is like cotton twine,
if you put a match

to string, it will
burn away,

but if dipped
in beeswax

the flame will be
slow and sure.

These winter days go one by one
and seldom does much happen;

yesterday my cat murdered and ate
a chickadee on the deck and the blood

and snow mixture left a pattern
similar to what a painting of

Vincent Van Gogh’s severed ear
might look like on fresh linen.

I let the killer inside, she licked
her paws--curled on my lap.

She runs from the garden with a tomato worm in her palm
leaving behind a doll, chocolate milk, and banana.

Behind her and thousands of feet above, a green-black
anvil cloud muscles in  from the southwest, close to home;

far from her mind.

My classmate Martha walked our school’s
halls for thirteen years, few students

talked to her because she drooled,
walked like a puppet, and had

greasy hair; there are  poems
I can not finish.

He was a champion boxer
turned alcoholic
who wandered

east and west
on the town’s
railroad tracks

until death;

after his funeral
his wife spent
her days knitting

and thumbing through
newspaper clippings
awaiting her husband’s

return.

"you can do what you want with my body"
she said with his hands at her throat
"oh but you cannot touch what is spirit,"
"my life is not yours to be owned"*
all the time it has taken to speak up
and show you the woman I be
has been counted itself a commission
for everything you didn't seek
I will love you today and tomorrow
and look at the past without fear
rebuking the source of your anger
with all that I have while I'm here
see, my mother and father are with me
in Truth and in Spirit and flesh
and today I am stronger than ever
for you and for me and for them

tell me how you'd romance this stone as I lay unnerved by the wind of you. tell me how you'd keep my body cold and my mind warm as you hold me between yours fingers, tell me you'll love me til I die be it tomorrow or the next day, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me tell me that my lungs won't ache after you've skipped me across the pond to drown, tell me how it is you plan to romance this stone. and I swear I'll never leave you.