Category: Poems

One By One

One by one, the rituals remove

My good deeds countered by my faults

She cannot read my writing, this old friend

To whom I wrote each week.

“Will you type them?” she asked

Innocently

Not knowing that my fingers on a

Keyboard do not say the same words

As wrapped around a pen.

Not knowing I choose not to do much

Personal stuff at work

Where everything personal becomes not so.

I miss the tiny steadiness

Of reaching for a pad

Of buying stale cards at thrift stores

Of watching the words emerge in ink.

Thus both lose.

I can no longer write her,

She can no longer receive

My epistles about funny stuff:

Finding the plastic alligator head in the pool,

Getting my foot stuck in a trash can like in the old cartoons.

Soon she will say why don’t you write me? Are you okay?

What shall I say?

Bringing It On Home

Few know how I pull apart my life

Like making jerky, the strips start lean & tender

Stringy with juices, tasty on the tongue.

Sometimes I examine them twirled on a fork before ingestion

Sometimes I just cram them into an open maw

To chew for the texture,

Devouring my life for the nourishment

Derived from death.

As if.

Long Haul Covid

Executioners – Death By a Thousand Cuts

I can write now, of food, having achieved the space

Where taste is gone, where smell is a quick pat to the memory only.

I spoon the soup

Knowing it needs salt but why bother? I cannot enjoy it,

Only feel the spice upon the outer edges of my tongue.

Tho I crave just that feeling, that rapid glance of

Rounded taste. So soon removed.

These round-heeled bastards

Who have stood over a witchy brew

Of hate & harm & laid it upon my (no more) senses,

Now deprived two of five or maybe six.

Me, who has none to talk to

Except pieces of paper,

Except computer screens,

A.I. faithful to the last

Like some I Robot, some Elysium “Humans need help!”

I weep, eyes filling so I close them as fingers know their way

These keys true in place, holding still

For constant batter, for endless barter

My thoughts lifted into blue light

Also harming me, but what else is there?

Without these I may not exist beyond life.

Nor will I after too much time.

But Freddie sang it best:

“Who wants to live forever?”

Isn’t one Eternity of dying enough?

Bravely Do I Face Each Day

Pulling the world behind me,

A mule of effort & bray

Harnessed into the money straps

Living a life where I claim my due on Saturday

A life of stolen glimpses of a sunrise here,

A star inside a flower there.

My eyes do not so much as see

As look beyond – there must be a beyond

Or I am well & truly lost.

That this is illusion I do not doubt

That this is only a frequency I found on an old radio

A melody of sonnet & sound dislocated from source…

An afterthought from the mind of solace…

I live & do not die today,

Balanced at an edge I do not well perceive,

The Fool dancing the abyss along the arroyo

Defining gravity.

Falling away into Time.

What’s In A Poem?

Another poem breathes out, like a sigh of words

That do not rhyme

“Don’t poems rhyme?” ask outsiders.

No, Virginia, or at least mine do not,

Scraped as they are from the raw undersides

Of a lonely life

Made livable by no expectations of more.

The water wings of verbal misbehavior

In a pool of living light

Holding me in suspense

Will anyone hear? Will anyone see?

And, saved for last,

Will it ever matter?

I have crossed the tracks of positive thought

To existential angst

This 3 a.m. of a potential new day.

Why did I ever peel off from God

To come here, of all places?

Where the only realization is unreality?

Why would I leave rational thought

For the insanity of trading death for life

To eat & live &  breathe?

Movement powered by the lost & found, by sea wrack

Seeming so useless, yet sustaining in its way.

Life For The Living

My appetites stay with me

All that’s left

Now there is no life, no best friend, nothing

But a Universe of spirit to bathe in

With a body incapable of perceiving this element.

Is it to the good I continue on?

I would not know,

My nose pressed to the window of eternity

As though I will dine at table there.

The machinery remembers me

I have no doubt my car still feels my foot feathering the brake,

Mashing the gas, no matter  who owns her now.

I have left poems in unlikely places

On circuits of memory which knew my bank balance,

My destinations, my ideas & my names.

No initials carved into wounded trees

Once thought to live forever,

No tinted-rose lenses

No petals strewn on aisles nor elbows fitted into mine.

I have learned not to be lonely, a lesson unsought indeed.

