My Wealth Increases By Relativity

To the poor I see

Pocket change becomes a standard of measure

To those whose turned-out pockets wave the wind

Small waving flags

To the goods nearby.

I Turned Away

Before you saw

The laughter in my eyes

Your sincerity undone

Unproven by what

You so earnestly affirmed.

Did you think me blind

Or worse, deaf

To insincere verities?

To the immediate gain

Of long-term professions

Of love & fire

In the barren, ash-filled fields?

Oh No, My Friend

I moved before you glimpsed me.

Wiping off my long blade

Of your amorous, overheated blood

On your sleeve, for all the world to see.

I turned, in careless escape,

Leaving my lip-prints

On your soul…

Sucked dry by need & ignorance

By tears of sheer frustration

Blessed by holy men.

It Came To Me

Once so rapt in prayer

To curse & flay

To beat at Fate

Like a child beats at stillness

I moved to shadow from

Holy Light.

I struggle now to find the words

We once abandoned in this dusty field.

Now blown against fences

For all the world to see.

The art show of my world.

No pictures but screams instead

Impossibly brought to bear

Upon my hands.

My Heart Has Broken

‘pon the shores of your pebbled beaches,

The rock-filled flanges of your mountainous demand.

Tis ripped & sore, so bruised, blue

as my sea once was.

The impossibility of love &

Totalitarian Fate

Scraped & scrapped like the palette knife

Against an easel.

Nothing smooth here

Only grated crumbs are left,

The peels of love

Possessed by none

Colored by need.

I Await

Your breath in my bed

The tenure of your hands on

This body, my vanity

Sore from self-inflicted Other.

I have a collar.

Will you not leash me now?

Chain me to heaven

Where I may bark to carry on

The song of the Coyote Angels?

The Glamor of a Life

Unhinged, unfettered, unencumbered

By need to pay but only play along its edges –

Deckled & gilded in

Your words:

My feelings.

This I would live: thus I would pray

Were the words to wash ashore

Like sea-eggs

Filled with salt & potential

Pontificating the hand-over-hand of Life.

Will not the furrows of dawn

Berate the sky?

Encapsulate the ocean, so raw?

Mine/not-mine

The dregs are so much

Sweeter than the life

Has ever been before.

An Afternoon Nap

After a large lunch

Stoked me to write these

A dream on waking

My elbow sore from oldnew wounds

I frayed the edges of my soul

Against the cheesecloth of time

The burlap of sin

Chafing many places

Wrapped in sinew of  possibility

Forgot by even God,

My angels fight to keep me sane.

Interior Lights

Work no more

I grope for enlightenment

Choosing sharp edges to fall against

Testing my mettle.

But life is not my former state:

Life is where I live & where

Showmanship dims to facts of

No audience

Inferior to pacing across an empty stage

The nutcracker season

Came early

Finding me late for limelight,

Lost to imperial need

I did not earn the Right

By wrongs of note & number.

Black, Then White

A bard in a barn

Singing to the livestock

Talent un-mourned

For all its likely presence.

Brought up short by Change

By “new normals”

Entrusted to Age,

Wrinkling,

Eyes sinking back

With misplaced bruises.

I tower over the competition

When this there is –

I sing, a cricket in a midnight corner

Keeping you from twin resolutions

Of sleep & prayer.

My scraping song the fingers pulling your hair

In darkling hours,

Drawing your breath to mimic my music

That together we may grow.

October 3, 2020