beautiful things
beautiful things
son, don’t worry about me.
i still find pleasure
in beautiful things:
my glittery shoes
and christmas socks
blanketed in falling leaves
from gratz park ginkgo trees.
beautiful things
son, don’t worry about me.
i still find pleasure
in beautiful things:
my glittery shoes
and christmas socks
blanketed in falling leaves
from gratz park ginkgo trees.
Back in the seventies,
in what some might call
ancient history,
some of us went to college
and learned basic mathematics
like how 28 grams equals an ounce,
and sixteen ounces equals a pound,
and how geography can spell profits
if you live close to the source
and have a dependable way
to travel cross country.
Midway is a magical town
It’s the perfect place to walk around
Hand in hand walking on the streets of downtown
It’s where Midway To Love can be found
If lucky, you could get a treat
A red and silver locomotive
Streaking down the center of the street
The conductor waves as your eyes meet
You return his wave from the street
The horn blows
And away the train goes
The red caboose fades out of sight
Lord Mordred himself descends into the Labyrinth
Sprawled
beneath drifting
clouds, I shutter my lids
and simply breathe. I levitate,
off the floor, weightless. My fingers
begin to feel fuzzy as the ambiguous border
between Earth and outer space. My toes float
into the void, and my body succumbs to blissful
darkness until I am only my breath, pulsating like sun’s
steady heartbeat. I relish the simplicity of breath, my troubles
and to-dos heliocentric to my chest’s rise and fall. Oblivion pierced
by a single light. Serenity. Sensation seeps into my limbs as I list
back to Earth’s atmosphere, to tumult and toil, my existence
once again bracketed by sky and solid ground,
but gravity is forgiving now, and if I leap
high enough, I can
almost stroke
sunrise.
14: The Banner Saga (Stoic Studio)
go figure, we are numbers, the starveling woodland
in its twig-legged hope
that an arrow could
solve anything.
oh, how i wish an arrow could solve
us from deadweight to death-wielding, how a bow arm could
make us worth the last peal of the earth peeled out of the fields,
yet the earth must die in pieces, jagged as her obsidian glass.
god, can we just lie down in an Eyvind Earle giclée
and pretend it’s not on the verge of melting?
More than anything,
I want WiFi.
I want WiFi so I can
access more than the few things
I scattered through nine hundred
square feet of newly explorable
terrain. (It’s wide open but already
I want more. Typical).
More than a small folding table,
two chairs. One typewriter.
Two small Tupperwares
of dead bugs, a modest
but growing collection.
A box labeled “china” which
in another chapter may
have meant the country
but in this one means
the fine. The breakable.
All our blooming orchids
for which I’m now solely
responsible. I consider
addressing them directly.
“Don’t die on me.”
One small suitcase with
ten days of clothes, a start
until the rest arrives.
The parts to a blender.
The parts to a food processor.
The parts to a stand mixer.
So many parts in pieces scattered
in a foreign and light-filled kitchen.
Parts that pick up from yet-another
chapter, one filled with cooking.
But not this kind of cooking.
Commerical cooking.
A sharp inhale of memory.
My arm twinges.
The intensity still on slow release
in my forever ready-to-spring body.
Flashbacks from the French
meaning to prick or sting—“Yes, yes.
I’m still here. No, I didn’t mind
waiting. Yes, it was a long hold.
Sure, I’ll check the connection.”
My relationship with water
started long before I was born.
In a warm liquid world
I formed within this
cushiony incubator
carefully guarded by
my mother’s twenty five
year old body.
My next encounter with
this life sustaining formula
would have been a bath,
where I may have felt
the familiar lack of friction
against my fresh infant skin.
From river wading to lake swimming
to the continual pull of the ocean
I am teathered by my heart to
this flowing force, each wave
a reminder of our bond to this
earth, as nourishing as my
first floating world.
KW. 6/16/23
