to dream that i
know myself as
you know me,
but the image always blurs.

i see me as you do,
approaching, your
eyes mine and
we're smiling.

but nearer now
i, in you, collapse
to edges and the
image becomes all haze.

tell me:

do i dance? sing?
orate greatly?
pass on with the wind?
sigh against storms?

in my eyes i am
small, yet larger;
leaping with love
and abounding energy.

i am a victor
in my losses,
loyal to all comers
who dare breathe me.

i am the feather
on the floor i
discovered this
morning,

as meaningless and
random as any
natant dust
in a light.

but simply put
and no less important
and divinely placed
and no whim of God.

i was
i am
i will be perishable
but true!

come walking over
and find me in
your own way
and tell me who
you've found

just as i came
walking over this
morning and found you,
the feather on the floor

and found me.

Sunday, June 17, 2018

father


fomented seas below him thrash the heathen rocks
          into a million-year submission and he is suddenly

ambushed at the edge of the world. tempted to peer down
          just once he then restores his focus and altogether his soul is

thrust outward toward that line between black and turquoise,
          the one that splits the Mother from her infatuate, the Moon.

hymns of the sea birds overspread the ear, as a whiffet of air - matron
          of dreams - makes them dance on a line, while

escorting the man's own desires, loves, fears out to a far-gone place he
          can barely see, then towing them back;

retreating and advancing on the ticks of some sort of cruel
          metronome, time and love both a wistful tide

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

time and unsympathy


on that horizon
a cackling spectre,
summons me there
with a tremulous claw.

in his convulsions
of simpering laughter,
pulsing with ticks
and their ravaging flaw.

what is unwanting
when echoing footsteps,
padding down ways
of a narrowing chance,

send you soul-digging
for nurturing mothers,
breast-less and weak
in their twilight-ing dance?

i do remember
day's lingering softness,
under the skies
of the faraway sun.

the true intentions
of un-sinful children,
swapping their lives
for a mythical one.

but i recover
to emulate fondness,
something to ease
the mind's emptying faze.

don't i adventure
to inquiry's cavern,
escape to dark
in her infinite grays!

all that deferment
of deepening sorrow,
buried me low
in a chamberless cell.

not one allowing
for insightful ponder,
tindered my heart
to a soul-draining hell.

what is all-living
but treacherous biding,
governed by love
for unsympathy's kiss?

caught up unguarded
i willingly waded,
sinking in deep
to a fatuous bliss.

if i'm respondent
to elegant favors
un-lent to me
by a spurious friend,

might i beleaguer
your effusive kindness:
protect my good
'till the comfortable end.

with this determine
the unfaceless demon
fingers the strings
of a rotating hand

i am forever
the laboring figure
cold-linked to you
in this humbling land

Thursday, May 24, 2018

silly























silly
how the moody winds
blew your particles of fire
my way and burned the blades

silly
how the boasty thunder
rumbled with your voice of reason
into the ears and flattened the eyes

silly
how the waters of the high crevices
spilled from your too-low sky
and drowned my last lingering fear

silly
how the piercing silence
sang your tribal hymn
and pumped my lungs with goldenrod

silly
how the rain rituals of the sun
drove the tides of your loins
and penetrated my fallow bones

silly
how the bald conversations
of the fat and shredded despairs
were soaked with your single kiss

silly
how the handful of hungry flowers
felled their pedals from your mouth
and baptized my delicate moon

they don't get it
they don't get it

it's really alright

it's along this stained path
among the yellows and the greens
   among the silent cries and loud looks
      among the cycles of this woman
         among the rigid paleness of this man
            among the showers of the day
               among the hot quivers of the night
                  among the good horizons
                     among the miles of explosives
                        among the overhanging boughs
                           among the tripping toes

that you are silly
for me, this silly man



Sunday, May 13, 2018

mad love


mad love is a burden,
all wail and want;
bounce and plunge.

i look into this mother's
face and i look into my wander
to find the flutes of her yearning,
the flock of all her exiled passions

passed on to me the days
in our moments of coitus.

i've looked into that flowing
face a hundred thousand times
and discover again and again
the seeds of my blossoms,

the curls of my own
granite landscape;
the seminal dawn of my re-youth.

