I'm a shell
My soul has left
Empty as can be
Space that's left
Is not me

I'm useless
As a highway
Without cars
I might as well
Be on Mars

I'm gone
But still alive
Like stars persist
Until the light is gone
My body insists

I'm a circumference
The boundary surrounds
Dry carcass bone
I care not
Just lost-and-found

I won't return
To my body of ruin
Burial plans made
Threaded into a patchwork quilt
Upstaged and waylaid

I'm now safe outside
Myself
I see you looking in
She is gone from her
Forever now thick and thin

I'm tired of sycophants  
Complicit in democracy's destuction
By their hands, skinned alive
I left my body today
In order to survive

Fate slips
As a fallen horse's
  hoof
To prove there
Is a yonder, unwritten
Which we can not
   write
With our fingerless hands
Stumbling through life
Gripping guideless
    reigns
Tripping over a wish
Never to be ours
Fate did never
     find

How sorry I am
That's the title of the
Book I will write.
If I say,
I may write,
Where does my sorry go?

Tell me of your delight
The wisp of wind
That catches your hair
Breezy enough to sense
The winds direction
To which you set your sails
Moving through glass water
Unwilling to break

Tell me of your delight
In the shell of a snail
Digging up its squishy life
For just you alone
Thumbing through
In a smile and a jar of joy
Enough to break a mother's heart
With every win and loss
On your way to manhood

Tell me of your delight
As you swing in the air
Legs kicking as branches do
When the air picks you up
No longer weighing you down
All cares wash through
The space of regrets
And deposit themselves
As pebbles on the shore
Where your feet will land

Tell me of your delight
Where the garden snake
Attempts to outwit
Your stride in the grass
As you quietly watch
With patience of a lifetime
That marches ahead in this stillness
That is between the distance
Where now is forever
In your hand you swoop up
A life trying to escape yours
Gleeful are you as you set
The creature free once more

Tell me of your delight
As you see the rays of a day
Shine on every stone
And drop of rain
Washing rivers deleting cares
Surpassing a mother's gloom
Her soup of ingredients
Marinated longer than your
Innocence wants to keep birthing
It will be her death that it takes
To be released and unburdened
So you can breathe again this day
Heart open to drown all sorrows
Brand new as the dew

Nothing ever right after my mom died
Decay
Decline
Despair

She's buried in Toledo
But I haven't yet been to her grave
She lives inside of me
I still miss her every day

                   No words to pray.

On the road outside
Of the fence
The Border Collie hears
The call of the
Doggies
On the inside

Enclosed behind
The wooden fence
The Alaskan malamute
The Drever, the Poodle
Bustle the edge of the barrier
Bark, bark, bark
A cacophony

Let us out
Let us come with you
Pledging to obey,
The Collie
On hind legs
Of a towering stature
Lifts a paw
Finds the latch
The gate creaks open
Uncorking in celebration

They run in gleeful circles
Hounds to escape artists
Unbound and free from tyranny
Of a heartless master
Marking their new territory
Of tree trunks
Sidewalks and fields

Have you ever seen
Such jubilation
Mirth and gaiety
Wagging their tails
Like helicopter blades
With gail force glee

They take off
Like upside down rain
Up, up, up
Every which way
Friends forever
Boundless canines
In search of the next
immured pooch who waits
For the musketeers