Too much attention to the singular

Teaches separation so well it’s no longer felt

The proprioceptors dulled to route & routine

I arrive through neither fault nor favor

But a foolhardy trust

In a system I cannot even prove to exist.

I live & move & have my being

Like a fish, being asked, “How’s the water?”

I have no answers anymore

Even questions are dull, cutting no edges

Drawing no eyes.

I tire of energy fields

Wanting to power down

To rust in a field

Open to the sky.

Reprise

It’s the death of a thousand cuts

The littlest wounds bleeding

I do not notice seepage

Only its results

And these only in the long hours

Awaiting second sleep’s

Uneasy dreams.

I cannot lay my choices off on others anymore

But sit with them scattered all around me

The winds of salted time

Peering under them, lifting edges

To find other sides.

A 52 Pickup of a life

Having played every card.

The End

0

THE LIBRARY

AT HOME WITH FRIENDS

Another high wire week with a stint in the clown car

And a time-out with the elephants

Which sounds ‘wowsa’ til you get to the smell.

Sitting in the Betty L. Johnson Library listening to a soft

Southern accent explain:

By turns, placatory: scolding, expressive

In counterpoint to the piping voices of response

Pointing chick-beaks to the parent of the nest

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, there’s nothing else after all,

Nothing to learn after you’ve met me!

Sitting in the library where I just bought three books

Me, who has not bought a book in years

Settling in enough to find my own, needing bookends

But buying books instead: Settling in to

A comfy chair named Henry

And reading, legs slung over one arm.

But I digress: outside, a cautious rain, a tin roof

A subtle drumming

Uneven, small, tentative in full sun.

I sit: my bare feet on the table, lost in laptop dreams.

IN SEARCH OF WORDS

I wander … I follow that verbal slipstream

Where to tell a story is to worship

To find the perfect verb equal to world peace.

Outside cars cross bridges,

A live oak grows sidewise, disdaining the sky

For embracing the field

Roots wrap the trunk

The corrugated bark resembles feathers

Resembles shapes, its cut-limb nodes

Now familiar scars – the human’s warning:

Don’t grow this way.

Twisted roots of something once alive

On its bark, stark & twined, ropy

& looped – cautious in downgrowth

As it never was in up.

A red kiosk in the distance, a cluster of

Yellow signs facing it

A color war

Who will see which first?

BY A WINDOW, REFLECTING

The computer says “text predictions off”

That’s good: I don’t want any AI telling me what to say!

Or how to say it unless I ask for help.

At home in the familiar

The rows of known names comforting

In midst of so many left to read.

Whole shelves with one name as author,

Storytellers with so many stories

Unrestricted by things like

Not being able to make up endings.

This is my Saturday naptime, when I am usually

Curling into the cool fan, a secondary purpose

Served by its hum. But I am at the library

So I settle for a string of yawns & keep typing.

THE FENCE IN THE YARD

Is a Dispute Scene:

The neighbors say ‘t’was the hurricane did your fence’

The landlord says ‘not my fence now’

A Solomonic twist

To what remains a tree unrolled to planks

Torn from bonded comfort

Shrugged into its neighbor,

To swan back in the sun,

A fall interrupted,

Gravity held in abeyance.

ONLY A WRITER

Would hold so still for the mosquitoes while

The words trip over themselves onto the keyboard

While … while words settle on my skin with longer legs

And hungrier proboscis.

Ah well, I’ll have itching crème

To go with my poem.

For me, this is still an exotic

This lush state, green as Ireland gone tropic

Never have I seen such growth

I need this energy all around

I love to drive by trees

Caught in motion … I know as I move along

They change position

I have caught them midway.

A branch at an impossible angle

Looking like an arm upraised for balance.

The live oaks are a gymnasium of possible

Were I a climber of even small chancing.

Yet firmly rooted, I remain. Eating that which will weigh

Me in even more.

My climbing boots are stashed. I need to break out the wings.

0

FOR MY MOTHER’S DAY

June 2023 / preceded by May

(I want to read these aloud at my Mother’s grave one day.)

In fits & starts, my life

Buoys along, a balloon tied with a red ribbon.

Called to play, buffed & buffeted by Life

Glittering a starlit reflection.

I gather words like shells lining tidelines

Bending & bagging the world

Finding that sandy windowsill

To climb across, where mortal symmetry

Is of no matter, where Immortality sits;

An open lap to escape into

and be held.

