Society requires us, on a normal day,
to flux between several roles:
driver maid cook
model influencer
reporter journalist publisher and pundit
a comedian and artist reader writer
parent spouse sibling child
historian therapist banker
grocery clerk epidemiologist
archivist teacher student activist thinker
worker doer fixer…
I’m just touching the iceberg’s tip–
grateful for this one space
where we can be almost anything.
Bound fast in love
parted by ordered heaven
to keep apart two lover’s hearts,
is another’s undertaking.
True love iseternal.
Infinite.
And always.
A fire in you that can not die.
The Sun is he.
A strong man
who captures hope in strings of starlight
and smiles ever so gently.
The moon is she
a fair woman
who dances with the stars carelessly, breathlessly.
On the darkest days
with fading rays,
she beams in his sight, but dies.
May the heart contain that little spark of love’s fire.
We always long for the forbidden things,
and desire what is denied to us.
But love knows no barriers.
No walls.
No mould.
And maybe it was meant to be.
The moment their eyes met it was war.
A fleeting moment when
colors erupt into the atmosphere.
The absolute lightest darkness.
Like two falling stars,
an explosion.
As they kiss
the world stares in awe
of their eclipse.
The moon is she.
She beams in his sight, but dies.
The blot of night’s ink from times passed has been removed.
The light of which may contain the secret of the truth.
The star crossed lovers are not always star crossed because of the fault in their stars,
Mostly,
it’s the fault in society.
before the pastor ran off with the new blonde congregant
before his wife tried to see him through his ensuing
nervous breakdown
before Michael was dead from a drug overdose and before
we all moved away from the backroads
i threw my johnny cash cd case in the fire during youth group
we were burning away the things of this world
cleansing our hearts and minds, amen,
to make ourselves as pure as gold
i knew johnny would understand
but i took the CD out first and hid it in my bible
i knew the good lord would understand too
sun yellow walls
more sad than
Happy
Pharrell Williams quick tempo
clashing with the rhythm of the bouncing ball
back and forth
across the net
held by duct tape
the scent of dog piss
and cigarette smoke
still lingers in the carpet
we picked up from the trash bin
down the road
the orange ball slams into
Peter Rabbit’s face
and the gold frame topples
revealing
electrical wires beneath
we hide our mess
in this house
this room lives in extreme
temperatures
unattached
broken off from the home
a heater or AC unit
is all that stands in the way of too
much
he yells “shit”
as he misses for the umpteenth time
we giggle
like the children
we used to be.
He used to laugh
about the time he spent locked up
alone
all alone
and he really did mean
alone.
Solitary
is what they called it
but what he called it was
cushy.
“I mean it’s cushy by comparison”
was exactly the phrase he used.
If you asked him straight up
“Cushy compared with what?”
it’d make him laugh.
Sometimes he’d laugh and just let it go,
and sometimes he’d tell you the story.
See,
they feared him, I guess,
thought he’d jeopardize
their mission.
I mean he’d already publicly declared it
bunkum
and he’d called it a flat out lie to boot.
Hell, he even sent himself AWOL to say so louder
and then, they said, had –
and this is the actual phrase that they used –
“he had the audacity” –
yep, that’s what they said –
“to try to return on his own”
just so he could keep on talking.
And that’s when they sent him to solitary
in the best way they knew how.
See,
he was in the Army
on a Naval base
and the Army didn’t have a brig there.
Turned out
the Navy didn’t want him in their brig
because guys in the Navy,
except for the SEALs,
tend to be pretty damn liberal
and this was a time
in the war
and the world
when he might make his brig-mates his converts.
So the brig-less Army
emptied a whole wing of a barracks
and locked him in there alone.
And that’s where he got the word “cushy”.
I mean, he was on the top floor
with a view of the water
and all of his meals
were delivered.
Granted,
they confiscated the book he was reading
in case
The Letters of James Agee to Father Flye
turned out to be seditious.
But other than that they left him alone
“And it doesn’t get,” he liked to say,
“a whole lot more cushy than that.”
But then, in a weird way, it did.
See,
even when you’re in solitary
you still have to do forced labor
and the job they gave him was dandy.
He never knew why
but twice a week
all of the base’s dirty sheets
were hauled across 92,848 feet
of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
to wherever they did the laundry.
His job,
his solitary forced labor,
was to lie spread-eagle
across the tarp
that covered the laundry
to keep it from blowing away.
So
other guys who weren’t being punished
would load up the truck
and then spread the tarp
and he’d climb up and lie down.
The view was great –
sometimes
endless miles of sky and surf
and sometimes
just closeup tile and electric lights
maybe five feet overhead.
The breeze was cool on the days with no rain
and the only hard part
was at the northern end
where he’d climb down and sit under a tree
while other unpunished guys
did the unloading and loading.
“Like I said,” he’d say, “it was cushy,
provided, of course,
you learned not to mind
the weapons the MPs pointed at you
to keep you from running away.”
And with it
the storm brings
hints of watermelon,
glimpses of cracked garage-door afternoons
daydreaming below cumulonimbus sheets,
of crackling voices
carried through tinny speakers,
the pounding of rain
against gutters
against blacktop
against well-worn umbrellas
that never quite manage
to keep our feet dry,
peals of thunder
that rattle every glass
we’ve ever purchased,
and for a perfectly preserved moment
in this sawdust-coated reverie
all the world’s a symphony.
You smell like childhood wrapped in my arms
sunscreen summers with faded beer breath
and remnants of chlorine
still stinging tired eyes
The men in my life have a way of fading
like the days marked by sun kissed skin
And I’ve exhausted myself on half drank coffees,
iced bits left melting in the car
But this heat wave is different and it’s high tide
when your breath turns into mine and time travel has become
something more real than murmured words
and lost messages found hiding in the past
Our last morning there
among the red rocks and soil,
we made a final stop
at Crescent Moon State Park.
We sat in the car, we four,
waiting for the rain to pass.
Finally, one of my aunts
tied a grocery bag over her head
and stepped into the fading drizzle.
The fog hung picture perfect over the rocks overhead
as we made our way down the path,
deserted other than us,
everyone else chased away by the rain.
Feeling our time grow short,
we hurried toward the gush of water
I could hear in the distance.
One by one, they appeared along the trail;
smooth stones stacked in piles,
some pyramid-shaped, some inverted.
I wondered who would take the time
to find such perfect rocks and balance them so.
Then we came upon our destination,
Buddha Beach,
where you could barely walk,
the stacks of stones
so thick on the ground.
Standing there, the rain speckling my glasses,
I could understand wanting
to be a part, make a mark,
create such aching beauty.
And I smiled.
You call it picking.
Like twisting
in both directions
the not-quite-ripe apple
that refuses to be torn
from the tree.
Stem so stubborn
I can’t help but ask
are you sure everything’s okay?
It’s just that your feet
weigh heavier when you
come home. You didn’t
take out the trash when I asked.
You told me to watch
my romantic comedy alone.
And I think you’d rather
do yoga at night with
the woman on YouTube
than me. It just seems like
we’re not okay, but
I so badly want
to believe in
a honey crisp love.
Love, I know you want me
to stop picking but the days
are getting shorter so before
you fall beneath someone
else’s feet, maybe I’ll ask
just one more time—
Are you sure?
