I am a mild man, you'll agree,
But red my rage is,
When folks who borrow books from me
Turn down their pages.

Or when a chap a book I lend,
And find he's loaned it
Without permission to a friend -
As if he owned it.

But worst of all I hate those crooks
(May hell-fires burn them!)
Who beg the loan of cherished books
And don't return them.

My books are tendrils of myself
No shears can sever . . .
May he who rapes one from its shelf
Be ****** forever.

You say I'm golden

I say, "that's a lie."

I'm sun-dappled at most

Yet you still smile

In the shadows of my light.

My bad moods loom, solstice

Too often, I ache for heat.

Still, you speak of my radiance

When I feel like a garish Vegas effigy.

In the end, though

I'll let your illusions be.

But, love

Even if you think I'm light's zenith

Being your star

Is enough for me.

Icy burn, an ache
both dull
and knife point.
Am I going
insane?

Cervical, thoracic,
lumbar, and sacral
tension, or
is it
elasticity?
Am I going
crazy?

Dark days, I try to run
away from myself,
just to sniff in circles,
distracted, burning
daylight.

Good days, I practice
all the basic moves
a mixture
of modern living
and disregard
made me forget.

Guess I'm pretty broken.
Isn't the concept of
properly aligned
posture fun?

There was a green branch hung with many a bell
When her own people ruled this tragic Eire;
And from its murmuring greenness, calm of Faery,
A Druid kindness, on all hearers fell.

It charmed away the merchant from his guile,
And turned the farmer's memory from his cattle,
And hushed in sleep the roaring ranks of battle:
And all grew friendly for a little while.

Ah, Exiles wandering over lands and seas,
And planning, plotting always that some morrow
May set a stone upon ancestral Sorrow!
I also bear a bell-branch full of ease.

I tore it from green boughs winds tore and tossed
Until the sap of summer had grown weary!
I tore it from the barren boughs of Eire,
That country where a man can be so crossed;

Can be so battered, badgered and destroyed
That he's a loveless man:  gay bells bring laughter
That shakes a mouldering cobweb from the rafter;
And yet the saddest chimes are best enjoyed.

Gay bells or sad, they bring you memories
Of half-forgotten innocent old places:
We and our bitterness have left no traces
On Munster grass and Connemara skies.

The epidemic of conformity consumes all
Children play by board game rules
Stifled by the world to paint a proper picture
They draw flowers of red with stems of green
Fields of wildflowers viewed as weeds enveloped in insecticides
Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet
That is a rainbow, in that order alone
We are taught to live by the colors in a box of eight crayons
But even so, those colors cannot make a proper rainbow
A rainbow should be praised if drawn in mixed-breed hues
That field of flowers, natures pallet
We should begin with a box of 124 and grow infinitely
Where lilac dragons can live in cherry trees
Where those waist-high weeds hide the predator from the prey
For where would we be without cops and robbers, or hide and seek
In a world where out of sight incites widespread panic
Children's laughter in the sun is slowly silenced by the rules
Instead, embrace the joy and encourage creativity
We should harbor imagination and develop unreality
For it is there that is born the ideas that will form the future