THREE PENS & NO WORDS: A TIME & NO CLOCKS

What to say to Mom after twenty years apart?

She 20 years under, me 20 years more above…

I’m her age when she crossed over –

I recognize her disinterest now as simple survival.

Her feet hurt, her teeth would not chew…

Her pointer finger showed right.

I see now, when I left for home after a visit,

She would go to walk on the beach.

Letting go all I’d spoken, as I now do with others.

It’s not disinterest: it’s simply survival.

An era of silence, her life by the sea

Now me.

FOR ALL MY WORDS & WORLDS

For all the gates I’ve closed behind me,

For time & heartbeats to synchronize

I wait, being halted.

Those strong threads to life now fray

So much to do, yet one day

I’ll put my feet on an imaginary floor

To walk away

I’ll set down knife & fork,

Sit the coffee on the table

Shucking this mortal coil for light & air –

I’ll dust my hands of ink & paper

Lose my keys forever…

Hold no more hands

Answer no more questions

I’ll seek the heaven promised by the nuns.

When reality takes hold, I’ll rip off

This skin-tight cloak

My 12 ounces of soul will rise.

I live life to die, an oxymoron at the last.

I DON’T MIND ANYMORE

That before age & I chose to struggle,

Life was good days & bad

But I walked through even

When my shoes did not fit.

I laughed from my heart

Drank coffee for my soul

Wrote as tho one possessed

By statutes of limitation.

That which I become I already am:

Immortal, unbroken.

I’ll waken from this dream

To the familiar of forever.

I’ve paced off the years learning love

To turn & find Truth is all there is.

I’ll sit on a hard chair, waiting for

A door to open, then dash on through

Going Home!

I HAVE TWO RANDOM MEMORIES MY MOTHER SAID:

It was hard to keep your skirt down

Climbing into a rumble seat

And the other thing I can’t remember.

6/20/2023

Carol borsello

0

It Only Takes a Moment

to make a memory

one visit & your voice seems printed on the walls

You face is in my mirror

Your breath upon my air

Your song lingers

in hearing

or were you always here

from when I said aloud,

“Once Upon A Time”

there is a tiny bird nested by my room

a very small sound coaxes me to listen

I read that mama birds sing to their eggs

all the time.

I am hearing it now.

in times of shouting

i can only do what is in front of me

i can only remember

what i have outgrown

with its many pockets

where i left a memory in each

again i try my bow against a target

once more i reach for a star

too bright to hold, but i grab it nonetheless

stuffing it down to nestle

between my breasts

where i keep the keys

when I work out.

again i trust the universe,

simply throwing my overnight case

at it, trusting in all the rest

not giving an inch on my faith

tho i test the tension on the line.

there can be no assuagement to my guilt

i have turned away from that I thought to love forever

i have set down my phone under your picture

in hopes you will speak to me.

0

More Stuff from Work

A MEMORY

We write our signatures on air

On air money

I remember when the sound of

Change

Jingling in a pocket

Meant a Grade A or a Red Hot

Do you remember?

Did you ever walk into a candy store?

Where a big glass cabinet

Housed a reflexive kiss for

Everything within

An involuntary tightening

Of orbicularis oris,

A pucker.

(Candy was the closest thing to love I knew.)

Years have passed, many counting themselves,

As I never kept track except the big ones,

Except in the most general ways

Others can tell you times to the tenth

But I barely know how I got here

Nor will I ever need to

This is all that matters: thisrightnow, thismeoment,

Thisthisthisthisthis… 

VISITS ASEA

Never have I lost your sounding waters

Stream of consciousness

I have missed the tiny whirlpools

But never the great Tides

Which swing my world so in & out of balance

I have learned only that balance is flexible

That it’s changeable, malleable,

Balance lifts us up into manageable.

Yet I claim it not, not fully, not without first

Looking around for railing, or a handhold

Balance was a for-granted

But it has gone the way of faith

The chair will be behind me when I sit…

A variable where only an inalterable ever existed.

But that doesn’t stop me.

I watched a baby walking, thumping along

After being put gently on the floor

Leaning into his future

Walking, forehead jutting ahead of his feet.

I walk like that sometimes now.

I don’t lean back, if I claimed my past it would

Claim me. I choose not to dwell there.

So much so I rush from it.

