There is no freedom till all are free
Bondage for some is bondage for all
Let’s celebrate the date all enslaved got the freedom word
All for one and one for all
It has been written
It has been heard

walls of magic
words, floors thick
with flying carpets

windows of dream
without doors – only
portals to other

times and places,
whole universes
in your hands

nested lifetimes
to live and revisit
all in good time

No other had ever come close to it,
its warm walnut shine, sturdy but
graceful legs, with endless leaves for an
infinite number of dinner guests you rarely allowed,

its elliptical silhouette a perfect fit for the room in the
ugliest house in the nice neighborhood, a
fixer-upper worth hundreds of hours, gallons of paint and
sweat, with the basement that

flooded our very first night, the
living room with the misguided angel mural we drywalled over and the
lights you said to never use because you
couldn’t possibly reach the bulbs to change them,   

the kitchen where we called the family to tell them I was sick,
the bedroom where I healed, waking up five times that
year to a new body, until I was better but we were never
quite the same after death slapped me awake,

when we were parallel packing you let me
take it, more generous than you had to be, and now
it doubles as a table to host loved ones and a
desk to type poems looking back at a safer distance. 

 For the creator must be a world for himself….      
                                               –       Rainer Maria Rilke
                                                        “Letters to a Young Poet”  

He makes me feel
abandoned at a border
hording verses
in my pocket
like gold to bribe 
the guards
But they’re not

I take them out at night
try stitching them together
whittling away ’til something
like a rustic poem takes shape
I wonder what he would say to me
though I am not young
and not quite free

piles of brushes, paints, papers call out
bluegrasses sway in brisk breezes
i brush on their colors, soft
listen to sage whispers
do not be detached–
walk out to us
touch our blades
know us
be

My grandmother had favored an irritable pressure cooker, 
blooming a field of grains to a plain of white wisteria 
with a sublime mental timer for each type and consistency. 

My mother had preferred a pot and a deep, soft patience
that obeyed the whim of temperature shifts to convince
the slender basmati to swell and not split into dots of hail. 

I was the designated washer, the one to watch cold water 
run clear under the swirl of the tines called my fingers,
simultaneously granting cleanliness and preserving form.

But we bought our first rice cooker last year.

It took a few weeks to entrust a precious, pooled sum
to the invisible technology, but our rice intake soon
ballooned, wryly, in time to mimic the rate of inflation. 

A 70-year-old cowboy,
Hat on his head,
A great beer belly
Hanging over his belt
Starts to move when the music starts.

Far removed from the hunky
Adonis that high school girls
Once swooned over.
But when the music starts,
A glorious natural rhythm
From deep in his bones emerges.

Eyes closed, he dances.
His shoulders and hips sway
Without inhibition,
In a universe to which
I have never been.
With a grace I could not muster
In a millennium.

Music in my mind,
But never my body,
Watch with envy
This bear of a man
With such grace.       

It’s always been here
amoung us
every second
threads leapfrogging
through the front
the middle
the back of our minds,
dishing out spontaneous bits
of unrelated pixels
that we consider to be our very selves;
we say
smart phones are not a far leap
from Lascaux or Fairy Tales or Holy Books
or Captain Turner’s sky writing of 1922:
DAILY MAIL,
but in the dotage of our species
we sling dots and dashes
with centrifugal speed
into the Cloud’s Great Garbage Patch
of meaningless data
and along with Gutenberg, Bell, Jobs
we’re all just hitchhikers riding along
with earth
yelling out our fantastical success story
into the textural void

We already know the message coming back:
UNDELIVERABLE

Cresting the steep hill by I75 south
the reverse mohawk of a tree copse
shaved for the spiked towers—
the black bondage line straps
of the electrical grid softly curve
from point to point a collecting net
for graceful raptors or
the local murder of crows
or unkindness of ravens.  

The scars the installation machinery
left behind softly covered now
as the kudzu begins it disquiet work.

Yesterday is a long time ago
to toddlers, and to old people
yesterday is a life time ago and
“just yesterday” too,
even when yesterday can be recalled,
but not exactly.