mou

I meant to mention somehow 

I know why anyone anywhere ever wrote a love song

I know why everyone everywhere has a serenade

Yes you are the very reason

the catalyst who sits on every pen the vibration in every note-

Ah me, I know why the caged heart sings- 

She locked herself in and hid the key

I shall know why when this time is over 

what took her so long to spring me?  

one jade bracelet to another 

and just like that- 

I meant to say 

I’ve fallen in love with love herself

& I meant to mention-

you’re the very reason 

I had to become myself. 

1/30 Dear Body

Dear body, I will not do to you what people have done to the earth. our streams will be clear our limbs will stretch & grow tall I will not cut you down nor cut you up
Dear body, I am sorry I have made mistakes I have medicated my consciousness tried to numb emotions and sense which are your life blood I am sorry that I never thought you were beautiful that I covered and hid things about you which I couldn't accept You were always the more honest part.

there are still places on my skin that I face with barely more than a wince.
I am changing. you've grown on me

teaching me that it's okay to hurt I will heal. our soft places are a source of strength I have the power to grow these bones  out from under me though I've spent most of my life chasing after their brittle giggle just to feel my foundations quake.
I don't love you quite yet, shell of my ghost skin over my bones but I'm definitely in like with you in the headwater-  the pollution began with my thoughts that together we could never be enough that the damage began during conception it wasn't the line of my fault now I see, we are the same you are not just the vehicle for my soul you are the measured seconds of the time I have left
I will worship you with kindness adorn you with comfort hear you when you call revel in your awake I will see that the lines between us  are not precise therefore where you fall, we fall
Dear body, I am on my way to you.

To the Real Child Whose Real Parents Named Him: Whiskey

I hope your siblings are named Rum and Tequila
and not Ruth and Timmy
I hope your Mom wasn't trying to name you
after your Dad
I hope the kids in your grade school

had no concept of Whiskey as a noun

I hope you're not related to the baby named Hashtag
I hope you both know you can change your name
I hope you do
I hope you don't

I hope you love your name 

I hope it isn't Bobert Baratheon Catastrophe

I hope it is

I hope you're the first of many

I hope I live long enough to meet

Whiskey Bobert Baratheon Catastrophe the fifth

I hope people never stop asking you if it's ey or y

and when they do, 

I hope you say it's neat with a beer back

To the Real Parents Who Named Their Real Child: Whiskey

I have nothing to say to you.

Nectar

There is an hour in my mind

when we are like Gods

& I sucked nectar from your lips

           Remember?

I swore we’d never be hungry again.

But, now, my stomach rumbles

           Like an oubliette.

A lonely galaxy speckled 

like isolated prairie campfires

we don’t know our neighbors

anymore than we know ourselves

grunting cavemen pointing at their own fingers

& maybe it’s only this festering vacancy           Where God used to beI’ve tried to carve a purpose into it     What purpose can I have without a creator?     What meaning without a beloved?There is an hour in my mind when there was nothing as sweetas the nectar in my tongueor as meaningless               now that I am gone. 

Sonja

She sees my almost tears

the lightening of letting go

from the dust on the riverbeds

begging to water my cheeks

She asks- will we ever go home again?

I dance with a crooked smile

because it’s easier to chew a cliché 

than a knot you can’t swallow

No, I say. We can’t go home again.

I was raised in paradise 

by two broken parentheses 

strangers came and held the truth of my family

spread open

dissected

An experiment in tragedy

Undigestable.

Sonja said her father touched her

Asking in a tiny voice for me 

to wipe the slate clean

What does untouched feel like?

I try to relate

My sisters were taken away

Incest was exhaust fumes in a car left running

going nowhere

Purposeless. Deadly.

Pulling back skin from innocent bones 

that now only grow

crooked.

What does untouched feel like?

How does safe taste?

Clean isn’t clean without dirty. 

Home isn’t home without homeless.

No, I say. We can’t go home again. 

Memorial Day 2021

We left Galveston for the red dirt

I ached leaving the ocean

Deep wounds in my body that never close

They bleed fresh, salty, sad.

Yet something was healing

Our blended family for the first time

Together

All chipped porcelain in our own ways

All not the shapes we were expected to be

Yet, together

Then

A man sideswiped our bubble

I revved to 90

Knowing we had to get his license plate

Understanding he was running from his mistake

Finally, he pulled over and my someday wife,

Said No.

What he did to us was not okay.

I turned to ask our children

If they were okay

Assuming they’ve ever known “okay”

Assuming I was okay enough for them to say they were not. 

