In Florida sometimes it rains so hard
that you believe that it can't possibly stop,
that it will just rain and rain forever.

Sometimes I'd wake to a storm late at night,
and I'd sit out on the porch.

You could smell the lightning, and the coolness of the storm would
make your hair stand;
I'd feel so alive.

Some nights I'd go out, and my father
would be sitting on the porch already.
Lost in the storm
or maybe
called to it.
We wouldn't talk,
but we'd be lost together
in the rain and thunder.

Sometimes I wonder what of him
is left in me.
I am not sure
if I am more afraid of there being
very little
or of there being a great deal,
but when it rains
I think about him on that porch;

they told me
it would be too late
to see the midnight stars

and they told me
not to wait because
the stars would never change

and they shamed me
when i did not budge
but sat with my friend Hope

yet now i am grown
and perhaps i should tell them
that at midnight
the stars proved them wrong

i don't really know.
it's just that,
you plant a garden in my heart
and grow tulips.
you write a children's book in my mind
and read it to me until i fall asleep.
you are the windows rolled down
and new music.
you are fresh linen
and clean hair.

i must describe you so ordinarily
so the earth won't feel so bad about itself.
but it should feel honored
to hold something as special as you.

a.h.d.

TABLE D'HôTE

Appetizer
Wrong Tons With Me Soup
cooked worry
seared in a teary onion broth

Hors D'oeuvres
Slow Roasted Fear
fresh over-analyzing
crushed with loneliness

Main Course
Stress Salad
tossed with insomnia
marinated in a vertigo dressing

General Trouble Chicken
battered uncertainty
gloomed to perfection
sitting on steamed danger
stir fried in an overwhelm sour sauce

Dessert
Choked Volcanic Eruption
mountain of OCD
topped with whipped depression
glazed with self-loathing

Expresso
prepared with frothy guilt

(C) Jl 2016

conquered cities 
reduced to dirt, then
sown with salt so nothing grows. ever. 
assaulted senses bring fevered dreams of
caeser's dying breath escaping when I exhale. 

fate breathes as well; 

a single, ragged, pep-o-mint tickle on my neck 
so I know she's there... 
just behind me. 

I'm finding it difficult 
to keep the salt from my wound- 
to keep the sea from my door- 
to keep the plank from my eye- 
to keep off the moors at night 
  when the moon is blind to my indiscretions.