The birds don't care about the internet.
Their anger is with the ground,
the place where the green goes,
the fields of the hunt and
the roots of the trees.

Their hearts pound in anticipation
of flight into the blue, a
lofting of the body high.

Their cries herald freedom,
the warm sun on soft feathers.
It is their exhilaration breaking forth,
like the promise of soft lips that
by rights are not your own,
tender in the night welcoming you.

i was going to write to you,
the reader, about joy and
its mysteries:  something sacred,
the pins and needles felt
throughout our human-shaped
boxes, the shadow where we
hide our hearts for others to steal.

i long to tell you, dear reader,
if only you can promise to
hold that secret close ...
Can you?  Can you keep this secret?

... (yes)...

So can i.

What is today if not a ripple,
the shock of yesterday
bouncing off tomorrow?
Each moment nothing more
than pebbles thrown and sinking?
Our human efforts a shrill
cry in the canyons:

"I want to be free to be me...
to be free to be...
me to be free...
i want to be me...
be free to want...
i want me..."

but it trails off, dies out,
like the ripples in the pond,
the efforts of a stone.

I found it while unpacking boxes of old books in the basement.
It slipped out of a Spanish to English
dictionary that I probably smuggled out
of a middle school library ten years ago
and haven't opened since.

I knew what it was, of course-
whole years were spent with bad posture
listening to substitute teachers and CCD carpool-drivers
lecture about the bold beauty and senseless frailty
that was youth.
Their bodies were at once tense and earnest.
Their voices were at once condescending and pleading as
they sang deeply of the space we blindly occupied and
they fiercely missed.

My understanding of youth was a
sepia-streak stumble through tall reeds below an open
sky; taking clumsy steps on sea-cut feet
and one day regretting not passing enough
notes kept folded in pockets or taking
enough pictures of the faces whom I ran beside.

Youth, obviously, is subjective-
It can be teased up or sculpted-in tight
in relation to circumstance.
In my own mind youth is a cool breeze,  glory days thing- like prom night or my first kiss.
Really each took place years ago but, since they didn’t
carry the weight or sheen I was told they should,
I still sit tight and wait for them.

They will find me eventually.
They’ll arrive a loud booming from a furious sky that births open-prairie rainfall that quiets my
teenage sadness as I sit shotgun
in some boy’s pickup and we race
a  cornfield to the Wyoming border.

The fact that I’m in my twenties is irrelevant.
The fact that I live in New England, where corn is imported and gas is expensive, is not worth noting.

So when, in the basement among the books I've hoarded and arranged around me like armor,
I saw my golden-ticket youth slip
out between pages and waft slowly down, I let it  hit the ground.
I could have crushed it with a sneakered sole
like a cigarette or crumbled it into nothing with shaking fingers.
I could have let it careen down between damp paperbacks to
the box’s bottom and know for certain it
would never reemerge.

But, surprisingly, I didn’t want to.
It was light and lovely in a way I would have never guessed.
It wasn’t as sticky as I thought it’d be.
In fact, as I flipped my hair forward and
double-no-triple knotted the bouncy, silky strings
(Strings that felt more like existing than regretting)
at the nape of my neck- a smile so severe I thought I'd crack found it's way to me.

My youth will never be something I flip through
like a catalogue and miss and cry out for. I will never
be haunted by it nor will I conjure it
around a fire while trying to make a point.
I won’t tell ghost stories about my youth
to bored kids because I am not going to let it die.

I saw it today. For the first time I could touch
it and smell it and I realized it didn’t have to be
the sarcophagus of who I was,
but instead could serve as the shifting
and stretching prologue to who I will be.

I’ll let it hang loose and light from my neck.
Its colors will fade in the sun and its beads will
probably warp as it trapezes altitudes and climates.
It will dull and tarnish.
It won’t stay pretty but neither will I.

I’ll gladly sacrifice any lace and filtered polaroid memories
and oft-repeared stories of my youth; kept behind glass and propped up among rags at a museum exhibit,
for the low belly excitement of closing my eyes today and not knowing what I'll see when I open them tomorrow.