Slowly, I recognized, my goal will never be to protect my wife or children 

Because, I know I never can

But to be a person they can say when they are not okay

And for each of them to know, 

I will defend our bubble.

We are Gods With Our Senses

we are gods with our senses

judging what 

looksgood feelsgood isgood 

from what does and is not

all roads leading to evolution

however winding they seem

we have every right to grow however the sun awakens us

and find a water source even in the hardest rock

I have stumbled on many rocks

in some bitter moments

I have known the bite of a thousand dirty hands on my tongue,

silencing where they touched

touching where I hid

forgetting to feel the pleasant things

that hadn't left yet

still feeling the invasions

that were long gone

this morning I looked through blinds

and in that half-inch second,

the whole world was one blue sky

I don't have a point if you're waiting

this is a poem about the way we censor our joy

& our lives together

but I’m stumbling

the lines between brilliant and distasteful overlap

we are that flavor

I know it's a cliché but I don't love anyone as much

as those willing to cut me up

those able to say 

they see through the façade

and love me anyway

I don't have a point if you're waiting

I think we should give love lost a proper burial

burn it like an offering of gratitude, 

to any eyes searching the sky for hope

Yes, Virginia, connections are tenable

and yet tentative in every moment

she asked me, calm as you like,

If I remembered when we were dinosaurs together

I pulled her into myself

and split my ribcage to nestle her in

I discovered in her midnight fingertips-we are all the fingers of the same god's hands

I discovered we are all

remembering how to live for the first time.

and yet again in every moment

and I never wrote a poem as true

as the scream I gave with my first breath

so, if life's worth comes from honest pain,

I will accept nothing less

Apodidae

we locked together
like we were drowning
in a feeling of captain ej smith helplessness
you sighed my name, saying
maybe the ocean is just another sky
as you pulled wings from my spine

this morning baby chimney swifts
faced a dilemma akin
born to a family of acrobats, they
peered over fascia and felt
fly or fall.
ecstatically, emphatically, they
pumped the earth gone.

so grounded I tried to be
from aster to zinnia, you pulled my number
as if you planted it when sappho roamed
(you, the hurdy to my gurdy)
this dance I've corrected,
cranked and sped
has me stumbling now-
my flight-useless legs and feet
rendered inimical.
I miss a horizon I've never known,
a feeling of ej smith helplessness

see, the sweet swept-back swifts
are born
obliged to rise

8/30 Frontiered Calliope

Somewhere between El Reno & Altus
is a town called Nowhere

the single attraction

hidden southeast of ole' Ft Cobb,

are a pair of broken bricked lovers

two shed-like contraptions,

just off the main road

one leans left while the other right

I have suggested it barricaded in brocade

if someone living lived in Nowhere,

walls would be condemned,

they no longer are as they once were

a frontiered calliope

now they stand

sentinels charged with the hill-laden landscape

defending their necessary existence

which passes unbeknownst
in many a rearview

rails and coots are the only squatters

spending seasons nesting

into a future the entwined won't live to see

(did the fledglings offer saudade songs?)

the crippled roof 

weathered high beams 

bare dirt floor

built so close to almost be one, yet

they are an emaciated and aged couple,

decomposing above ground

as testimony

to a surrender the world should not forget-

don’t think I didn’t have designs on the place

                                 to wrestle it back from the earth

to envelope myself in a love’s forgotten letter

Even so...

sunlight speckled

how one leans left while the other right

eventually their parentheses

will be the echo of sound

from nowhere

carried in the wind by birdsong

harbor my boat to the tightrope
of your lip lines
if it sounds as if I'm trying too hard
it's only because I'm trying so hard
for something that seems easy for you

your smile:
the gawky kid in me thinks
when I grow legs as long as yours
I want to spend the suntime
watching how
your smile grows
the gentle lover in me agrees
your lips are nearly ripe
to think I am a portion
of your blossom's season
the rain and fertile ground
where your joy is dancing

Prior

That time we tucked our mosquito bites in
unattached to a thing
to any things.
We tip-toed outside
to smell pineapples
growing in old rubber tires.
Moonlight whispered down
through lava trees
As we swallowed the stars
nesting in each other's dimpled cheeks.
(I forgot to tell you then
because I didn’t yet know how)
the bees would frighten me irate
even as they were slipping extinct
(I forgot to tell you then
and I still don’t know how)
To me- being poor was a terminal illness;
I wanted to scrape it off like leprosy
So- I was going to save us by sailing away
I wanted to protect us from every thing
From all things.
(And I know,
though your silence is an echoing time-capsule
of who we were together
Then.)
To you- I was running away.

