It fails again and my hopes splatter
Down on the concrete
And I’ve got no ladder
Fall and crash I might
My dreams may never take flight,
1 step forward and 2 steps back
Never on the right track
I’ll hide in the imaginary,
The boring comfort zone
Eyes locked into my phone
Like they’re about to bleed
Let’s see what’s new in the feed
Any escape of the problem which is me
I’m afraid this is who I’ll always be
I peel myself from a fresh cloak of shower steam,
but in minutes my teeth chatter, lips blue, ice-kissed.
I lie paralyzed on the bed, trying to reawaken.
My bones ache, my blood fills with frost like sepsis.
The warmth was seductive, intoxicating but brief,
and now the contrast of its absence stings more,
seems somehow even colder than before, fatally so.
pert round dangling
they are a woman’s lot
& a man’s sought
giver of life
cover for the birthplace
beyond love
A waffle cone for me
A scoop in a cup for you
Pistachio, seaglass green
Was my choice this time
Gator tail for you
Chocolate, and caramel mix
This go ’round
The sun beaming
A table for two
Mosaic orange tiles
A perfect sunset
The best end to the day
Last week shoveling out the fridge
the geology horifying
pointing to insanity, senility setting in
while cottage cheese curdled on the back shelf.
Two days, five trash bags, bleach
and sunshine, and still the faint odor lingers
meanwhile, in the next county
from a hospital bed and a deep fog
– ping – an order is placed
and soon delivered
frozen crabcakes arrive on the doorstep
begining the tortuous cycle again
Every year
I’m reminded of why
I avoid family vacations like the plague.
Great big, green mountains watch with wise old eyes
As I pass through its sliced core in a cramped SUV.
Between being asked every five minutes if I feel sick
And walking on eggshells not to upset my driving mother
Sitting in silence outside of a South Carolina Cracker Barrel no longer felt so bad.
A relaxing beach getaway
Is furthest away from me than ever
while I’m sitting in the sand
Whose community are
you uprooted who communes
with monsters who hollows
the pit who buries their
bones who are you to say
you know who knows you
who believes they do
my mom was avid about taking pictures
she wanted to perserve our family history
most of her snap shots were of us
standing around at some gathering
looking directly into the sun
one of us would have our head cut off
when we got the photos out of the shoe box
we’d say: do you think that’s Mike
i use to have a darkroom
to develop black & white prints
thinking that scenes from Red River Gorge
were artistic, all those pictures
have joined the ones of the family
gathering dust in storage bins in the attic
now my grandchildren use their phones
to record their loony gramps
with his dreadlocked beard
that they then manipulate
into zany videos that they “share”
with their friends
most of those digital images
have also been forgotten
and are now gathering dust
in something called “the cloud”
once in a blue moon
someone will try to retrieve them
to produce a movie for a funeral
when I go
just let me go
i don’t need mechanical reproductions
of me flashing around
at my celebration of life
that’s too much trouble
I hope you remember me
as I was
Picking peaches on the hillside of an
old homestead, curling myself into the
curve and reaching,
I know my back will hurt
all night, but it’ll be worth it to
taste the richness from forgotten soil,
bright sun-soaked juice lingering on
my tongue like a ghost of long ago
groceries before stores and tv ads,
before processed sugar dominated
every item on our kitchen shelves.
It wakes something stored in my DNA, and
my body remembers an imprinted desire
to forage food real and green and
growing close to home.
