Looking Glass Life

He’s gotten really good at looking in mirrors
Interacting with reflections
The image transferred
In reverse
Looking right through him
Now able to decipher
Behind his back
Over his shoulder

He’s gotten really good at forgetting people
Packing up
Moving on
Leaving behind
Rarely remembering back
Some meal he ate
A hand held
Expendable love

The best gifts to buy him:
Luggage
Walking shoes
Signed with a sharpie
Perhaps they’ll spark a memory
A thinking back to conversations
Shared laughs
Tandem dreams

Those things you hold so dear
Which he has all but lost
He’s gotten really good at letting go
Bonafide gypsy
Migrant reflector
Newness junkie
Mostly addicted to
His looking glass life

One?

He tries to unscramble the pieces
like a puzzle
unravel the riddle

But what if the One is the one?
And all others playing charades
constructed by Enemy
to draw him away?

What if The Way is the way?
With no other to get to the Place
where the One longs
to have him come near?

Can he even relinquish the idea
he holds so dear
That there may be more than one One?

The puzzle already solved
The only riddle left:
Can he even believe?

The Anti-Nothing

What lingers on the other side of nothing?
What squirms in the pit
Where blackholes dump their trash?
Spew their collections?
Bury their loot?

The ragged cusp of creativity
Where the universe spills over its edge
Into somethingness
Anti-nothingness
Perfect newness

Colors hum there
Matter, mass
New amoebas
Foreign, congealing
Into new music, novel mist

That random place where anti-dust & anti-heat
Implode & churn out anti-light
Anti-matter springs, unfolds
Anti-worlds & anti-words
Anti-poems, anti-songs

Anti-planets, anti-suns
Ante up in the anti-space
Where Auntie Em looks down in black & white
Swabbing the head with an anti-rag
Dipped in anti-water

Anti-thoughts in the anti-mind
Swim around in the anti-time
Where far & near are upside down
Anti-pulsars spin around
In retrograde

The anti-wormholes are antebellum
Post-apocalyptic felons
Anti-war & anti-peace
Anti-teeth in anti-jaws
Speak anti-rules & anti-laws
While living anti-true & false

Pooling up & cooling down
In the land where life creates itself
To shake the known with quasar-quakes
Giving birth
On the inside of everything
Nothing included
Nothing reborn
As something

So She Sings

Snow shafts like ‘shroom stems
Shift slow so sleet stings
Slipshod shaped shadows
Slice straight through sun strings

Slung south since smooth skin
Sail silent sea springs
Side-saddle soldiers
Swing swords so steel stings

Sticks, stones stab sutures
Shown shut yet sap seeps
Sleep softly, soundly
Sweet song her soul sings

Sweet song her souls sings

Sick

Tick tock ‘til ten ‘til
1:50 nightmare
Side-saddle she sits
Horseback misfit

Starving out the nitwits
Soaking all the sexy twits
Sperm sponge sloppy thick
Spilled seed oilslick

Sweep away the scary bits
Sorry suitors she submits
Six o’clock clock tick
Sleep engulfs the swollen sick

Summer Colors

Sometimes I see summer colors
In the wintertime
A swath of green
A streak of blue
There

Even in the coolness of colors
On the frigid days
The heat warms me
The fire burns
Through

Porcupine Pain

He clawed at the tree
One, two, three rings
Years deep
Ferocious vigor

The bark of the tree
Like porcupine pain
Shot under his nails
Red hot slivers
Quivers, quills

Pain
Electric
Shooting, shooting down
Out

Fire in his skin
His veins
His muscles
Pain
His bones

Blowing up inside
Explosions
Tons
Explosions

Pain
Excruciating quills
Terrible sharp
Poking through his callouses
Soaking through his meat

Piercing
Deep pain
Coming from the inside
Porcupine pain
Screaming from the tree

Non-Religious Hypocrite

You can’t wiggle out of it
You non-religious hypocrite
Saying this while doing that
Skinny mind, marbled fat
Empty words of pompous weight
Nothingness upon your plate

Eat it sucker, suck it down
Pass the empty spoon around
Chew it well you tell us all
Recipe you can’t recall
Squirming two-face call your bluff
The tried & true have had enough

Thank you for a stab at this
You fire-breathing hypocrite
You scorch with words and burn with lies
And have no clue that we’ve surmised
The empty calories you sell
Have plumpened up the guts of Hell

Choke your propaganda down?
Another chef has come to town
Take it. Leave it. Watch it go.
Your final pup & pony show
Lid ripped off and you revealed
A bloody mess of smothered veal