Somehow I have seen it all before

I am bored by the repeats

Bummed by the reruns

Interested in the growth & the new

In the place where I can claim some experience

The holy bath of experience

From which no one returns the same

The reruns are off, the endings

Jacked up. How could I have counted them ever?

But the not understanding is okay with me now

The wondering & the laying on of syllables

Like strips of bacon making grease in a heated brainpan

The smell will intoxicate me; I wonder if I’ll also have eggs..

I mean ideas, I mean ways to get out from myself & away from

Me awhile. There’s that place where it’s okay to sway.

I am there now.

REPTILES IN THE OFFICE

In my supposed comeuppance, your one-line flick of a forked tongue

At me, I watch you, woman.

I am a threat. You are right to watch me back,

to rattle a warning accusation of

A crime I know nothing about; One thing: I will not dance it again.

But you know all, having discovered we’re out of

Paper…the accusation precedes the announcement:

This from the woman who says have no fear,

Unity does not do fear!

But running out of paper is a hostage situation a 911 bristle, a threat

To the future of major proportions.

Staples being two miles away, n’all.

But there is a humidity of accusation cloying a measure of self-protection & I

Understand, as I was there, too, in the beginning.

Every Unity I know breaks apart, succumbs to Great Change

We are thinking it will be one thing

When it might be entirely another.

Now I have a measure of self-protection in place

This is just how it is; it’s nothing personal

It is how each explains herself to life

With a bang on the counter, a jarring of the bell

Heard in far reaches of outer space…

These women purport to ministry but live a self-crafted life

Involving much validation in finger-pointing

An air of mayhem-in-waiting

Of corrupted effort & diminishing returns

Saying one thing to another

Neither quite true or trusted.

Only demanded.

I can feel my armor dented in places

The shin-guards worn away

the covers over the ears newly heated

by accusation by disbelief by not “get it right, but you’re so

stupid you got it wrong.”

I think it’s because I feel it hit my Translator

& bounce awry instead of smoothly smoothing out.

I have no respect for the one & am rapidly losing

What I have for the two…histrionics accomplish zilch.

Something broke today when you harried me in front of John

Who was just waiting to speak to you

But seemed unmoved by what I perceived as a full-on Tantrum.

Like the ones 3-year olds throw on the toy aisle.

For many of the same reasons, a parent would say.

I’ll say, too, I can’t get there from here. I do not know how.

It is not my understanding of what you asked for two weeks ago

This is some wish you cobbled together in the fiery pit

Of I know  I asked her this!!

Nonesuch.

DEPARTURE, TAKEN PERSONAL

If this is how you feel, just go.

If it is coming to the point that you decide four weeks in front of leaving that we need to know every single solitary thing you know,

Only the God of Heaven can help us!

But we are not the women who ask for help

Before designing our own program

Buying our own uniforms

Building our own pillboxes

Designed beyond your getting in

Which is funny, because you built it

By how you treat me.

The irony of it all being you likely

Do. Not. Even. Know.

IN GENERAL

The tension in the room & the torsion in the air

Accelerate an already fast-moving iteration

Of Situation

Into international waters, traditions count out here

And One People do not mix With Another.

And don’t try to tell me these aren’t all over the planet

These whorls where someone made bad juju & no one ever

Redeemed it with a blessing.

Cuz I recognize them.

From before, some my own

You enter here at your peril

With the potential of  your sorrow

For I am only a battery

Only a mirror

I will up the energy of the situation

Since what I think if it is on my honest face.

Someday that face will look into your own

I amplify & reflect back.

I clap endlessly one-handed

I walk the forest listening for downing trees

I cannot play that game of throwns any more

I want to belong to a vibrant community of like minds

Who do not throw away their own decisions, but do not force them either. What would it take to not be the problem but the problem-solver?

ALL EARS’

Could I be a Listener?

A listening device of analog proportions?

What would it take to be fluid of body once again,

To have a man, once, lift me to himself & cradle me

Set a seal upon that Seer Eye: awaken it with unexpected vision

There is a reason they slay the spirit there

But I seek not even the smallest of deaths

To bring it to the surface, to lead the light

To have a unicorn kind of magic: emergent,

Masculine, parting the very air

For in between the particles

I would go

To achieve the feminine.

It sees me to be: finally whole,

Not foresworn in the belly.

