canker
on my inner lip
hangs
an impatience;
chew it through
bimonthly.
floods my poor mouth with pus before work
again.
must i choose words?
a year now
hangs
on that impatience,
and there are hairs below my once smooth chin.
If you are the ghost, your task is to wander
around the yard and look for the others,
who are hidden. If you find someone,
they will run home. If you touch them
before they get there, you will be free
to hide the next time around.
If you are not the ghost, hide somewhere
the ghost won’t find you. Your task is to get home
untouched, even if that means breaking
cover before you are found, hoping to outrun
the ghost. If you fail, you become the ghost
next time around.
If no one is caught, everyone keeps their roles
the next time, unless someone volunteers
to be the ghost.
Three Eggplants Potted on the Back Patio
Blooming purple, they stand tall,
leafy wind-blown, guarding that sunny corner.
Tucked away from the bugs that would swallow
them whole in one hour flat, they nod slowly
east to west. They survey the larger garden,
listen to birds sing. Not ready to uproot,
strike out on their own. They know home.
Dirty whitecaps and foam from churning dark water glow
in the headlights of the car I drove
down and around our knob’s gravel road
to its intersection with the creek.
Yesterday, flat stone to flat stone,
I had walked on the water.
Tonight, the roil and roar of the river glutted huge with rain,
engorging veins of gullies and creeks,
threaten with turbulent teeth of froth and mud
to devour the car,
rush me down the swollen creekbed circling the knob
and into the riverbelly.
Tonight, the Lord is not willing,
and neither am I.
I back up, turn,
and spitting gravel,
head home.
Relentless
I went to meet her
In my new red pants, sure to
Impress the empress
Next door when I was thirteen.
I used to exclusively
Laugh at myself in
This scenario — the young,
Naive boy who thought
He could just walk out there and
Insinuate himself in
Her impossibly
Exquisite world (really just
As dead and baffling
As mine, as ours). But now I’m
Proud of that kid, intrepid
And red-pants’d, charging
Forth with the accidental
Confidence of the
Pure at heart and the lovers
Of life who heedlessly dive
In, unaware of
The piss-poor odds that compel
Others to peek through
Blinds to see from afar, but
Never to woo, nor to win —
To say: “Here I Am,
AS I am! And isn’t it
Quite a thing to just
LIVE, to dare, to shoot your shot,
To show up in your red pants?”
They are from my sporty car,
a red Nissan 240-SX stick shift,
before I forgot what if felt like
to rev the engine, pop the clutch,
and squeal tires on asphalt.
In the summer of 1990,
the sun had already melted
black threads in short fast streaks
as I left my driveway.
I sold the Nissan before I was done with it.
Baby seats and diaper bags
took up the back seat
of my very practical sedan.
It was green, not candy apple red.
And now, as I sit behind the wheel
of my latest very practical ride,
one that I can spread out in
and haul kids and dogs
and all the stuff that goes with them,
I almost remembered, just for a second,
the red letter
California
across the orange sunset
and blue lettered
JST4U
I saved the plates when I moved back East
to this very sensible home
where it rains all year round,
soaking the ground.
It seeps thought the cracks in the foundation
in the laundry room above the cement sink
where the water pipes run up the wall.
I slipped my California plates behind the pipes
where I look at them while I wring out socks
and I can almost remember
the fun I had driving down Balboa Avenue,
through the canyons to Pacific Beach
where the sun heated me and my tires,
leaving tread marks as I shifted gears.
