i think i would cook
more if i pretended to
make tasty potions 

He sat in His seat
before me, 
created me,
set my soul free
to choose

from my own
creation seat,
a lifetime
of choice–

possibilities,
like a warm wind,
dance in the air
before me,
waiting for me
to choose

I choose

then, I
find myself
in a new
creation seat,
considering
what may
come next–

another choice–

an infinity 
of possible universes,
waiting for me

Behind fading moon
mist settles down like a cat,
       we sleep in coolness

Good morning Robin
      could you come into my house
                     and catch my last dream

                            Summer flu
keeps me off riding mower:
                       lush clover for honeybees

midsummer malaise
vacation bible school students
                                 run through God’s sprinkler

                                         A truce with the Skunks,
still you must lecture a teen
                                    who’s Squealing his wheels

            All day I wish
it would have been different
   until the evening breeze

                            At night I wonder
                    why so many are sleeping
                            under my pillow

When I write about my grandmothers
something happens as I am transported
to other times and lands and languages
juiced in majestic memory, 
in a splash of the
ocean waves they traveled.

When I think I have forgotten a word,
a story, a gesture, a recipe,
it comes to me in the night as
grandmother moon transforms the
dark into gold that granddaughters treasure
in glass boxes lined with velvet.

Velvet of deepest purple, the
color of grandmother veins, the
color of ripened eggplant, the
color of budding cornflowers
in early summer
when the salt sweat drips down my face.

I taste the memory of old women
who traced their lives in migration, work,
desire, hardship and the pleasure of their
children, the dreams of their grandchildren,
tucked away
in glass boxes lined with purple velvet.

Today I was parched
    dessicated
    my will dry
    as a desert well

One sip of your joy
    seeps to my roots
    fills my spring
    brings me back to bloom

Words,
they plague me

Sometimes
they land as bricks
or quiver like rippling flags
then scatter
moving in space
like leaves in the air
randomly landing on
the tip of my pen
where they may be unlocked
when applying some pressure
to identify them

Sometimes they are name tags
attached to fragrances
turning my head
asking my consciousness
to surmise
a scent
an object
a dislocation
a shift
a shove
a slant
that makes
one notice
what has set off a time bomb
in your head
until a word
grandly presents itselt
or rolls out of
a gum ball machine
a colorful promise
of something
to chew on

I didn’t read the book

Until I was 25 years old

But by that age

I only thought that he was

A petulant and whiny asshole

Even if he somewhat matured

By the end

By the time

I am able to come out

of the closet

and live as myself,

it may be too late.

I didn’t get to

have a girlhood.

Now I may not

get to have a life.

Politicians are trying

to outlaw my existence.

They praise the freedom

of this country

as they plot genocide

for anyone not like them.

God bless the USA.

It has been a long journey

and I have worked hard

to become myself,

to love and accept myself.

And it’s so frustrating

that my final destination

may be nowhere.

I’m waiting for never,

a day that is not coming

or maybe one that already passed

where I can be myself safely

without fear,

with joy.

The future I hoped for

dies a little more each day.

he looks worn, distant,

so close to the fire’s heat

but not yet burning

this is how creation works,

magic made to seem easy

when so very difficult,

the door closed and locked

seconds or hours,

finally it yields to him,

the treasure so bright

as he lays it out neatly,

each note perfectly in place

(after the 1891 portrait of Erik Satie in his Montmartre studio, by Santiago Rusinol)

de-
regulate me, whispered the river tributary
to its dumb and rushing banks–
and they obliged in kind, all the more willing
to hold water where water goes. 

The wooded bottom diverged its course
long ago–its pain, the occasional flooding
water that tossed its sediments, made dams,
tracked an occasional moored-up Ford
deep into the orange wood, its abandoned corpse
filled with all kind of junk we’d find there:

the glass bottles of Ol Grandad        sun bleached
beer cans               tattered seats, foam exposed–
springcoil heart ripped open.