I’d take an island of bees over your sting.
I, the coward, the invasive specie;
Misjudged.
Yesterday, I walked the covered grove
down the red highway into the sea
where mangos rippen and drip and pop
I swam almost too far
as my legs sifted the navy waters
pumping with wonder

and from below, I felt the moon cry for us

not the us in my mind or yours

not the potential us

but for the two stars she gave us to see in each other

and we never gave back

or even acknowledge anymore

 

Here's what I meant

Years ago when we both huddled under a capsized boat
Rain slipping awkwardly from our shoulder
Both so thirsty we'd nearly drink anything
Here's what I meant
We were listening ears cocked at the ready
Heart poised and yet inept

Playing gunshots or fireworks

We raced, laughed and worried the river rocks smooth
Here's what I meant
You 

Took me on the adventure of my lifetime

We 

Wouldn’t take no for a ride, remember?
I 

wish, for a moment, you could leave yourself
To see yourself
It's in the
pushing your own understanding

I gulped

a minute is all I need,
But I need it now.
You sipped
& here we are years later
Entwined
River at the ready
finishing that sentence we couldn't before.

Ayin

Ein sof.

Binah, binah, binah, binah.

Before the beginning-
there was a thought
... Of never ending
a stone in a pond
rippling
endlessly
I wasn't there to see
but atoms in my soul
are the dusty footprints
whispering 

it happened

The 70s

70s and I'm seeing my parents
deep in the mistakes that would eventually
define them
children of the night 

skin innocent and fragile
eyes lonely and together 

70s and I'm seeing my parents
deep in the love that would
Eventually
desert them
surrounded by the fear that only youth
never see
and the hope that only the sages
regret

Voyageur

atteindre le bord du voile
il est toujours le matin à l'arrivée
Oui aujourd'hui! yeux louchent
désespérée de prendre tout cela en
lourd avec merveilleuse; graisse sans attentes
il y a toujours les collines, les arbres
une rivière ou un lac insaisissable
accentués étapes pas destinés à être compris
seulement entendu, esquivé
un espace tranquille pour sentir la chute de jour de congé
there is never time to finish
night hurries in everywhere
a shift in the air unwelcome
No, this is not where I can stay.

To Create a Child

Perhaps there is no right or wrong
There only is

Though when it comes to the boy-

We both know he deserved better.
He was planned by three
And likely loved by three
But 6 months later,
my belly rising like the sun,

I stood alone.
Perhaps there is no right or wrong

We both know he deserved more from you

And I don't have enough forgiveness in me
For the both of us.
Besides, he and I have made do

I am his, he is mine
My plan to grow him
was a fish hook pulling my bellybutton open
And out climbed a cherub
Conceived by demons.

But I was reborn with him

I knelt and absolved and grew flowers from my fingertips

Roots from toenails
I sprouted and shriveled and sprouted again

Along with him.
Tonight he is twelve
Tonight I am sure there is purpose in life
That consciousness is meaning

He brought that gift with him
I have stepped onto a midnight beach
Staring at the sandy sky
& felt an alone too big for one
Eternity is there as well as here
It is a fish-hook pulling a bellybutton to open

They Are There

They are watching
They are waiting
Haven't you asked why aliens haven't stopped by yet?
Haven't you wondered if maybe they have?
Violence, slavery, war have been imagined
By us
The violent, the cruel, the murderers.
They do not come in peace
The lessons of the universe have already arrived
Evolve with love
Or die.
Compassion is allowing something to be as it is
To recognize it as evolving too.
They do not pick flowers to show love
Instead they say- I saw a meadow dotted with purple petals
Seeing it, felt like the happiness I feel
When I am with you.
They do not do the child's work for them
Instead they say- learn by doing and see
That, also
is love.

Childless Gran

good morning will whistle in Madill
from the rusted Live Bait sign
a creaking flag from a forgotten country
it will advertise
the lean of a woman
if you can, buy her okra
tomatoes onions honeydew
she will laugh you a recipe
like thank you
half-smile grin
stroke's souvenir from a sunless vacation
She's alone now, but for the wind-sighing sign
Still her eye-shine will sparkle with hope
for being here now
with love
for her dusty town
and her well-heeled garden
Hug her, if you can
the whiskers on her chin will tickle
and she will feel foal-knees weak-
a someday steed but for the breaking.
You'll know by her knuckles
how hard she's held on
If you can, buy her okra
tomatoes onions honeydew

hug her
and hold on, too.

Where Are We Now, The Hurry Has Gone

loose-knit body parts
scattered on the bed's battlefield
the shrapnel of our clothes
peering helter-skelter
over the edge


where are we now
the hurry has gone
two empty casings
floating just there
want surrendered to have
defeated by had