I remember you,
free of walls and doors,
locked gates and security guards,
wardens and cell mates,
a "room for visitors",
Let her house be a bushel of things
growing, fingers reaching, crying
their way from out of the soil
laughing makes way to sky
digging down seven years
to my triple bypass
the bloody remnants
of that trip under lights
In time I might forget myself
In course of vivid currents.
My bastard inclination
To wrestle with the ocean.
Summer with a scent of peppermint
Is a cliché
Shedded cherry tears cover the remains of asphalt
under the multitude of lonely feet
or drops of blood, or hair, or parachutes,
or acidheads experimenting with flight
(misled believers in their superpowers),
or jacket, hat, and backpack of a child
returning home an hour late from school.
where the pins weren't
sharper than the air
stopped by pin pricks
hidden in the remote control
Open your window,
throw your ennui out,
which consumes itself
through the depths of your house
You are a tree....You carry notions of hope in your wide open arms
You are also the dancing breeze on the still waters of a mountain lake, and the deep blue surging waves of an ocean. You wait for miracles to unfold around you.
last night I saw you plunge from the top of the cliff into the ocean. you were wearing your blond wig, when you emerged from the water not a hair was out of place.
Other people have better heroes, heroes
That break down less often, that come with a warranty.
But this is my hero, and I’ve gotten used to him.
after supper he’d lift it out, slide it slowly
from its scabbard, jab it and show me
how the Germans screwed it sideways
to yank out your intestines—like a Canuck
Lucy, how could you know, in your tender immediacy, that your great-great-grand-daughter of the future would be a seven-foot-tall dragon with functionless wings?
After the mob murdered the man for eating
a cow, it was found to be meat
from a goat. Why can I not
stop thinking about it—
the stringy flesh inside his gut,
he is stripped down to the essentials:
a man and his facts, a meteor
shattering into little stars
I did not love you, not
in the way we are taught to think
of love, but
you held me, listened to me, made me
say what I needed.
So, now we must negotiate all the
god-forsaken years spent indentured
to one god or another millennia
after millennia like strata embedded
into our primordial DNA.
I never perfected the art of taking
of claiming the merely found as mine
never felt the extensive satisfaction
of keeping all my finds
Vehement shakes and frowns,
points to his pad and pencil.
“Too sad” he writes . . . (to remember,
to be no longer able to play)
I remember Rene Otto Castillo. Because the lines and their sizes
are all there though we have made several attempts to erase
with all our might. A smell from the pot on a hearth is out there
from the window and everybody in the street breathes the beetroot
soup. It is launch. It is ethereal nose everybody wears all this noontide.
If only one could play them without the “tits and feathers.”
A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life.
The other day a woman was pulled from the canal unconscious and not breathing. That’s when I realized I should have done something sooner – hanged myself from a ceiling hook or bitten down on the muzzle of a gun.
The children stay home from school
often now. Homework never complete.
They have grown silent. Whenever they
talk, it is said, they only speak about
colors missing from the rainbow.
This young man’s madness is sincere and intense.
Bargemen grind to dock their relics to the shore,
their rusty struggle is honest and intense.
Wanton winds,
take my broken songs
to the riverside
and let them drown.
I need room
for new songs of hope.
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