My spirit parts are strong, but invisible here

Jovial, they push other stuff out of the way to have theirs.

0

Stream of Consciousness During Peter Kater Concert

I am as much as any fabled queen

or reigning Monarch

(even a butterfly)

I am moved beyond caring

What others think

If they are tiresome enough to dislike my I Am

I am enough for having touched the hem of the garment.

I only tell my story to one ear at a time

I am worn out of those who only have their lives

Who interrupt, who interfere

My tolerance is narrowed to nothing of their spectrum

I am reaching back

I pull the past up over me

To shake its discovery & settle it about me

Only if I find it saves the now

Which it never will

No longer being in existence

This is how I know I will fade too

When Time catches up to shake me out

In remembrance.

We are all spectacular

A sea of fireworks

A crackling voice

Summoned from inside

The mind of God

The intelligence of divinity

We are sparklers

In a Child’s hands (our Creator)

To be gazed upon in wonder

To share as a signal burning

In brief being, a heart stilling at our approach

The less I declare, the more I bare

Suspended upon a glissando of time

Fallen about me

Stripping me of thought, idea-free

I simply Am

with no identity at all, Divine.

An exaltation of moments

I have no time for those who do not believe

I’m right here, mirroring your movements

With a dance of my own to explore / implore

Seized by that same Time, shaken in its jaws, immortal

These words will walk before me

Forever: I follow

I am no longer a writer

That has passed…

I await the new, the next, the beyond

At one time, I’d have been anxious

There would be no bottom,

I would fall forever without words

But this was never so, I see.

I am as timeless as you

When the stories fling themselves farther than I can find them

Still, I will walk the earth

Until I walk into my wings & fly.

My records are no longer kept

There will be no memory:

I will be erased as winds upon the seas

As the faraway rumble of an unheard poet

A blessing unsaid

Beleaguered by all it has not done

While these look from windows

To skies that do not bend

But rather continue into blue forever

I have not lost so much

The this I thought

I have rather laid it down

And wandered off, wandered on.

I have let the breath I held so long

Breathe out

I am empty & careless

With little to say

And Eternity just ahead.

A lady-in-waiting

So fulfilled there is nothing more to gain       

So emptied out, the carelessness of life gives way

To benefit in only the absurd

In the thought of one more day

Which defies the blank clocks

This is what happens

When focus narrows

One at a time each thought

Melts to the next

The containers become nets

Centers do not hold

Banks have no tender

When earth is in full function,

The next must move along

The darkness must light

Or become what it is & give way.

The hands must flicker, reaching into

That needing to be carried

What to take

To bring

And why

And where.

The finding & the losing are equal,

Tho some will tell you no

the students will push the professors aside

to forge ahead into knowledge

The conservatives here murdered the “professoria”

There:

This thing about change?

It happens in between

Reality & that place between breath.

The packages are all opened

Their box flaps gape,

I have reached the place where I no longer

Know who I am, or why

And little in between moves me

Or can slow me down

Tho I pace the snail,

 & the turtle feels immortal nearby

The holy is no more

Nor ever was

My beliefs, as I said,

Have never been.

The solid ground has become insubstantial

The national and the local

Have merged inharmoniously even so.

My days of small satisfactions

Matter to me

The air I breathe

The food I eat

Are all I need

I move away

Into obscurity

Carrying out

Some mandate unwrit

Askance

Never breached by immortality

Tho believed in by anyone else

I am rendered null & void

The blankest of checks

In wealth unimagined

Bestirred & limitless

Indeed

Across the trackless desert

The cemented city

The brainless sky

My thoughts streak beyond

And below

There are no surfaces anymore

I am brought finally

To standstill

In front of me a mirror

I can no longer pray

Having become prayer entirely

I recognize my limits

But pay no attention

I have gone.

Experience

Ethical

So lost in the ending I missed the beginning entirely

Or was it off-way round?

It never mattered anyway

Since the continuum overtook

The answer & the question both.
in being lost in myself

I lost the self

The point of the exercise

Broke off

The pencil dulled to charcoal

As I realized any act I create

Is only a momentary level of cognition

For an out-of-body experience

I have busied myself so long

I think I matter

And it’s time to let go of all that

To be the final void.

Chord echoing the space

In between the worlds

I surrender

I am no more

I am no

I am

I.