“You know, son… There’s a reason...
God had a reason to give you broad shoulders --
It’s so you could carry this load… It’s so you could hold up all these boulders.”

“But these boulders aren’t my own, so why did He leave me them to hold?”
I can hardly hold them now… surely I’ll collapse when I grow old.”

“You can’t think in terms of time, it is not a restriction by which He is bound…
Instead you must think it as your cross, think of the thorns upon his crown.
He will not notice the time; that’s a human concept we’ve created…
Instead he’ll judge you by the size of the burdens with which you’re weighted.”

“Well, that’s a relief, but how can you be so sure?
He’s never turned the night to day; I’ve never seen a disease he’s cured.
Excuse me if I’m wrong, but I struggle to have faith
When the world that he created has become this wretched place.”

“I can’t convince you that he’s real, I can’t show you how to feel.
But if I showed you cold and silence, would you say that they were real?
Yet these aren’t real things, simply the absence of others…
So you must look to the voids, when you wish to discover.”

“I hope that you’re right. I hope he’s up there listening…
I hope there’s golden gates I can admire, I hope that they’re still glistening.
I hope God can take my hand, and tell me ‘Son, you’ve done well.’
I hope to God there’s a heaven – ‘cause I’ve been living in hell.”

For the past year or so, I’ve been hearing some singing –
Or maybe it’s pounding…
Perhaps more of a ringing.
Though I’m not sure what it is, I know what it creates –
Some sort of bond –it would seem… To forge together our fate.
The sound is near ethereal… It combines our raw materials.
And while I can’t seem to find precision in an attempt for definition...
It’s been playing since we met –
It’s music with no musician.
But what’s a musician to music?  We only need nature to infuse it –
We’ve got music all around us, for us to listen as we choose it.

I think we chose the sound of steel in hopes of finding something real –
For as bad as it gets damaged, a simple fire is sure to heal.
This world can be a cruel place, and we’ve got the wounds to show it.
I’ve found life moves too fast, but your soul helps me to slow it.
With how we’ve been bombarded, our steel was sure to be discarded…
But the fires gave us shape… and our work of art was started.

So a sword is what we’ll be, the finest weapon of you and me –
And although we’re made of steel, we’ll keep growing like a tree –
More intricate and divine, as we stand the tests of time.
Free to be shaped, not burned, in our metallic design.

Searching for a book of matches,
I came across one of your poems
from 1993. It wasn't written on a
matchbook; no.  It was written on
a page torn right from my heart.

The line about how a blind man
helped you to see that words hold
more love than truth still burns my
eyes.  Seems you were right; and
you were wrong, too. The ink was
no longer as blue as your eyes
that day when we last held hands.
That day you penned these words
to my heart. That very day; our last.

Your poetry used to make me smile,
or laugh, or curse your soul for writing
words that I could never seem to find.
This poem was your best; your last.

The ink has faded and ran  in places
from all these years of tears shed and
long dried. More tears would do no good. 
I can hardly read these faded lines. You still
would not be here to kiss them away,
to tell me that everything is going to be
alright; no.

r ~ 5/8/14

Asked to write a poem of yellow, what could I possibly have to add that would celebrate this word found within the sun, the moon, at times, the stripes of a bumblebee, a butterfly, a yellow jacket's sting,  the brilliant splash on a painted bunting, the goldfinch, canary, a yellow breasted warbler, baby chicks, a rubber duck, a baby duck, too, a dandelion in spring, a sunflower, a rose of sorts, a lily, daffodils in a field of wheat, rubber boots upon your feet on a rainy day, a slicker, too, a school bus, a number two pencil, a taxi when you're running late, a tangy lemon, a banana, sometimes a grapefruit, butter on a pancake, egg yolk for your western omlet, lemon drops, cheese, macicheese, and a cheese pizza, too, yellow hair on a farm boy, a piece of straw in his father's mouth, his yellow-haired beautiful sis, her yellow polka-dotted dress, a yellow kitten, a dog in a sad movie like old yeller.

So nice, the color yellow, on a sunny day in May.

r ~ 5/3/14