That You Live

Pushing through the dark tunnel
To the bursting light
The minute it is impossible
Is just when you're so close
My precious.
Life struggles begin with the first
Requirement and expectation
That you live.
My precious

12/8/2014

Growing Sideways

Breathing, multiplying beings in the house
Buddha becomings, little holy and human
Chatty and observant these guys.

My roots are growing and I'm reaching but
My leaves are falling of gray hairs
My future is gone continued into theirs.

I'm big and tall yet falling, angling
Propped by the little and the external
Like a Dali painting.

10/10/2014

Gathering of Stones

Outside, the stones gathered
Into a big theatre
Got front row seating
To the show of every season
Change, so patiently.
They watch a soft blur of a bunny
The stars in strobe lights, ants and grass quick as blades
While breathing a long sigh
Bleeding mineral rain to crumble
Like dessert for the earth,
Doused with shells and secrets
Expiring inside.
8/29/2014

Sharing with My Mother

The more I try to reassure my mother,
The more she suspects...

The concerns and cares I shoulder,
I conceal and collect.

Her ears keen to the notes I offer,
My anxiety she dissects.

Taking on more as I grow older,
Less her fear affects.

Understanding her and less eager,
I share all; she accepts, connects.

9/7/2012

Earth

I'm hot at the core
Molten magma glowing
Alive, my crusted surface is
Cynical.

Even when it cracks open
The shuddering and shaking
Tears you asunder. I shiver
Now, hair-trees tall.

I feel as fresh as ever,
In this ancient rainforest
Again. Buried beneath
The meaningless concerns
Snowing and turning all.

Dragging Awake

Like little fish in murky waters
The dreams of last night elude me
They cast a line out from down under
And hook me as I shift about some eggs,
Someone out there must be dreaming
Catching my little fish, too, they drag me
Along underneath, fully awake and dressed.

08/24/2014

Coyotes

Coyotes cry at the cold
Camped in the field yonder
Making cameo appearances
On the icy roads at night
Their startled silhouettes
Clipped into the black.

In the daylight hours
Hunched and cunning
In the cream color of yellow
Grass and the snow
Blended together in your eyes,
They're part of calm and peace.

But their screams are all around
At night when they carry off
The whiff of your maturity and reason,
And you shiver wondering if it's
Because you forgot your cap or
Maybe a crowd of coyotes about you

Out of sight, cramping with chill and fright,
In that dark of only stars a-light.

Ninety Days of A Poem a Day

Like new babies with birthdays
Every day, week, month--
I'm celebrating my new habit.
Ninety days of a poem a day
Reading one, pondering,
Writing one.

My allowance and privilege
My pretension -- if you bear with me,
For ten minutes out of each way.

No labor lasted ten minutes,
But then no artificial need
Developed like eating and sleeping
And sex. And pushing an impossible
Baby.

So I'll celebrate my conscious, shy
Thing -- my habit formed with my
Mind's love for words and people who
Whisper and shout them onto pages,
Bleed in black ink like me.

It's my impossible love, my
implausible pregnancy.
Happy birthday 90 days.

To Domestic Abusers

There was a man who insisted
That the sun was his--
The heat had scorched his face and hands,
Dirty from carrying his other belongings
The largeness, the heat, the light
Nothing appalled him as much
As the fact he couldn't
Pull the sun aside and hold ransom
Those who didn't know it.

9/24/14

Toddler Prioritizing

The bag is full and needs a spill
So he grabs his peepee
And hops from leg to leg
But he refuses to go
From an important effort
His lego gun is almost done.

11/17/14

Angry Words

Anger focuses my pummeling words, they
Tumble out like from a firehose
Urgent sudden and with a blind force
That can make social history
Linger in everyone's memory

11/19/14

To Burning Man, Words on Earth

Even a burning man knows it
There is free in freedom
Spending my words like strawberries
My mind has no sieve
Pours out all of its rain,
With no value proposition.

But I've got to spend my oxygen, too.
Share these to let your body digest
Eventually we will be valued
Into sweet rotting food for the earth.
Our minds will know no freedom
Like the one we imagine at death.

8/25/2014

An Anonymous You

Each day with new records
Of thoughts and poems
I walk up and down my haunts.

I shiver excited in the snow now
Looking at the dust
Rising in sparkles from my feet.

Gold ink oozes down from my
Fingertips, so I can shout inside
To the abyss of my expanse.

I've seen beauty, I made my footsteps.
I lived today, and I've written it down for
An anonymous you.