present no dull
arguments against the mothers
who, in dignity and truth,
build for you this altar;

they summon strength from
a facility you have no
notion of and from a universe
that has no name.

mad love is a burden,
all vertigo and elegance;
atomic and feeble.

where is it said that
the sun sets in the eyes
of the unforgiven and
the supple mouths of sinners?

that i may rise up in the
morning and witness each
day the one thing that makes
her heart a soundscape to gods.

what binds her to me is in
the corolla of that which we've
made in unison; the seas that
tremble the land are beneath her feet.

but anyway, she divined from
her womb and from her vessels
and from her fibers and from her
fingertips this epoch.

how it is that it happens in
such a glorious way mystifies
all the men of all the ages,
and yet we are still blind comers.

she mingles in that place between
the farthest moon and our nearest
sun, and spreads such delicate
and spacious love that we can only weep.

mad love is a burden,
all bray and praise;
elevation and desires.

my child is a partisan;
he is a victor in battle;
she is a guard against frailty;
he is summon to gods;
she is a play thing among fools.

my lover imbued the world
with our confessions; she laid
at its feet the subtle wish and the
fragrant flowers of a her and a him,

to be champions of their own
virtuous stars and to give unto
all others the jewels of some
fantastic and shocking voyage.

this came from her!
this sprang from her legs
this poured from her eyes
this drained from her mouth
this burst from her arms

like the eternity of light
and expanse of knowing,
this mother let love detonate
upon the sands of life.

and i can but claim to be a
weak witness to the evolution
of her cells, the increase of her
palace, the iron and soil of
her mountains,

and watch as they walk
among the growing fields
of their own harvests knowing
that they do so because of her.

there is heartache in her
dreams, pain in her side
from the extravagant violence
against her fount.

some blame eve
for our expulsions
and for our obscurities and
for our descent
which is foolish
in the face of the truth.

my eve, she failed no one,
but rather sinned against
herself when she took
on the mantle of mother
and then apologized for it.

i stand far from the horizon
and look back toward myself
to check and see if she is there,
the woman who originated men.

she is there, in her coat of shame,
in her smile, in her blood-pain
prowling the distance for predators

who would take from her the
kings and queens that she bore and
she devours them with her pure nature.

mad love is a burden,
all pink and flesh,
breast and womb.

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

79 and anew, begins


it's mom's seventy-ninth today:
i called her when i felt she would
be able to talk, her attentions now
abridged by the poison of illness

she was going to the greenhouse
with Dad, she told me, where they
would pick flowers to fill the 
boxes around the house

there were many years he would
drive her to New Hampshire
to dine at their favorite 
restaurant on this day

but now, trips are forestalled
by a simple silent hand
and all approaches to the
once-before normal are dried up

outside my kitchen window
the peonies stand praising the sun
and await their may bloom
now that the cold crack of winter is over

they can live to be 100,
each fall dying back into the
mother and each spring emerging,
yawning green and leaning 

a hardy flower,
a flower that resonates with
the power of something
regenerative, something silver-tongued

my mother said goodbye 
after a few minutes, her voice
fevered with fatigue;
she needed to go nap, she said

the peonies will flower
soon, brightly; i won't know the color
but i will put my nose to them
and breathe in their bright lives

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

all yearning


something sometimes i write
makes no perfect sense,
so that what i put out there
is most frequently tread upon by
my sated behavior.

i can't imagine a world
in which words always march
in a narrow trough like this

and it's left me lately dismissed,
speculating on what i'm trying to
say against the ego of my
clouded and partisan intentions.

truth is:

i'm trying to be mild.
temperate in my frolic
around this world;
tenacious in my advisory
toward those whom i love.

