In this world I suspect everything
has its importance
I live in a southern town
an area well sown with secrets
Full of gold stars and hard badges
Full of litter on the backroads
where pickups back up and push
old things downhill
I live in my skin like a nice woman
I dab my lips in the humidity
From sea to shining sea
I watch from the shelter of a chickadee
All the roads are repaved but I sense
dirt roads reddened underneath
I am careful of my culture
lush and drunken with magnolia
softly cold and beautiful in Winter
I sit on a wooden bridge and swing
my legs in slow motion
The waters below dazzle tricks of light
I dream of finding another cautious soul
Naturally friendly I wave at God
in his better world

never at a loss with words
you are speaking to black waters
it is early and the sea spills
reddened spikes across endless noise
you whisper ballads to the dancing gulls
off key and salted with aged foam
these days you lean too heavily
on visions of fresh dawns
carve too many faces from the sea’s wall
there is a dolphin singing godly verses
with a ribald beat
women with existential eyes
hum lyrics you have never heard
sigh now in recognition
they have borrowed your songs

When there is nothing left to say,
and autonomy grows thin and forcefully governed,
take to the streets, live with a roll
of newspapers, thrown out and free
Sometimes life slips down to the bony
thoughts of survival, an old independence
refusing to blend in
It comes down to internal control, a self rule,
and wandering away into what might be
the last freedom, the streets alive
with a determination to open eyes without being
under the influence of anything but morning
scents of fumes and dawn fogs of perfumes
It comes down to waiting for the sun,
and finding food, wiping your face again and again,
drinking from a public fountain, while birds sing
about the lack of good trees.
If autonomy is standing a long way off, you have
to go there, get back together with yourself,
struggle the way you always have
just because
it is your struggle, your life, and you want
to live it.

She wants to tear us to pieces for the audacity of it all.

**** us to hell, but still remain a Christian.

And the rant! Each day, her rage, a lance laced in bitterness.

And I can not speak to the contempt, she holds me in,

for some imagined slight, loving her to exhaustion, as she screams, I know,

You have something to do with this!

She is brilliant in that blind way of the highly dysfunctional.

She is bright colors on beautiful days, when she smiles,

the room to dreamy notes of yellow sun.

Some days she takes down, bleary notations in her diary.

Get the hell out of here...buy cat food...eat fruit.

Some days she writes long articles, to the institutions of oil,

sharply upbraiding & filled with wisdom.

Today she is a small branch, gnarled in a rib hug.

She has misplaced something that she believes was stolen.

She claims the devil spites her mind, but she is too smart to listen.

An old acquaintance drops by with cupcakes.

She opens the door and greets them, in perfect intelligence.