What sieve
can distill a dream?
A thing of moment
intimated,
but confounded
by dictionary devils.
Enticing in its grey distance,
alluring in its apple wholeness,
it follows like a moon.
One wakes
to the knives of morning,
mourning the loss of the thing.
Struck dumb,
as it were, in regret.
Category Archives: poetry
Shortcuts
Make cuts carefully,
in concealable places,
so as not to be known
as an attention whore.
Bundled in fives,
as at Shawshank.
You and I know that it’s better
than a serious spanking.
That it’s our punishment,
our atonement,
for speaking with the Devil.
Time for sleep
I cry inside.
I see the sky
in robin’s egg blue.
Things of old
have turned to gold,
unglittering.
An alchemy,
an accretion,
to life’s masterpiece.
I fear I’m being asked
to sign my name.
There are nodding heads,
prayerful hands.
But, layered sheets of sleep
settle upon me.
Soon.
The names we pin
Be not offended
If I don’t remember what you told me.
Or if I tell you something for the second or third time.
I need a good defragging,
And, now that we are all homebodies,
It’s excusable to forget what day it is.
The names we pin,
The borders we mark
On borrowed continents.
A cure for the chills
Me, I like a slate-tinted sky.
Shales of ice,
opaque underfoot.
The remains of thistles and rushes.
Holistic winds that purify
all but notions.
Think: How our bones and tears
have fed the oceans.
But now, I am for home.
Pour myself a cup of tea,
and think about the bubbles.
a working man
Old Man.
He come every day
at twilight time.
I hears the bony drum,
cicada’s hum.
He wear raggedy clothes,
canvas cap,
yellowy beard.
And his work he does.
Cranks that gear handle
round and round.
Powers up the tiny lights.
Pinpoints
in the pinwheel spiralled
sky of night.
Surfacing
don’t mind me
at all-
I jump in frivolity
from one to the other
as the bee tests for honeysuckle nectar.
The proper endings of songs are not known to me.
Only a taste of a part of the art.
A tip of the hat, and I hot-foot it away,
Stay too long, and the feet soon get cold.
Ancestral memory
In want of stories,
and of someone to read them to me,
I spoil the fun, envisioning
hillsides of mossy flow, far off in a fog.
An anxious kerchiefed woman
watching her man hammering a glowing sword.
Then, his returning, cut muscles bound with cord,
staunched with a maid’s cloth.
In here
So many, here,
write words of love.
Words of yearn,
longing and lonely.
Are they for one
who is here,
or has left
and cannot come home?
For one who wants a conjuring
to bring warmth to a sad siren.
In dream, I conjure you,
the writer,
with hands
soft, warm, and strong.
Alone.
The stairs, the stars
I will want my eyes open if I can,
when it happens.
Don’t stay
if it’s too hard.
But if you do,
you might see,
in my dry eyes,
a struggle of the soul.
A sea-change,
as I watch the silver sun,
and all that’s earthly folds its book.
For I’ve already peeked at the show,
And I know.
Aremyfeetofftheground 