Pray for Wild Things

I like to raise wild things
with their so unclean, justice
without mercy mentality.

You can't be at war
with the world always
but remembering you

continue to dream
in red and black
and royal purple.

Such resonant, beautiful howling.
Like joyful grieving.
O that I could be

that real.

Unnatural Spaces

There is a place in time,
on this planet, in an open field
or hidden deeper, a secret fistula
unnaturally joining one unlike space
to another like a hole in the wall

where someone watches her
undress or the tractor beam
that sucks her into the sky.

How far up or down
will these tunnels take her?

In a hallway as long as
the distance from Mars,
she calculates the speed of light
and divides it by eternity.

Victims

Death, call your first witness.  What stories
will you tell;  how what you bury you bury
forever?  All night the mouths of stones
keep your secrets, the eyeless sky hides
her cries in the folds of her hair.  Even
Earth whose arms are filled with worms
and beetles keeps its silence.  But somewhere,
in a dark, quiet space the size of a jar
there are no victims.

Little Pockets

A brother and sister.  A lake and its wood.
Seldom do they really know the other.
Stones and birds and wolves, darkness
and the joints where its wings unfold
are all fixed inexplicably together.

The rest of the world, its disintegrating
pieces dropping away, shriveling up, shrinking
must attach themselves to others.

Wasn't it God who set the stars into
their little pockets expecting them
to slip and fall?

The Green Spot

Fire, its orange-ness burns
indiscriminately How sweet
the demon has become sitting
at my feet.

If you stare at the young girl
eventually she turns into an old lady.
The green spot sears into the wall,
the star follows all who see it.

When you pretend to be dead long enough
you forget how to breath.

I say this:  find what you've lost-
the burning, the green, the tiny
punctured sky, the place at your feet

where someone is waiting..

Speak No More

A mouth of words, a heart filled
with colorful strings knotted, jumbled;
I'm not qualified to unravel them.

Sometimes the sound of bees
makes more sense than poems
or the oration of sciences.

A belly growling for food,
a foot tapping beneath a table,
the sore spot squeaking between

the ribs like loose coils
of a bed-   educate the masses
without certificates of wisdom.

I'm tired of hoping to sound
beautiful while effortlessly silence
and what fills it is far more
handsome.

A Piece of Sadness

Part of this first piece of sadness comes
from a mother's mouth (one can only know
her heart was louder).  How desperate is
the tree whose fruit once ripened falls
to where it soon forgotten rots alone?

Can you hear the river howl, its shifting
rocks and sands bear no sorrow but her
hands incapable of holding what she bore
search for them more often.  Who despairs
of severed love when love is like a door

and opens?  Even I have longing

to be longed for.

The Fibrous Edges

I was made for this:  patience, leaning away,
how the beautiful keep looking for a darker
corner to slip into.  See how the fibrous edges
of the heart become thinner with each struggle,
transparent as a boiled grain of rice-

soon there will be nowhere to hide.

And those who share too much, you know
who you are, will be left with the inverse
proportion of what you gave away. Regardless,
I'm not afraid to die.  I just don't want you
to find me in the darkness like a tired moth

too afraid of light to burn itself up

completely.

Starting Over

The story starts:  in the beginning {Stop}  if I could go there now

in my new garden boots the color of paradise,

a heart in the shape of a shovel with the yellow eyes

of a wolf just as it tires and a pillow that smells like

the perfume of clouds, I could begin again.  {Start}  

There are so many stories about {Life} as for the others

about crossing over, night after night I hear their slow, dark

voices speak of black seeds, deep red flowers and the missing

light.  Something about the big, quiet house and those waiting

to be born inside.  What I meant was "the wind carries those

who love it to the other side."

A room that is not a room.  A bird that can't fly but

burns the wetness of its wings out.  A tear  that never

forgets to slide to the corners of the mouth.

My mother reads to me a book with pages as heavy as shadow,
dense as sleep and it sounds like singing, it sounds like a wild
and strange animal whose throat is filled with a thousand crows
in startled flight. At the end of the story {Stop}  I close
my heart and {start} over again . 

Collision and Its Darkest Hour

No matter what collides, day into night,
God into fear, love into debt, the smallest
particles of secret into its darkest hour-

essence inexplicably survives.

The manner in which things collide: 
dutifully, remorsefully, with resignation 
or fight changes nothing,

no matter how traumatic.

Only this:  the discipline of our world,
the way in which it keeps itself separate from
its obvious beauty and its terrible truths

offers perhaps a sweeter promise.

No matter.  A million particles of light 
in the shape of  a ladder climbs sleepily
into its silver bed, huddles like a child

and falls into sleep.







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