Hypocrisy - the latest craze
To sweep the world at end of days
From earth to sky from shore to shore
Not just religions anymore
Swallowed whole with indigestion
Atheist beliefs in question

Groundhog

It’s not the groundhog’s day
I didn’t know they could get that large.
Is it bloated?
With its salt & pepper pelt
Big enough to make a small jacket
Or at least a large vest
Entrails still steaming
In the February air
Fogging the glass
A flattened shadow
Lies beneath him
Pinned to the permafrost
For at least 6 more weeks

This English

Recessed & depressed
Regressed in the best
Sort of way
Sense of the word

Addressed & sent West
The game is afoot
The love is abreast
Distinguished, distressed

This English request
This anguish, bequest
A language, bereft
Soon extinguished

Dragon Lady

Dragon lady spews
Her fire-breathing smoke
Billows, plumes
Razor sharp tongue
Slicing
Cutting deeper
Cutting quicker
Cutting stronger
Cutting down

Dragon lady harsh
Words
Braids flying
Mouth flapping
Nose flaring
Lips going
Hands moving

Making him smaller
smaller
This man
Belittled
Mistrusted
Slowly destroyed
Word by dragon lady word

Teeth, Scales, Claws
Coming down
Billows of smoke
Attacking
Killing
Flying
Soaring
Swooping

Talons out
Down
Cut
Crush
Devour

Fib

Well, I guess I just
told a fib.
‘Cause there’s no way
I’m paying you
to pee in your pot.

Loveliness

Nine finger Nanny looks at me with her lazy eye
I think
Then she flips me the bird
With that one finger that isn’t there

She’d be able to pick out my lisp
If I hadn’t swallowed my tongue
Of course, the deafness in her left ear
Keeps her from hearing half of what I say anyway

She hobbles along
As we stroll down the beach
Prosthetic hand in prosthetic hand
In the sand

She stops at least 9 times to dance on her one good leg
‘Cause she has to pee so badly
It’s been an issue ever since she sold that kidney
To buy me a valentine

Just as she sets out to recite
A love poem from memory
Her chronic amnesia kicks in
Again

So I slide out of my wheelchair
And plop down next to my sandy Nanny
As she pees her pants
And the waves lap up our loveliness

Spirits

:::For Forest:::

The living dead
Haunt
Tiny holes in the wall
Little dives

Having walked out
On their skins
Long ago
To sit side-by-side

Spirits in bars
Drinking spirits
Themselves
Past death

No life to breathe
Pulse-free
Green livers
Shining through sheets

Wrapped in chains
Rattling, clinking
Metal on metal
Glass on glass

Sometimes crying
Boo hoo beers
Lamenting
Tragic lives

Scared & scary
Slip into the grave
One sip slow sip
At a time

Last call
Ghosts drift out
Bloated, floating
Into the dark & stormy night

Colors & Lines

I started school in the south with my baby teeth falling out
Right away, Miss Arrowwood taught me about lines:
How to stand straight in them
How to squeeze letters between solid & dashed ones
How to color inside them

She also taught me that colors don’t have to stay in the box
Beginning with the exotic tone of her skin - creamy & brown
Like the sweet chocolate-milk I chugged down in the lunchroom

I learned a lesson about the taste of white craft paste
Bland & starchy on the tongue
If you get caught eating it
You have to learn
The cold steel of the punishment pole in the center of the room
How many times did my nose freeze with the cold of it
Cross-eyed
Living within the lonely & torturous world of that avocado green

In rows of rust & mustard
Purple was the color of the books with the rarest spines
My five year old eyes would seek them out
As I drifted on the smell of must & ink down the library aisles

My only sworn enemy - naptime
No matter how I tried to resist, it’s undeniable power would overtake me
And cover me with its gray blanket of sleep
Except for that one time - the day my tiny fingers
Found a crack in the plastic of my blue & red nap mat
Dug out the yellow sponge inside and carried it to my curious mouth
Three trips to the boys’ room sink for secret water
To dislodge the lump in my throat taught me silver
The color of the safety pin securing a note for my parents to my shirt

A few of us were chosen to leave the others behind to take turns
Playing with tangrams, 3-D puzzles & the single, sacred computer
Black screen. Orange cursor blinking at me all electric, mysterious & wild
I loved its amber glow more than recess, but less than I loved Miss Arrowwood

Afterall, she was the one who schooled me on numbers & letters
Dick & Jane
Chocolate-milk skin
And that most of the time, it’s better to color outside the lines.

