Your arms are so long;

I can’t see where your hands should be.

Do your fingers point away or

back toward me?

 

Are your muscles taut or loose?

Supple or soft, sufficient to hold,

implying an embrace? Or is there sinister intent

in your outstretched arms?

 

What is in your eyes?

Do they look aside, avoiding my own

while mine nervously look elsewhere, too,

unsure of beginnings? Of the road ahead?

 

Your pavement lies cracked, unsure,

            like the radiator of an old truck;

                        built for much more but now holds little.

But the truck looks good.

 

The skylines too often block

            the yearning view of skies made black.

                        As black meets blue comes green,

the color of your gold.

 

Starched Mayflower collars,

            unbending to wind or laughing or failure,

                        press the god-filled soil from your boots,

on the necks of your serfs.

 

The voices loud, the words are tall,

            writ large across your branded skies,

                        the songs are sung by those with guns for fists,

and stripes of nettles on corral courtiers.

 

My own soul, distanced, but tempered by time,

            finds grace such temperance allows, to swallow

                        the seeds of discontent in the hearty bread

baked in twin kilns of need and desire.

 

So, stretch out your long arms.

Grab hold of one made larger, broader,

Arms made to embrace or crush are at least

around my shoulder.

 

 

 

 

 

And so there comes

a certain showering of

sparks flaring upward

like flakes of white hot snow.

The stars in rows

gather as unbidden memories

to cast their ghoulish glow

on the back, black walls –

hidden from view,

or at least cowering

among the older stars,

clumped and unbillowing. They do not

breathe anymore, but

still cast their

meddling shadows.

Their pathetic streams of

yellow light offer

neither warmth nor sight –

just scratching on

a chalkboard of a new

night, too full to care.

My pen bleeds it’s sickly sweet dewfall drawl.

Nothing inhabits this canister but dried up vowels

fit for lying salesmen and puffed up politicians.

 

The birds have picked clean the grain,

and the road is left clean enough

to walk on without sound.

 

The deer have stopped coming to taste

the salt lick that once bore the strident residue

of something that helped hold their water.

 

I’m feeding the fish with sawdust

one pinch at a time. They’re only fat

because they’ve had to eat each other.

 

Unbanish the bright and flowing nerves of pulsating ink.

Let breathe again the salacious, the rambunctious,

the florid and foul, the simple and bombastic,

that tickle, cajole, prance and pet

and set free the smallest fires.

life is not finished yet

this time between the times

the bones between the flesh

mute or stinking

 

another thought has come

crumpled but poised

crouching between the eyebrows

of have and had

 

slick and unyielding this

tricky business of friendship

of unposted letter-lives

hiding in lairs of uncertainty

 

where the dark and damp

find the warm and humble

sucking from the teet

of forgiveness breathing

 

toward a resolution

a day-night hour

pretends to see the unseen

tucked under a quivering branch

 

and just when the first bird

alights with song at the ready

the branch gives in and

dancing leaves meet waiting ground

 

 

There are the non-rhymes of indentured servitude,

like our darker shadows served up as a litany of disgrace.

The dog keeps eating his shit and it reminds me that

sometimes what we think is tried and true is merely

dying to escape and find its way back, unseen, to soil.

We cramp up, our innards telling us a hard truth:

lap up this fish water and eat the stale tree bark much longer

and the ground won’t know the difference between you and your vomit.

Bitter weeds entwine roots with the vegetables, rape them for nutrients

and laugh all the way to the bowl where even the Ranch Dressing

can’t cancel the happy devils’ rotten trick.

So, I guess we either get used to the taste of bitter herbs in the salad,

the indiscriminate odor of our own feces among the riches of earth,

or we remain satisfied to let it all grow up together.

Maybe there’s an accidental rhyme of dirt and sky, earth and heaven?

Maybe rhyme isn’t the point?

For my mother, Doris. You will always know where I live… 

She ate the fires that burned our feet,

but kept us dancing still.

An outsider to her own life,

she dwelt in the shadows with others,

unadorned, weary and unnoticed by

those who mattered most.

She was a woman of family loyalties

seen through the well-pictured mantle;

of a burdened sensitivity filtered through an indomitable strength;

of shrewd candor minted in the currency of honesty.

* * *

His love was real enough but

tentative, unsure, safe – he saw her

as through a glass, dimly; sideways, peripherally.

Though his arms were strong,

they were no match for her constitution,

mammoth by comparison; a roundness

of stalwart purpose swimming in a barrel of uncertainty.

* * *

Though his word was law, hers was heard,

and heeded in the hours, in the minutes,

in the places where we actually lived.

Wrestling one child with words, another with shrewdness,

still another with a ping-pong paddle

on which was written “for a better future,”

she forged us in fires not of our desire but her design –

on the requirements of character and truth.

* * *

Mirrors told her what they saw

not what she hoped for and always, just behind her,

skulked the injustice of vengeful time.

All the words nearly rhymed to songs sung

just a little out of tune; pleasant enough at a piano with a broken back.

Despite her stature, there was never any doubt

who stood tallest, whose shoulders were broadest,

whose voice spoke loudest, and whose purpose was sunk deepest.

No scars ran deep enough, no bruises blue enough

to raze this spirit from the earth’s deep places.

* * *

She ate the fires that couldn’t devour her…

You live your life in post-it notes

pinned to the outside of balloons,

shaved, polished and properly named

for your amusement.

 

Skipping through fallen leaves, all with names

of used to be friends, now just concerns,

you pepper your imagination with pretty bird calls

and nice stories with happy endings.

 

The bad people, the ones unlucky enough

to fuck up somehow are safely tucked away

in the soles of your shoes, right next

to the dried dog shit you leave for posterity.

 

“Come, love me,” you say.

“Come, watch me live,” you say.

“Why are you here?” you say.

So, I came and loved and watched.

 

Now you say nothing. Why would you

when life is a singular word with only two letters:

m, e?

Warning: not for kids! Oftentimes, the most inhumane violence done to others is that which we inflict through our passive-aggressive silences. Sometimes a punch to the face is easier than seeing the back of someone else’s apathetically silent head. I explore that a bit in this rather visceral piece.

My ears are ringing, ringing,

ringing from the deafening roar of stony silence.

Someone has been shouting at me for so long

without stopping,

never stopping,

ever.

The lids of my ears are pinned back

as scenes of your violent ennui pelt my psyche.

Ghoulish shrieks of the banshee gash holes in my bowels

and any remains of touch and sound lay shredded and splayed

on the table, once of communion, now of refuse.

Quickly, cut open my gut with a heated knife of angry words.

Split my head with the axe of honest, unimplied hatred.

It is more compassionate to watch another bleed,

their blood still wet on the tip of your axe than it is

to watch through a mirror as another

squirms and writhes under the torturers knife

of guesses, unanswered questions, pale assumptions, made up half-truths.

Like the wanderer, banished and scapegoated,

the unforgiven walk in barren, featureless landscapes

peppered with the memories of better days.

The shrieks of silence are so much louder

than the shouting of angry, cutting…but honest, words.

Wordless words spill out into the aether

through sealed lips, drowning in their own denial

of non-communication. Oh, I hear. I hear. I hear,

SO STOP YOUR FUCKING SHOUTING.

Your victims are only fed enough sanctimony to forbid reality,

deny context, withhold boundaries for the untold story.

The din of merciless words is quicker,

the pain, short; the gouching, swift.

Silent pain is relentless, without pity,

casting scorn through indifference,

hatred through unspoken speech,

unforgiveness through apathy,

vengeance through willing ignorance.

_

In seeking truth, you’ve become the biggest lie.