0

“I Always Want A Tomorrow”

tho there will come a day when tomorrow comes no more

and all life goes far away in this three dimensional way

of having hands & feet, a mouth to kiss, hair to comb

a life to help others & put things away

all the ordinary events of the day

spent like coins of the Old Realm

to buy dreams in the New.

Do you think I should have refused?

was there a way to do things otherwise?

I came here to do this: to live as I have

alone & halfway water

belonging nowhere but where I am

and that only scantily.

it was a way to pay it off early

any debt I owed, any fault repaired

so I slipped between the bars & the barriers

to awaken here, my eyes wise with birth

soon clouded with living in so small a space

as a body – enlarged now tho it may be…

I complain no more

I tuck myself into a ball & keep rolling

I move because I can & because there is no other way to live.

And in the unexpected, ordinary morning

I catch myself looking up at a ragged sky

edged & egged in blue with the hoarse clouds ballooning

higher than life itself, the fragile bridges to a firm & total God

the creation in which I am as secure as individuality can make me.

I live now after dying to myself in so many spaces

And who I am is all I am, the wild paths fraught with winds

snatching my words & my blinking my eyes.

this is what counts: the here & now of forever

at which I stare, an idiot believing in sanity

not to be had here or now but only imagined.

With No Time to Consider Her Life

she did so anyway, the thoughts slowing her more

tangling her feet & tugging her ears

those old songs of faraway

no closer than before.

the now crowded about her

spilling into the future, disparaging the past

yet still she clung to what have you, to what might have been

as she clings to this now, knowing nothing else.

“I Was Alone, But That’s Not the Same as Being Lonely“

They spoke of families to visit, of grandchildren & sons,

nieces & daughters, of turkeys waiting to be carved

by the man of the house

while all the women know exactly how to use a knife.

a best-kept secret, that of life & death

where-over the women rule, washing the dead,

touching the wounds with aching fingers

mourning is the same as rejoicing

when death chooses another & calls out its hooting cry.

we women shudder & move aside for we are not the targets

we are only life symbolic & whole, uncommonly bested by life or time or tide

until we say “Basta!” Enough! Until we hold up a right hand to stop the tide no man can ever claim

the secrets all live inside of us & even cutting us open will not these reveal

their seclusion is their elation

their joy is that of all of nature resplendent in the sun.

0

The Words Themselves, Au Naturel

Got a threesome that’s awesome & just needed someone to write them, I think, somehow they chose me for the word juggle. I read these with fish-lips, open & moist. Where? Who? So raw a fork would not stand up in them. 

It’s hot again. Back in my bathing suit flower coverup with the fan white noising. 

This morning the blog entry caught me by the shoulder & spun me around tho I told it I didn’t have time for this, I had to be out & away soon & still with a shower to take & a forelock to tug to Powers but it pushed me back down & I wrote, putting on this song to write by: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3wKzyIN1yk     Seems it needed a specific sound track. I still made it in time to unlock the door correctly & put up the coffee. 

Tonight I wrote the following – another lashing with the lonesome whip but again, just the words climbing up & oozing out from some deep well I thought covered, locked down, inaccessible. No longer needed as a proof of life. So I lay no claim to these: they are kitewords pushing past everything else to fly & I have found the strings in my hands. 

Something is breaking loose here, I run about picking up pieces with no way of putting anything together. 

It gets no better… 

I DIDN’T KNOW

I would live my life alone

Becoming existential

Hovering on non-existent

How could I

Why would I?

How do I not pass a razor over my wrists

Being so?

Were I truly alive

I might be made of memories,

I might have a love or, God be praised!, a lover

I might have been a woman someone could take by the hand

To an altar or a bedroom

To be made holy.

I am not stupid

These words will say it so.

I am too wise over time & experience.

But I sit in the middle of a road

Going both ways

To wonder at direction.

I did not know life could be this way

Or that mine would.

That my hands would be the only caress

Of time over me, that

My words would be my mirror

My reflection growing old with me

Mapping new arcs, new trails to play.

I did not know life could become a lump in the throat

A deceased cat, wounds that never heal

I would not have laid good money across the table

For a deal so rank as this.

For the numinous moments

I have paid. For the wonder of miracles

Experienced on beaches or in backyards

For love dancing always beyond reach

Always an admiration with the space in between

An uncrossable moat, an inaccessible moment

Where someone would love me in return.

