All defined, labeled, identified.
like quiet children who stand aside,
                                                    Silent as a dusty book,
Captivated by their own shoes,
must be pardoned, must be excused.
Those who mumble and avoid your eyes,
them do not mind, they’re just shy.

Imagine if everything still and reserved
Were undermined by such a word.
What would we say of those calm characters
mountains, towers, poetry, flowers?
If perchance one afternoon we met the horizon or the moon,
Are we to say that because often they stand away,
Afar in photos, landscapes, scenery,
off center, silent, beyond the sea,
That these defining features of the sky
Should be cast off and labeled shy?

Those amongst us, who silently
Live largely in their reverie,
Hiding behind their books and journals,
Heard not, but for the scratch of their pencils,
Will name you someday;
They'll have something undeniably brilliant to say.
Should you disagree, consider and think,
Violent, boisterous thunder is the voice of silent-seeming lightning.

This health advice
Is better than a few:
I should sleep more,
And probably with you.

I used to live in paradise—a long,
low ranch house,
sheltered by the tangle of cottonwood trees
that lined the creek. But as with every Eden
We believed in the magic of that world down in the creek,
where the greenbrier curled
around trees and scratched
our legs and the water oak tipped lazily
over the stream as if in a constant half-state
between dreaming and awake.
We believed so fervently,
so completely,
that the trash tossed down
from the nearby overpass
became heavenly gifts—oil cans,
garbage bags,
tires,
empty cups,
all hidden among the scrubby willow oak.
We collected them like greedy misers.
pieces of glass in a discarded Ziploc bag,
and they shone so brightly
that we believed them
to be tiny pieces of falling star.
And in our desperate belief,
we made our paradise.

There's only one bitter truth and a whole bunch of sweet lies.
And all you've got is an empty stomach.