Have This Wish
Maybe you would say
it’s impossible to grasp
just a single star.
Perhaps I would answer that
it’s they who cannot catch us.
Maybe you would say
it’s impossible to grasp
just a single star.
Perhaps I would answer that
it’s they who cannot catch us.
i’m almost 22
but halfway to 60
my body’s winding down
no chance to breathe
i’m running on half a leg
a peice of my lung
a sliver of my heart
embarressed of my bladder
fighting to live a life
where i’m happy on my own
its a messy paint splatter
halway off the canvas
between college classes
and doctors appointments
part time jobs
and social services
three lives collide
my head, jumbled
my shoes tied together
stumbling as i go
no choice
have to keep crawling
can’t stop now, or else
my bed won’t be made
my cheek warm
on the ice cold floor
a sheet as my replacement
or worse, the concrete
as the rats greet me
only they’d know my name
so much at stake
if i don’t push a little more
past my limit
i’ll pay for it tomorrow
in bed ridden misery
but for future security
see no one could prepare you
for, almost, twenty two
and disabled
but fighting
in more ways than one
I do believe that
if I introduced
more trashy reality television,
no light would be
brought into my life
but perhaps I would realize
the light that is already there
“Truly I tell you,” he said, “unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” — The Gospel According to Matthew
The kingdom of heaven is a child
coaxing a stray cat, stretching a searching hand
into the dark gash beneath the bed,
even after, crying out,
he sees his own blood
for the first time.
oddly placed askew from the maple, closer to the house than it should be
or than design principles would recommend
invisible when I moved in
now under four years of leaf sediment, nature floats it to the surface
too small to burnpile well
it would only work as a hotdog warmer
in the place where most of us would put a firepit
but, to firecode best practice still too close by, sits the hole bored by the wild boar
working off steam from a fight with his lady
a few years ago
I was just getting diagnoses
severe pain
something very wrong
still eating frozen dinners
expensive
organic
unable to cook
no dexterity
no hands
trying to hang onto the bucking bronco of daily employment
the racket was awful
inhuman
after a rain
gate open
two boars
wandered in
turned yard upside down
like bulldozers
I felt scar/r/ed
trespassed
naive
on an island
where I didn’t know the rules
just like at work
honesty irrelevant
impossible to mow
if I could have afforded to anyhow
the yard has healed
last year I locked the gate tight
I watch the boars sometimes
hear them quietly
mamas grazing with babies each birth season
with their waggy tail squiggles
unselfconscious
unagendaed
like watching possums at night from the car I lived in in L.A.
they go about their business
it’s only been four years
since townfolk told me we just shoot boars here
make sausage
it’s true the sausage here is good
though the tiny smoker couldn’t make a go of it
closed last year
just as my body was desensitizing to meat
I don’t see the boars much now
nor deer
gate’s been open a few months
wonder what will happen when I plant those fruit trees back there
wonder if they’ll come sit by my firepit with me
Connotation and denotation…
What’s the difference between
A prayer
And a plea?
One seems to contain hope within.
The other seems to acknowledge
Something that exists in the desperation
Where hope is in a container
Where something or someone is
Observed or observing, but without
A way to open the lid.
Please.
should be easy. Can be hard to see
how a tree can be alive. Sure—
in early spring, the limbs look bare
when they contain many universes:
the imperceptible bugs that colony
and caper up and down the bark,
in between the starts of buds.
It takes people weeks to see them bloom
and melt back into their stalwart background.
This one leans the wrong way over KY-1295,
Every September it lets go a crop of vestigial fruit—
tropical green going custard,
two rows of seed big as thumbnails.
Fruits drop where they grew,
macerate onto the asphalt.
A Silverado takes one at fifty,
the scatter turning to liquor in the heat.
Ants and yellow-jackets and all else
brave the road to harvest
like no man will.
I’ve never felt easy to love,
though you could pluck it from me like a fruit.
If I were a tree,
I wouldn’t want you to see me
drop it all
and let it kiss the road.
If you called it anything,
you’d never even have to call it
love.