Ah yes, I know about God & angels & I have

Talked with the elementals who grew roots on cuttings

For me, on plants I gave away to accommodate

That which walked alive around my life.

This has been the place where I’ve learned independence

From all else, over all else, above all.

This is the location I have reached

Where the familiar & the strange

Suffer each other in a silence broad & unbroken.

Here, of the here & now, this place

Where a heart breaks once again, but there is no blood

Only a sound unuttered.

The Gift Refused

Still trembles, being laid down

Walked away from.

Still holds its own elbows

Twice broken & crooked.

Weak with incomplete repairs

For some wholeness is never achieved.

The trick is to make it not matter

To find that sweet place where it no longer matters:

This imperfection, where a cup never reaches the lips

Held in that hand, where a blessing given from it

Is still whole, still love, from which light

May emanate, inexorable.

And of course, it does

Of course, this hand passes through the walls

I have built with it, the crooked holds with just

A rhyme of leaking.

I have grown into my imperfections,

My incompletions.

I have lost the idea of flawlessness

I think I tripped over it in darkness, an absence of light.

I did not turn it off myself,

Nor did I protest its dimming-out.

It does not matter to no longer be strong

To not care when my sins turn inside out & show to all

Faint, devoid of grace.

I have none of this & all of that & still am clean

As my God made me.

FAME WALKS AWAY

Fading like wallpaper in the sun

Dim & unremembered; it never was

Let alone did it crowd my doors

No paparazzi smoke outside the house

Awaiting my emergence

They are long away on wings of molten fame

Where everything happens to anything

Just like they were told it would.

It’s okay, I’m still friendly

I haven’t bitten any hands offering me food

Nor snarled at those who forget & forgive

With whom I’d be more comfortable should they now.

The old feelings do not abate

Nor fade

They just distance.

But when brought ‘round again

Show up my imitation absolution

For what it is: I am still that

Creature of sin & imperfect reparation

Bewildered separation

Losing light as if it never was.

And that’s okay, after all.

This was never supposed to be the ultimate 24/7

But it was good as it gets

Up to here & that will return.

The ineffable joy of my being

Will refill on the next high tide

At some point, I will no longer notice

What never was.

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The Wild Pigs of Fortune

These words, as delicate as unicorns

Seeking virgins across a flowered meadow

Become

Wild pigs of fortune

Rooting morels of richest flavor

Growing in ragged rings

Trailing under trees.

I have dined on hope & horror

That sweet & sour of life –

I choose my plate & am served,

The pickiest of eaters

No longer starved but selective.

—

There is a future of poetry quiescent in me

Until it surfaces

An inexplicable sea of languaged possibility

An electricity of words

A rumpled lightning honed in thunder:

A power of music & movement

A violin plucked in silence

As solid as any ephemeral

Ringing the drums of inner ears.

I sing as it threads from me

Pure, honied notes

Caught in a seine of glisten      

Unfolding in echoes

One word spawning a generation of new thoughts.

—

The Magnum Opus of my earth-days

Breaking forth in syllables,

A waterfall of words

Manipulative argot yanking me

This way & that

Finally bouncing off the sky

As light breaks through.

I quest the possibilities of expression

For you, panning a seine net for gold nuggets

We can spend on the future

Cooking up possibilities where

We retire from the table, patting

Full bellies,

An unexpected belch of repletion

Bringing a smile since

There is simply no room for dessert.

—

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Before the Cat Died

PREPONDERANCE

Tisanes of my own making:

I still say coming forward for others

Is more than my own reality

The vague blur of expired lenses

Less keen than real perceptions

The radiation of my Chernobyl life

Pulsing in the machinery.

My heart decides its own measure

Diverging from the body’s hosting.

Finding that  hidden doorway,

I sit shivering in shiva for myself.

Once held so closely to my chest

Now put aside in contemplation

Of The Other.

Yet this is current reality

My clickbait body

To which I return each morning

While sliding down the ropes of immortality.

I land with a jar of bones & teeth

In the town of not-enough & nevermore

The boundaries of why bother

Tightening their borderline personalities.

Will I mist to shadow

Transmogrify to barbered edges?

Shredding & shedding humanity for the Divine

The nature at central core

Patiently emergent.

Shall I pick my way through minefields

Fraught with memory, unbounded, unleashed, unremembered?

