The ground does not yield as I make my way

unsteady across the dirt mounds and bone-dry grasses

in the brittle frost of the early deep freeze.

It’s almost as cold as Mars at the equator, I find myself thinking.

I dream

of butterscotch evenings, and landscapes tanned

red and brown and meandering canals

clear straight to the bottom.

This is Bradbury’s Mars.

I close my eyes and stroll among the ancient ruins

until the cold drives me back into the chaos again.


The last rocket for Mars left a long time ago

and I am stuck on Earth to freeze.

I rolled my mom some joints
from the onion skin of a fat
volume of Shakespeare.

"This is gonna make you smart,"
I said as I licked the dry paper
and admired my handiwork.
"Hell, you may even start quoting
Romeo and Juliet."

She smiled. It was the least
I could do for her.

And, living with an addict,
it was the least I could do for myself.

Destiny maketh me to lie down in sullied pastures
and shows me in an instant what is mine.
I am mother of my will, steward of my nature.
I embrace the children born of the seed of my misgivings.

Inherent nature calls for us to mourn
a child of woe, born in Eden's harem
she is wandering.  The taste of fruit still lingers
on her tongue as she is blessed, and passes through
the garden pleasure's widow.

So man may know the breadth of immorality
God hath given what I am to none but I.
And for you, oh child of nature,
naiveté of man, I will tell of all the
truths you've yet to know.

I am the sole proprietor of love's embittered light.
Suitor's move to choose me in a smooth unfettered sweep,
a lily plucked from dewy beds of beauty.

Among thieves I am the memory of prelapsarian song,
of how it was before we were the way we are.
The gaiety of goodness, weightlessness of night,
are wrought too plainly now to be mistaken...

those days are gone--and I,
an unlikely proctor for the movement of the age,
will stand alone.

In the mustard yellow smoke that floats
along the streets there drifts
a burned and greasy smell through shot-out
windows from frying pans ignored
while on the phone to a neighbor.
I long to turn the burner off,
but it smells like home to them.

By ****** puddles warm with sewer gas
I pass with too much grace—and weave a
dainty two-step down gaping alleyways
beneath clothes
strung out like a lifeline,
sifting murky sunlight
through threadbare cotton.
Old and ugly patterns dangle
from a nylon cord--
cut it and they fall
against the wall and are ***** again.
I shove my hands in my pockets and walk on.

Graceful lines and symmetry
but beneath it all you cannot see
the chaos held together with spit and prayers
and a cocktail of modern medicine's
latest poison.
My dance is a side effect
that just happens to be graceful
my song
a disembodied pantomine
that passes for social interaction.

I don't pretend to be like you
but I'm trying  
and on my best days I stretch and preen
and the sun hits my feathers in just the right way
and almost
in the right light I resemble who I really am without
bipolar.

What stirs the sea?
no sentimental thoughts
of grinding moon or gravity,
I fear it is but unintended nature…
[an accident]
the beauty of coincidence that men believe is theirs, the tiring search for God in natural proof.

What if we are nothing more than accidents?

Would I know you as I do, the cool
lucidity of thought…would that prevail?
Dare I say what nasty thing I’d be today had my beginning been no more than just an accident, some thing that tried to be but couldn’t—and flounders in the cold unflinching truth
that it cannot.