You can't finish Spring cleaning
because every old thing becomes
Inspiration for a poem.

2. Instead of planting that garden you
Promised yourself, you write about
Your metaphorical one.

3. Because you're a romantic poet,
You ruined your flowers by plucking
Each petal in a She loves me, she loves me
Not tirade.

4. Every stupid bird is a new poem.

5. April rains bring about the
Melancholic poem inside you,
And you love it!

6. Instead of playing with your
Kids outside, you write about
It instead.

7. Even though you are allergic
To everything, you take that stroll
In the park you write about
So often.

8. Spring's promise is really just like
The New Year's poem you wrote,
New beginnings and all.

9. While digging through your Spring
Cleaning, you find your old poems
And decide to post them on
Hello poetry.

10. The garage is a mess, nothing
Is getting done, but in the poem you just wrote
Is about the hard work it was.

11. You learn the name of
new birds and flowers to make
Your poem fancier.

12. And finally,
You really don't like Spring,
But its a season, and we're poets,
So yeah.

You can never skip an opportunity to call yourself that
Because you’re your ma’s son:
Didn’t get caught up in the tool shed
Got spiked through with the hooked art of repeating yourself instead

Should I feel insulted then
That these cracked, digited fringes
These rejects of your diminutive anatomy
Are how you love me?

You love me with the unvoiced, unexplained idiocy
Of fingers that make Mexican waves
To one particular song
And lure mine to come dancing too

You love me with the whorls where you keep your DNA
Counting the concaves in my skeleton:
Explore them, soothe them
Wonder if you made them

And I think you fear that
If you ceased to trace me as I grew –
A carpenter sifting through the age rings in my spine –
I’d only feel the dislocating vagueness
Of an absence too menial to be mourned.

“Cack-handed”
But I remember different:
I remember your hands like leather,
All heated and scratchy from your pockets,
Unhooking the problems from my mouth.
And how the weather’d teethed on them,
Gnawed away chunks down around the cuticles
Until they were dry and scarred like February –
February getting lost in its own bleak cavernousness

They stir the rag in the shoe polish,
And the burnt spoon in the bean tin.

I used to try to pinch them
But my nails were too soft
And your palms too crusted
But when they tell me “thick-skinned”
I shake my head and think
“No, beautifully cack-handed”

Clover honey sunshine o'er Sassafras rivers
Proud Martins sing for notoriety , full bloom-
white sugar , shivers in the afternoon pasture
Our last Raven of the hard day season
Roaster , stained glass color kinda holidays -
liquid Kildare clover valleys , euphoric July nightshades

Blue skies
Sunny days
Children's laughter
Heard miles away
Dimpled cheeks
Golden hair
Blue eyes
Sparkle so fair
Scraped knees
Bumble bees
Bird's singing
From tops of trees
Afternoon glasses
Tall with sweet tea
This is what Spring means
Only to me

As hot as...
those eyes when he sees
almost predatory

always do they genuflect
upon their roughened knees  
a sordid kind of scene

obscene / unsanitary
craven cries to Loki
for pleasures
****** writhing /
feeding fists

sweat of the easy / a quickened fix
men with members stiff as petrified
sticks / jabbing in a hastened mix
teeming muscles / hungry hips

like electrified evenings of swollen eels
sustained by suckling Gamorra's ****
fiending always
for the slick and the harsh

crystalline mist / he is undoubtedly marked
by the unquenchable blue fire
of his lust / afflicted addictions,

never will he tire - incessantly
defined by ***'s maledictions

I grow hot like sunlight
bright - even in the darkest mires
he's an unmatched lover in satin flight,
a dragon / a well-endowed sire
formiddable in succulence / remiss of sight

i weep without regret when

once i followed him toward the night
forgot what i was and

accept what i am,
endure in all burning light
fueled by the sword of Pan

love keeps me warm
as he keeps me lit

i am reborn / magnificent
a forlorn phoenix
omniscient  
songs for his careful choir

i am one chosen - truth among liars,
i fly above / kite toward the sun

this is what I am / what i was
this is what i've become

then a willful puppet
without inhibiting wires

still my love will never tire
transformed by lost desires / hot as blue fire

this is who i've become

i am the light of the rising sun

The Lion of kingdom come...

Traffic light refraction , glass store fronts pan
the main avenue
***** , bluesy , defeated people in line for liquor ,
beer , milk and lottery tickets
Navy skies grow red to the West , streetwise
pigeons work overfilled dumpsters and city cans
Bus stops return workers from Atlanta , the-
local grocery methodically stripped of its inventory ,
children playing games on side streets beneath working-
yellow lamplight ..
Fire trucks fly by , no one even bothers to look up or wonder why
Porch lights irradiate the Westside , amber hues build -
over the interstate , cars travel South , bottlenecked in the race for home ..

I yearn for latter-day retreat along the reverent hallways of the South River hollows
Along dewberry arbors , beside the Walnut Tree light encrypted fallows
To afternoon Black Angus calling the day to close  
For silhouetted properties atop lavender valleys , gravel driveways meandering back to home
The high Moons certain visage reflecting across the olive waters , country lanes splitting evergreen forest ..

Mutual...
Like the beach,
sparkling with radiance.
Openly welcoming the soothing
caress of the waves.
Allowing them to
playfully tug
at her toes
before retreating back
into the ocean tide.

Mutual...
Like the leaf,
that shines amber
in the autumn sun.
Silently inviting the wind
to sweep it off the threats
of the brittle twig.
Trusting the breeze to set it aloft,
in a whimsical spiral
before releasing it gently
into the safety of the ground below.

Mutual...**
Like you and I.
As we confidently
match each other's
gait in a display
of song and dance.
Though our exchange
remains unworded,
the promise of love
rings clear within
the clasp of your
willing hands
in mine.