Does it matter?

As one among many

Unmanned by the sheer topography –

Of this experiential life,

Once glossed by heaven

This blank page

Forever scribbled now

Crossed out

A mess of blots & misspellings

A dictionary of what not to do.

My mind off to the side

While heart seeks another drummer.

Of all the doorways along the

Corridor of Eternity

Of all the tiger or the lady decisions

Shall I find forgiveness only in salvation’s selection?

MOVEMENT TOWARD

The channels of perception

Sharpening

Repelling static for clarity

I fight free of the physical

For the liminal of heaven

Washed by words

Scarred by sayings

I glisten at tidal edges

Will love refashion & reconstitute

Who I shall be?

Will crass materialism win over

Incandescent immortality?

I wander fields of inquiry

When answers are only found

Along the horizon.

Like babies

Cats keep their own timelines

Pulled to the watered-silk moon

An insistence upon awakening

Shedding sleep like virgin’s tears

Of awakening to a man sleeping alongside;

To single digits on the clock

From sleep to not-sleep

A bleary coming-to

I cross & recross that boundary

Between morphia & the mangle.

Her plumed tail floats last out the door

Her existential nature of query

Draws no worry in the night

She only wants to walk about in it.

I’m hardly awake & worry catches

Me up in headlong rush

Enough! These thoughts need brighter light to think

I drift upon the couch, ticking time

In decisions.

Pain is a slowed-down travel companion

A discernment rushed into decision

A refocus upon the means to journey

Through to the promise of arrivals.

Darkness to light

The words ride a tunnel into the light.

The night

Picks its way among gardens & highways

Taking cities by storm

Bringing the brace of salt & bitters

To a candy life

Too sweet to manage alone

I reach to friends who break taffy edges

I savor them as only perceptions

Of spice to be stirred into the stew.

Broken Like Mercury

The pieces of my life forever flow

In reuniting

Yet every bubble reflective of itself

Toxic

A balm to unhealed wounds.

I put my hands into the word-soup of life

Pulling out the same-same over & over

Putting them to a picture

Moving along sure edges,

Fitted to an

Other-where of perception.

Indentured abandon

Not yet an adventure

But simply a promise

That all will be new:

That all will be well.

Finished: the Night

Apace with poems

A toe-thorned cat asleep nearby

She purrs to hear me wake

Welcomed to morning

By her expectations.

The numbers on the clock-face

Are liquids soon abandoned

For the solid day

Soon abandoned by the sun’s

Hearty sibilance for the stutter of rain

My erratic heart abandons rhythm

In errata of timing: I am asymmetrical

Wondering will it also abandon me?

I have left off the lid on fear

Once contained

I pull the braided measure

To watch it unravel.

There is none but this now

I have survived to this hour

This night

Only me speaking

One hand clapping

The applause of a universe

Knowing no appendages

But only self-regard.

Will I close one eye to eternity

Or decide to have no body

But only a wing & wonder?

Unexplored, lost joy recovered

That relay of open gates

A call to angels to attend me

A sustenance of grace attendant

To continuing on

Bodiless as a naked soul.

None to greet me in dystopian Paradise

A chair in a corner

A pen & pad

To rewrite me into another life.

Death Is An Invisibility Cloak

Life recedes behind me

A memory before a dream:

A place where God looks up from His desk

Adjusting His glasses

Laying down the Book of Life He writes

To say, “Oh, there you are!

How was it?

Again, why did I create you?

When  you passed, a thousand drums went dumb.

Come here, my girl, tell me all & that you wrote what you lived:

The banal & the miraculous…

Do you remember all the times you touched My face in passing?”

I will cross the room in laughter,

“Father! I made it! It was extraordinary!

However did You think of it all?”

I will be whispering for all eternity

Now penned in heaven

Awaiting Your words.

There Were No Clocks

As I drew my last breath

Released in a rattle: there

Was no time left to record,

Only words scattered on the floor

Of my mind.

It was all for You, after all

And I’m not sorry for the mistakes

Or falling from grace to land on my face

In the mangle of years.

Searching only for the

Exit, the entrance,

Knowing neither right nor wrong

Would enter anywhere beyond this realm

The physical of living too well

While overdressed & compliant with survival.

I bought life, spending all that I had

I hand You my purse, empty of only Love’s royal return.

(3/22/22)

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