(my bathroom's floor sags in
a finite sorrow while i write this)

yearning is a decent enough word
and the fatigue that emptiness
brings upon me is a speechless
death to this pale poet.

i need a stone in the sling;
a magnificent weapon that i might
wield to fell the giants
in my forest and take
possession once again.

there is some evil
practicing its craft on
me; a parallel body
in a vacuous world whose
primal light i see as if through
a gauze at night.

i've never gotten used
to being in the seams of
life, i suppose.

so yearning is an excellent
word - the way the sun aches
in the palm of winter, or
the moon rages in the breast
of summer.

truth is:

i'm trying to be mild.
temperate in my frolic
around this life;
tenacious in my advisory
toward you, whom i love.

you know ... i had a teacher
whose life-passions sagged as
much as my bathroom's floor.

to think i fantasized about
us when she despised me in life
but in dreams shredded my
virginity and left me yearning.

i once hurt for a lover
to the point that i thought i'd
been separated from the earth;
my eyes were numb to every sound,
my ears could only see into my past.

sweetheart:

talk bitter sense to me.
show me the origins of tears.
make yourself hoarse with it
and get me back quickly so

that i might again be shaken
into a murmur on the pond,
a wake in the shore,
a disturbance across the sands.

i know who i am.

i'm a prince of the habits
of dreams and i've
nothing to show for
the mining of their wealth,

except maybe the
thick agitation of mysterial words
that they've gifted me:

all sparks and wander,
life and wonder

all yearning.

Saturday, April 7, 2018

ungirl

i'd have you raised up to the
height of your truth;

elevated above the assured
counterfeit of lesser minds,
who chance against the atomic
weight of your best self.

you are picturesque
you are positive self-proof
you are a grant against the greed of
the soul-swindlers

don't hasten toward those who
ask you to shine for their behalf,
for they do so in service of
their own squalid darkness -
their attentions are puerile fictive

tell them to fly from you.

tell them, 'i am no girl,
i am velocity and sulfur;
inferno and the elegance of fire.'

Friday, March 23, 2018

sleep in her shade


i missed the shaded tones
of all those you've held
to your sleeping breast.

i'm too small for the
conscience of time to
know any better i suppose;

to see that the consumption of
the curious, calm breath
of loved ones is a craft;

that those formed of love
are eternally in love
and not surpassed.

i will watch you sleep
inside silence's muted
source, vibrating,

and see that what
emanates from you
dwells in the best regions.

hoping that i
can approach you
in my own inartistic way,

reaching you in slumber
and feeling what the babe
feels when free,

and falling forever
into your best
dreams

Thursday, March 1, 2018

i'm ok, daughter


i'm ok, daughter

on my shoulders
rests the weight
while i wait
for your fire
to burn the world down

i sit in our
kitchen looking out
onto a march afternoon
enlightened by sun but weaker
without you here

you are at school
or you are at play
or you are at sleep
or you are at one of
those moments of deep

thought that i find you
in at times that makes me hurt
not knowing if you
are vexed by the sudden
breathing of dangerous clouds

i was never the same 11 years
old that you and your friends
are now, i'm afraid;
the way the world has bound
you to a deeper covenant
with darkness is perverse

when my brother died you
hugged me every day for
months and you said
you liked the way my shirts
smelled after i'd discarded them
on the floor

so you wore them, and
in your silent way
told me that someone
else's pain can be a line cast
across the waters of those
who've not yet learned to swim

so i thought i should
be more careful around
you, to build a bulwark
and take pains to shield
you from the weight
while you waited for

an older you to
come, that perhaps
then you would be better
for it when life appears
in the palms of your
hands like broken rainwater

how foolish of me

i'm ok, daughter

on your shoulders
rests the weight
while you wait
for your fire
to burn the world down

it is your weight
and i understand it
and i understand you
need it - not me -
to teach you the
necessity of will

and faith
and pain
and love
and goodness
and death

for i am
ok, daughter

because of you

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

the first time i made you laugh


there was an attraction to chance,
when the days of eternal vitality were far before us
and the depth of hidden meanings magnified
our new fate.

blown by gusts that i will call impulses,
and proceeding from cold wisdom
that rioted with the heat of passion,
you cracked me open.

it was subtle how you did it,
standing in the dark before me;
i'd known you just for the length
of a quietly passing moon.

up until then, we'd become measured in tone
and deliberate in the conscious
approaches to each other's
closed door.

when, in that moment, that
feeble dusky instance, there was
a subtle shift in whatever temperate air
that floated between us;

and i ventured, when you looked
at me, to bridge (to span) that gap
with something inane, some silly
suggestion that made you laugh.

and i think it was then
i'm sorry
i know it was then, when
your expression bloomed,

when your eyes became my fable
when your lips my inclination
when your cheeks my exploit
when your voice my ovation

that i fell in love