better a heart made of glass reducible to sand than this regenerative muscle that forms and is torn apart and forms again waiting for the next hand in the chest trickster whispering the decision is the right one what is right is never easy and wanting more than anything than to feel nothing questioning every decision that led to here beginning with the first tears there is no balm in gilead there is no gilead
Tag: loss
forlorn (20181028)
crow
in the yard
digs through trash
among words
i’ve tossed out
it finds one with still
a little life
plucked from the ashes
of other
dead phrases
i feel the crow disturb it
through a pulsing umbilicus
that runs across a cracked driveway
and fragrant rosemary
with impossible blue blossoms
it runs under the door
straight into my gut
the word throbs in his beak
like a thumb-size mass of organs
wrapped in a greasy membrane
he will unseam this word
tear out the stitches
pierce it with his black beak
devour the marrow
it will become his
it will become his word
and on his black tongue
it will be his song
as he rises from the ground
i throw rocks at him
my loud visitor
to scare him away from
the bins
but he eyes me with contempt
and with my hard work
in his glistening maw
he takes to the air
i do not
pursue
his feathers are so black
so very like the night
and this
paper is so
so
white
Day 29/30 of the Tupelo 30/30 Project (20170829)
a room
now long abandoned
filled with….
——
My poem flowers and the absence of fragrance is available to read at the Tupelo 30/30 project page.
copper (20161214)
round red leaves litter the pavement
pennies scattered from threadbare pockets
someone disappeared
and took their words with them
i thought to look because another
returned after a long hiatus
but the ghost
is a mist taken by dry winds
why dwell on another’s choices
why feel the sinking in the chest
the pit of the stomach
why ache for someone i read
but did not know
tomorrow i will look at leaves
and see pennies again
and count their value in more
than copper
all the poems (20161209)
every poem should be a love poem
not because there’s so much to love
but because it may be the last poem
i’m not being fatalistic
this isn’t about the grim reaper
hovering behind us all
although, of course, he is
no, what if this is the last poem
what if the words dry up with
the next sunrise
what if it’s last tango for
the fingers and keyboard
it’s not as if i have anything
important to say, nothing that
anyone needs to hear or wants to hear
what if what if what if
the next words the next ink
the next electrons cluttering the
snow white screen make as much sense
as egyptian hieroglyphics to
an albino pet store parakeet
someone excavate the feeling out of this
obscure and amateurish babbling
it all comes down to my love
whatever it’s worth
that’s what these words are
that’s what these words roar
that’s what these poems are
Poem 20160306
every loss
is a taking away
negative
subtractive
a chunk of you or me
lost to time
or circumstance
or maybe malice
and you feel it, a vacuum
i suppose
in that emptiness
in your stomach
in the surprise asphyxia
of certain moments
in the way your eyes try
to see a missing item
–can you spy the difference
in these two images–
but if a loss is only
a cutting out
a phantom limb aching
below someone else’s knee
why does it weigh
so damned much
Poem 20160112
i dream of cracking teeth
wake with an aching jaw
sure that my mouth is full
of broken bits of bone
awash in frothy blood
this news is old
and my eyes cloud
milky and cold
the silence loud
Poem 20160109
the abandoned heart is beating
it struggles on, but not in spite,
or beating, rather, not to spite
but because it knows nothing else
dreading the silence of the night,
the abandoned heart is beating
to hear itself, steady rhythm
the only comfort it has left
cold darkness too, this loss of words,
a handful of half-told truths–though
the abandoned heart is beating
it will–can not beat forever
these days are soft sun-filled hours
and gray clouds hiding silent stars
that whisper, it is a lie that
the abandoned heart is beating
Words and Feathers 