beauty beauty . . . silence settles
you touch me there
you invite my song
now there is
silence
going going g
o
n
e
I wake and breathe in the thick air of uncertainty that envelopes me.
The weather flip-flops from sunshine to gloom.
The news forecasts perpetual doom,
and so does my mood.
As fragile as the annealed glass:
global affairs,
peace,
public health,
safety,
sanity. . .
All one careless graze away
from crumbling into countless tiny shards.
magic slumber
dreamless days
walking with shadows
I conjure
from the spellbound
playing forbidden tunes
on forbidden pipes
a magic age
scribbled on cake
and candles and
buttercream roses
rancid and sweet
in summer’s heat
while drums beat
dancing feet
on solstice gathers
the young who spin
grateful again
what I lost
bit by bit
fingers trace lines
around eyes
around smiles
new candles
will flicker
in the wind
For my favorite carriers
Tease me with timetables, double-cross at the gate.
I’ve nothing to do here but drink and wait.
Crammed in a middle seat that I’d never choose,
your profit-and-loss sheet for me is just “lose.”
When you pull off the rebook and kidnap my bag
that heavy one—that I had to drag
through terminal wastes—will I see it again?,
Travel’s no longer about where, but when.
We stood together barefoot,
hand-in-hand,
in the mostly darkened night
Lightly lit by a mixture
of streetlights
and the somethings of the sky
Feeling the warmth of her mere
existence
ignites the lost light in me
Where we unify our breath,
waiting for
the New Moon to set us free
Dried ground and sharp blades of grass
stabilize,
extracting, and we release
Together we ask the earth
to absorb
the pain; take what we don’t need
Moments after hugging tight,
our request
accepted by Mother Earth
The last clinging connection,
sliced by last
attempts to menace our worth
Through recognizable tears,
we embraced,
as familiar villains strike
Our souls sit with a knowing,
the New Moon
intervention mode… ghostlike
*(this feels unfinished, but not sure where to go…)
Can’t you find
are you? Where ?
Can’t you
? ?
I was acting
But i was just, crush
Johanna
Only ’cause I can’t
Remember ?
You complained
told me
Oh my Johanna
Who ?
I
tell
Who am I?
Couldn’t tell
feeling being
, so confused
electric lucky strikes
all night and , your eyes
said
Only want you
no pretending
happy ending
sad to see
Johanna
I have you.
When I was twelve,
I opened a drawer I wasn’t meant to.
In a box inside a box inside,
I found my childhood
filed in bone.
Twenty milk-white moons,
roots still dark with me:
no note or coin,
just the sound of my own jaw
closing.
I’ve read that fireflies are becoming endangered.
This pit-in-the-stomach factoid exists in my consciousness
swirling with all the other soundbytes of terror
in the landscape of life in 2025.
It creates a hard dissonance with my own reality
privileged as it is
ICE doesn’t knock on my door
My children whine that they don’t get enough dessert
I spend a leisurely summer morning
writing a poem
I struggle to actively fight the horror
and not be swallowed by it
I work to help my children understand, stand up
and not dim their still-flickering optimistic view of the world
I walk in a soft, wild place
still undisturbed
I know it will be…
none of us are safe.
And yet
at dusk when the heat finally dissipates
walking thoughtful circles through my park
all I can see
are the fireflies.
The sinuous track of ferns cushions
each step, stinging nettle reaches out to
tantalize our thighs. We recall the old raconteur
that walked these woods before Boone spread
the word about Paradise and the landscape
recoiled beneath hard, leather boots.
The salt licks, long gone, favorite spots of
bison and elk prevailed. Perhaps he learned
his stories from them when warm air
whistled from flared nostrils as they licked
deep crevices in the salt earth, creating springs
for drink and lure.
They say he lived somewhere near the bluffs,
an overlook to the narrow passage of the
Dry Fork Creek, burying his stories in fissures
of jasper and limestone. The old ones tell tales
of watching some stories crumble and roll down
the sides during heavy rains, with spark and burn.
If no one finds the stories soon, they will be lost
in the spray of water tracing deep grooves along
the fossil laden bank. We climb down the bluff,
walk the creek, blanketed with pieces of quartz tooling
and occassional arrowhead hidden beneath aged leaves
of sassafras and river birch.
Clumps of humus, crinoids and brachiopods are pushed
aside, groping for proof of his existence,
listening for whispers from pieces of shale. A river stone
surfaces, brachiopods fossilized deep in its face, we lift it to
listen, a blast of silence in the labyrinth of history,
the sudden rush of the creek almost knocking us over.
A sighting of the indigo bunting graces the distance
between then and now with a quick dance, as the
ghost of the old raconteur howls.
