I am a work in progress.
A soul adrift.

I have drifted over many seas,
Over beaches and mountains,
Islands and deserts.

I have climbed volcanoes,
and heard the hiss of the sun sinking into the waters.
I have climbed over boulders at midnight,
and skidded with rockslides over barren ground.

I have seen lakes of blue, green, gray, black, white and red.
I have seen a million shades of green.
I have tasted the extravagance of fresh air,
and have been choked by smog and smoke.

I have joined in your rituals,
and told you details of my own.
I have cast spells.
I have summoned courage.

I have spoken in tongues foreign to my own.
I have been understood,
and misundestood,
time and time again.

I have been known,
and i have been a nameless stranger.
I have felt the heat of love,
and the pangs of a broken heart.

I have known longing's name.
I have shaken fear's hand.
I have developed,
I have changed.

I will continue to do so.
I am a work in progress.

Conches and cymbals rend the air peering
into the mists of time vast like the snow-
clad peak, ancient that shines in the cells as
in the stars, matted whose locks gather the
sky-river in their folds, bearing the moon-
shell on his brow, merged in etherial that
datum where shine neither the moon nor stars
still like heavens that serpents slither lone
the one beyond all dual, red-hued like
the glacier anointed nigh at dusk

We're supposed to care
in the pits of our hearts
and review in solemn
exactitude the magnitude
of little things we did
as kids

Try to recognize this
exsanguinating loss
and watch as what you were
is cast to disappear in past's
prolific mists

so vast they dwarf,
they drown us: caring as we are
in hearts' pits.

The sheets are cool
Upon crawling inside
Unlike your continual warmth

A lullaby soothes me
Welcoming my dreamworld
Perhaps infancy is approaching

Over forty years
Beside legs willing
To entangle

Whoever thought our nights
Would become my
Emotional sustenance

She cries with the force of the stampede
That killed Mufasa, and I forget the
Viking blood that runs through us.

Weakness on display is a sign of strength.
She is the strongest person I know;  
Does almost everything without

Me. Barely cries about it afterwards,
When hindsight lets her see what she's
Been through.

Wake up, little heart; your nightmare is
Over. Fall back asleep in arms that
Care.

Listen: It's not raining anymore.
She calls out to me like air raid sirens
Over a city dark with enemy aircraft

Wings.
But all is quiet now.
Nothing harder than drops of

Water ever fell.
Sleep. Sun upon cloudless skies will
See you smile, drowzy; unalone.

and the eraser, so I can
clean up messes with a bit
of magic rubber

this **** ink is indelible,
even if it's scrolled on a page
in ephemeral cyberspace

delete doesn't count once other
eyes have made a meal of your meaning,
digested and crapped out your words

I long for a Big Chief tablet
and the art gum magic I could perform
with nimble fingers and clear eyes

he sits on the curb
all twelve years of him,
waiting to be a teen

when he'll have to pay
adult price for a movie ticket
or bus pass

he usually has no cash
for either; but wishing and waiting
are art forms to him

he's learned to move
the brush of time slowly on life's palette
while he watches others whizzing by

on their store-bought skateboards
and Huffy ten speed bikes, while he has
only one gear for two feet

which now are clad in Keds
from the thrift store, and planted
firmly on the cement

by the drain gutter,  where he
last saw his favorite possession, a Super Ball,
get ****** into the sewer

when the storm ended, he yanked
off the manhole cover and crawled into
the dark, but the ball was gone forever

when he came back into the street,
yet lamenting his round loss, more boys
on bikes buzzed by

their circles safely spinning
on asphalt, far from the gutter and curb where
he once again sat--wishing, waiting

Baltimore, 1965