Live at the --

Strangers’ bodies bumping
Elbows in the spine
Mobs of unknown people
Restless feet in lines

Rows of human wheat
Transplanted in strange soil
Swaying together through the heat
Distinct as water and oil

To step on one another’s toes
And splash a stranger with their beer
To talk in someone else’s ear
And share their sweat and who knows what else
And push and grumble and stare
Trying not to acknowledge the ones with whom they’re sharing air
Feeling dirty, sweaty, and abused

Until the gods appear!
To strum a chord, and beat the drums,
And play to appease the hoard
Who sings and worships to and fro
Still bumping into those they do not know

Clutter

Shards of paper
Shreds of glass
Seeing through a window
Clouded by the past

Weightiness of pages
Crusty residue of thoughts
Expanse of brave, clear future
Encroached by emptiness


Trying to distill the uncatchable,
The irretrievable,
Trying to ignore the ever-present;
Paradoxes of crowded loneliness
And frantic apathy,
"Heavy lightness
And serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms";
Too tired to be young
Too careless to be old


Wet cloth, rubbish bin, and broom
Cleaning up and clearing out
But making no more room

Finding Ophelia

Certainly not kin
But more than kind?
Did she give it all away
And lose her mind?

Clean white Styrofoam boxes
Folded into themselves
Lining the shelves,
Neat and sterile as hospital supplies,
Lonely as a castle lookout;
Souvenirs of nights away
Forgetting father’s pressure;
Brother’s absence and hypocrisy;
Her proverbial prison of gilded walls.
Protected yet prevented
From living.

He charmed the ear, the lips,
The mind, the blushing vanity—
A promising escape
From another soul not free.
Something special with this take-home box,
Closed for once with tenderness.
A way out?
A newfound prison?
A true love?

It matters not
For now none of them care
They’re crazy, gone, or dead.
They only wanted to pull the strings,
Puppet their madness
Till it seeped down and down
And into her heart, too.

Something is rotten
The flowers will mask it
Fresh fragrance
To cover the death,
The deception,
The fact she’s been abandoned.

The water, the flowers
The rotten, the un-kind
Life and death
Cage and kisses
Lost, lost, lost

Loving men, and used by them
Left trapped and naked under suits of woe
Perpetually mourning and already dead is
Not to be—
For her, they left no question

To thine ownself be true:
Woman thy name is not frailty
It is kindness in an un-kind world.

Existential Punctuation

I'm beginning to use the ellipsis
as Emily Dickinson wielded the dash . . .

If she was hesitant, abrupt—
emphatic
—strong-willed.

What am I? diffident, dallying . . .
dismissive
. . . dubious?

Punctuation says so very much.
It says so very much?
It says, “so very much!”
It says . . .
what we want—
it to say.

White Fang in the Washroom

Sometimes
When I brush my teeth
The toothpaste foam overflows
The basin of my mouth,
Just at the sides,
Dribbling down in frothy tears
Like drops of blood or fangs.
I flash a sinister smile in the mirror;
I am a peppermint, fluoride vampire.

Rain, Rain, Don't Go Away

Dense gray monolith, weightless, cresting on cross currents
Phantom of tiny droplets; neural web of beads, infinitesimal
Millions or billions or millions of billions
Attracted to one another
Like static follicles, magnets, lovers’ lips.
It waits.
Existing on nature’ whims:
Before jerked away on an angry breeze
Or dispersed or evaporated or plummeted –
A change of pressure, wind, atmosphere, temperature
The mutable forces of weather hold the gentle monster’s fate.
The bottom
drops out . . .
layer
after
layer
Sheets upon the earth
One into many
Many into one
A flood forming, fluxing
Dispersed, harmless, and floating forlorn
Churning with the soil, roiling over asphalt, tickling grass, flushing gutters, pelting windows, wetting hair, flowing and growing
The monolith mixes
With life

Last Night We Walked Together

Last night we walked through London
Arm in arm and holding close
Like old beloved friends
And lovers
Two of a kind
Both of one mind

We sailed through crowded thoroughfares,
Noisy and chaotic,
Bustling with grit and characters surreal –
Our strange street fellows a romantic blur,
Snow dampened daguerreotypes . . .
Lace and velvet
Too much rouge
Dusty coat tails
A stained cravat
Worn leather boots . . .
A seedy Victorian crowd.

Through which we sighed and marveled unscathed.
Your left arm was in a sling.
You wore a thick black coat.
You let me ride upon your back
Wrapping my grey wool-clad legs ‘round your tight torso;
My arms ‘cross your shoulders
Nuzzling my face to your neck, your scarf
Red, like my smiling lips, as I whispered in your ear.

You made me laugh.

We walked
It snowed
They bustled and jostled
We didn’t stop but laughed and laughed
And smiled with our eyes

Of one mind
Brisk and breathless
Alone together
In a world of ageless bedlam

Last night we walked together
In my dream,
My dream of London