The New Story

It was late September when he looked up with
Those beautiful saucer eyes of his
Tugging on her sleeve
She smiled & sat down to share
One of his favorite stories
But all she could find was darkness
The blackness of a hole there
The words fell out silent
Spilled out all blank

Her brain ached with the effort
Sharp pain of emptiness
The sides sucked in upon themselves
At the query
Even the failsafe failed
Not only had all his stories disappeared
But so had all of hers
The cold of late December
Painted her face in bright red blush

There were the shelves
She could see them
through the snow
Outlines in the dust
Where the ancient books of memory
should have been
All barren
Lonely
Stolen

In the void
she had to stutter something - anything - out
Quickly now
He’s waiting
The retelling of someone else’s story
Only half-remembered?
Or observations of the then & there
The here & now?
Sweet smell of April drifting near
The color of life shining out
From those saucer eyes of his

She paused.
She chose.

And the words flowed out so liquid smooth
Full & rich
A new story
Caressing his ears
Tickling her lips
Refreshing drops
Of July rain
Overflowing the cups
Filling up the saucers

A Clean Kind of Dirty

The blue tones come off
Whitewashed
In the nightlight
Fading
Disappearing
Into nothingness

The shadows cast on
Wallpaper
Live in warm hues
All it costs me
A little body heat
After sundown

A small price to pay
For the debt I owe
At the watering hole
Wetness
Flowing freely
From the wellhouse

The water comes across
Drier
Than it used to
At the homestead
When the dust was light
And washed off easily
In the sunlight

Handshakes

Overcooked linguini draping over saucepan’s lip
Limp, soggy noodle fingers dangle there

Overzealous, more than eager boa constrictor grip
Firm, squeezing coil vice of angry meat

Underfed, gaunt little skeletal twig of digits
Thin, bony pipe cleaners wrapped in paper sleeves

Oversized pork sausage swollen tight links
Plump, greasy clogging our connection with fat

Underdeveloped seed of esteem, timid shrinking back
Small receding, recoiling, quick retracting stem

Understood instant longing resting within my welcome hand
Firm but gentle, perfect size, hold me longer, don’t let go

Biker Man

Look at you straddle that Harley
On your way to work
Downtown

Cautiously stopping
At the yellow light
Highly-pressed khakis

The biggest patch
On your jacket says
“Live Free. Ride Hard.”

But those papercuts
You hide inside
Those leather gloves

And the neatly trimmed
Hair parted
To one side
Safely tucked inside
Your helmet

Speak volumes about
How free you are
How hard you ride
Your rebellious ways

Biker man-

I know these might be
Fighting words

But the polish you
Expertly laid
On those square-toed
Dress shoes

Is outshining
the chrome on
your bike

But you keep on
Living free
Biker man
Keep on
Riding hard.

Amputee Scarecrows

He resisted the chill with all he had in him
[Which wasn’t much]
But cold seeped in
Nonetheless

Frost formed on his hat
Ice latched onto his boots
Angry crystals grew on his collar
Turning him brittle and stiff

As hard as he tried
[‘cause he really did try!]
He could not stretch his arm stubs
To hug himself for warmth

A fate suffered by all of his kind
Amputee scarecrows
Cursed to wander through Autumn
With short-sleeve shirts

The Dance Above Me

Shards of light like icepicks piercing
Drive through eyelid skin so thin
Causing moaning, groaning, wincing
Squeezing tight to keep night in

But Sun runs wild, a slave set loose
To burn the world with shine so free
A necklace now - a lovely noose
Surrounds the throat of captured sleep

Daystar climbs into his glory
Shredding shadows, rising high
Peaking where apex so lofty
Bilaterates the bluing sky

A lasso flung from deepest west
Ensnares the beast and draws him down
Until the sizzle sound of dusk
Is swallowed up by hungry ground

Then tiptoes out the timid moon
Dressed in lace with shoulders bare
And glides across the tapestry
Of clouds and love, of stars and air

Tired now, she yawns a bit
A rumble shakes the eastern shore
Proud lion breaks his binding bands
And thrusts through dawn to roar once more

Morning

I love it when the cold sting of
the freshly peeled sheets
frozen by moonlight

Fades away into the warm toastiness
that swallows me up
just before dawn

But I hate how that splendid comfort
is destroyed
by a whoosh of the covers

And the scent of a frost-laden morning
fights against the heat
hiding in my eyes