Too tall for the kiddie pool
Too old to go back to school
Too young to feel like
I should have accomplished more by now.
Too wise to be immature,
yet I’m still not really sure
quite where the line is between
being chill and being cool.
Too ambitious to stay still
Too distracted to go anywhere
Too high, too anxious to sit still
Too side-tracked to get anywhere
Morning glory, evening inventory
What came between? A hazy life lived as a walking dream, a production brought to you by prescribed medication
Common Cause: condemned Course cannot cause
Belated benediction.
Benefited dereliction.
Astrophel antagonized and Anthropomorphisized.
Lovely as cardinal, I could be
But lowly and lonely as Cardinio is the future I see.
The Common Cause is the proper Course of humanity, the natural Source of applause.
We are doomed to infirmity and Strife, but the course is towards Something beyond humanity Versed in eternity.
Detritus: deferred detriments Defined dour diction.
Elegant, enshrined excellence
Enlightening eye.
Further figments furlough Fatherhood, forming fallow Effervescence.
what music
here in the not
seating
on the edge
of a littleness
new to the eye
steady rhythm
holds the one
Who wanders
melody spins the
far-flung web
not to be escaped
Folding time at the end of Science,
we play a game with practice money:
count the dollars and cents
required to replace a lost charger,
a delivery of a sub and half a salad,
a trip to the mall for earrings on clearance.
My student is minted in
math’s steadfast stillness,
and wants to spin
every dollar coin
before he returns his contribution
to the classroom till.
Upstairs
I sit in the part of my sister’s Tampa condo
that’s above someone else’s garage,
someone who speaks Mandarin
into a smart phone before he drives off
in the morning.
In the evening I see him doing Tai Chi
with five black-bellied whistling ducks
at the condo’s Alligator Lake. When
he sits down on the lake’s lonely bench,
I go down and join him.
The conversation is easy with him, as
between old men of a Common Era he says.
He eats mostly coconut, grapefruit, and
cinnamon toast. He’s a widow and a retired
physics teacher at FSU, but since his daughter
was killed by a college student drunk driver,
he volunteeres at the school’s Asian Center.
We thought we’d be safe in America, he says,
but as a physicist I knew better. Nothing
is certain and at no point can one predict
stability. How could it be that I’m a childless
widow in a Florida condo that has a pet
alligator? He holds up both hands and interlaces
his fingers in a way that makes his thumbs disappear.
For the life of me, I cannot figure it out.
When my sister yells from her porch
for me to come to dinner, Dr. Hue says to
come back tomorrow and he’ll show me
how it works.
Second attempt to deliver…
Are you ready to be treated like royality?
Last reminder…penis size…confermation
needed. You have been paid…Trust
this sender. Someone tried to hack
your account. You have been paid
$%[bag of money]#@! Free video doorbell.
Seriously, We don’t usually contact…
multipart/boundary; style<text>
reflext….unclaimed assets—
want to learn about? Someone May have
Run a Background Check on You.
Dear Ms, you contacted by new monies
to have deliver $100,000,000 US out of deceased
husband’s random will. You Christianed
woman. You must send transfer money
ordered to this addrss by Monocled…
Mistaking the crawdad’s severed claw
for a tooth, you bend to the water
and the water bites you
or so you imagine
thinking the claw reanimated
the nerves un-dependent on the fuller animal
To need only a part of ourselves
to move through this world
But isn’t that how it often is—
the handiwork of suppression
composing an erasure from the source-text
of our lives this remaining, this not
you locked it up
every inch of black and blue
stuffed into a bottle
mean and smokey
smoldering until it devoured
every atom of oxygen
the bottle was
left for the milkman
hoping he would take it
leave you a quart
of fresh sweet cream
it stayed right where you left it
give it a name
godamit
if you’re going to bury it
write it in the mud with your fingers
so the rain can carry
it down to the river
give it a voice
scream it into the air
smash it into the earth
carve it on your hand
so that you know it
when it crawls back to you
Spring is cool here
Holding its breath I guess
The sky slowly turns blue
Waiting for the exhale
Daffodils flurry the yard
Nodding their yellow kindness
I think I lost kindness this year
Is there a spell for reawakening?
A wren paced the window sill
Yesterday then tapped the glass
In some sort of Morse code I didn’t get
What is the sign for forgiveness?
Today the voice goes dry
Gritty sand clogging my throat
Chia seeds swelling in gelatinous glee
How hollow is absence?
The buildings have all gone dark now
Like uncertain endings
Nightly hours stuff with lazy minutes
Should I take up knitting?
This morning someone leaves a plant at my door
Its green offer soothing my soiled heart
I gently place it near an open window
Both of us bowing toward the light