Pondering Sandy Shoes

Must I carry these with me
Your shoes, encrusted with sands
Adventures' remains all about the house
Of no consequence or weight to you, my little ones

But I'm your first teacher
Your servant and master-- your mother
And maybe someday your friend. Yet
Am I enabling my toddlers when
I let you grow wild like weed and carefree?

Shall I snip you both from left and right
Give you rights and take away privileges
Play you my music and passages of ceremony
Give you your version of heaven and hell
In cookies and spankings, in cuddles and time outs?

I wish I could keep my sticks and carrots
And wait until you and I, we understand each other
We can marvel together at life's nonsense
Write poems of even less sense
And carry sandy shoes and all.

8/27/2014

Purple Dreams Blooming

Purple dreams blooming shades
Beneath lemon trees
Verdant and heavy in paradise

Products of painting wet on wet
Mostly in veins and tubes of
Plants and rainbows with the kids

And no end masterpieces
To add to ego's constellations that
Everything beautiful must be creations.

Fleet Passions

In presence of strict rules
Passions dark and deep rise
Rebellions looms like a shadow
Following every good child.

It splits the intentions sound and wild,
And whispers of the freedom
Enjoyed by wolves and flowers,
However fleet may be those lives.

11/10/2014

To Avoid Fear

All I've done to avoid my fear
Of being quiet and alone
Not for a moment or a day

But for eternity, shut up
Like a nun, in service of
Always other duties than here

No laughter or recompense
I dare myself today to allow
I'm matter. I matter.

Quietly like all chance daughters--
Objects, I accept these drawn boundaries.
All I've done to avoid my fear

Of being alone and quiet
For an eternity of other worlds
Is a delusion within an illusion.

11/6/2014

On the Line

Complicate your inducements, work harder
Because I don't buy this, that
Story, the red door, white fence
That blue cloth, your marching orders.
My belief has never been on the line.

So create your bigger lie, cast a wider net--
Make a catastrophic problem that
Outsizes your own brains and britches then
Maybe this child of flower-child will bitch
A little less and fall as seeds to your needs.

The version of humanoid the tall sacrifice
To yesterday's decisions however unfair
I stand ready to your eschatology
Your well-told self-deception, your genealogy
Now more true than your nightmare.

Aging is all about

Aging is all about
       the martini on speed boats
Bumpy ride, splashes
       all over until there is
More on you, than in you
       I mean love, that is
Accidentally accumulates
       as you get drunk on it
Among more society of
       friends and family
Dying and winning all around
       You forget how desperate,
Lonely, and swimming work
    Can be for the glorious, sober
Darkness of youth.

8/26/14

Art

The cultural memory and enamored
Contrast of reality to dreams
The industry of never growing up is
Pondering the sacred and not

From active progressions of
Rebellion to submission
Our goal is to expand the
Human mind yet only high society

Stoops to scoop up this bit of
Our darkened souls into its world
Suspecting it's important, collaborating
In the history of art's boredom

Fickle viewing of its existential
Problems, self-referential speak
From yet another angle and to
Call it overcoming money and consumerism.

11/1/2014

Some people have trivial problems

Some people have trivial problems
With deep notes
Encompassing the whole psyche --
Whether to buy this hat?

We don't normally mix you say
But everybody gets a chance
To stroll online, maybe to troll
To disagree on surfaces.

In creating the ripples and tips
We are really always asking
Underneath our clothes and all
What is this--this human experience?

Tomato

Merciless in the frost around my fruit
Ripened sweet and turned hard
I'm bit by tiny insects in a trace, and once
By a field mouse, as a test.

The seeds have gathered around
In crescent communities and clusters
With each an egg and a slip
Gliding constellations in the dark,

In hues of yellow, green, and red
To human eyes, of course. They're
Ready for a long journey down a
Hatch through, life through the grit.

First Thing in the Morning

The idea was to separate me
from a tangle of children
Warm limbs, pile of my love
Little arms around my neck.

The cold air and the orange seeping
In through the curtains were
Surely the call of a different
Kind of sleeping, waking

Into my life is impossibly real
Children, husband, work, running
Cooking in all that space of
Cold air greeting, the piles of results

Of all that on every room floor
with Legos.

8/23/2014

Sharing with My Mother

The more I try to reassure my mother,
The more she suspects...

The concerns and cares I shoulder,
I conceal and collect.

Her ears keen to the notes I offer,
My anxiety she dissects.

Taking on more as I grow older,
Less her fear affects.

Understanding her and less eager,
I share all; she accepts, connects.

9/7/2012