If this hallmark of a romantic gift
I give
is a bit fumbled,
and its professions of heartfelt wishes
feel
slack in their graham-*******-box repackaging;
If the candy-coated wrapper’s fit
is left
misfitting around its dented-in red corners,
and the lippiness of its stick
has come
unstuck at each crushed-down end;
If the pink bow
stands unbowed
and frowns as unpretty as any crime-scene picture,
while it raises
a frayed end with the victim’s gone-through motion
entreating
death for its last tug free;
It could be
my feeling heart’s once-bold youth
isn't
entirely found in it,
or it could be
the entirety
bound in it,
my heart,
couldn’t find its way out.

I.
White’s imprisoned gray.
A black sole subdues
one red glove with a crunch.
There it will pause, fingerless
until the first thaw.

II.
The sun's amber frown of diminished light
slides down black branches
a blundered slight,
but when it hits the ground, it rides
wonders of uninterrupted white.

III.
Steamy columns of warmth
slip through the crack,
pawed open by blue purrs from his white cat—
a tonic wash, to welcome.
slush-slicked, black boots back

IV.
Nuzzled, from the muzzling of a drowsy-
days-long muslin wrap, brown earth bursts
through what white patchwork's left, to cure
her forbidden tramplers with a slurpy
and black-mouthed, aubade kiss.

V.
Winter’s white makes shallow breaths,
and exhausted she coughs black
complaints about the crushed
green of popped-down bottles,
a cellophane orange cat with a close hold
on his shorted stock of shock-
yellow crumbs, and the assorted other
man-made matter mocking
her color, but never her,
wherever they stay.

“Jurt,” she
curtly spurts out
and stops
not knowing if
she’s going to
continue to
speak unknown tongues
or if
this emanation, this
interjection,
spoken on strange
impulse,
is Icelandic
or Bosnian
or Serbian,
and if
the middle one
how not the last,
when they both mean
the same thing, yurt.

Lord, if you exist and have ears
(neither of which
proposition is entirely clear yet),
let’s make a deal.
(I know prayers ideally aren’t
supposed to involve bargaining,
but this is really a poem
so I’ve got some wiggle room to ******.)
Bring a little peace to these instruments
who call themselves your kids,
and I swear by all things you deem holy
(since you made everything,
I guess that’d be the whole shebang)
to give myself up to your wills and won’ts.
Of course you’ll have to clue me in
where there’s a Will,
(the won’ts are pretty well covered)
whether buried in endless musts
****** thus by musty books,
or hidden in plain-sighted laws
governing the broadest range of spirals
from when the first shoot knows
it’s time to poke its budding nose
above an earth that’s lost the frosty bite
to when our yellow dwarf explodes
and grows a giant with nebulous arms
stretching outward to catch its dying breath.
(I’d cast a vote for the latter,
but my still-small voice has long been
to the far reaches, outnumbered.)

There’s a fifth elemental
bottled up inside,
and I’ve found myself
in biomimicry
light as the airs
lamenting
that this too too earthy flesh,
no platonic object,
of fiery desires,
could atomize and rise
to watery dote,
where true hearts float
and all honesty lies
with a fine print of boasted
bullet-points
and side-splitting effect:

The meaty much we do
means little
mixed in the cosmic stew

Arms are best for putting round,
but when putting right’s left out,
it’s better to put down

What cleans a surface,
even tears, can also stain,
given enough time

Take the cleansing solution,
and wipe them
down to their gleaming steel

Then weld the twelve
couple-less, cautionary signs
to fashion a finer form

I could pack infinity
into that very finite dodecahedron,
with this one simple observation:

The glow reflected on your face
is the most beautiful
my light has ever been.

The jelly-jiggling slop first had to flop
before it could waddle
ashore into this muddle of last gasps
and becoming
where middling deaths swaddled in gauzy breaths
emit a consonant-rich sussuro:

If you don’t recall the swirl-swept depths
where we furled it,
can you keep that promise in shallows pocketed?

So we began, and with the begetting
a rosy cloud plumed forth from our two
terraformed lips,
its delicately distinct petals mushrooming out
with a thorn-less, serif-soft voice
to bestow this frothy font of atomic confusion:

Let the forgetful sea rinse over now-handy fins
to hard-edge etch
their starfish straight lines in a slurp of soggy sand.

The mothering molecules haven’t lost
their smothering ache to forgive
our thickened skins
and they still cling to us, cooing about a lulled drift
past bye when we’ll climb the thinning links
back to homes cloaked in a sifted light:

*The loves of your heart-filled heads, no matter
how starkly pled,
all waste away to join us in our timeless waiting.

He may be bits shy,
tucked in there behind
a ready excuse of clouds,
but from today he spreads
our pocket-lint days
with radiant smiles,
and lingers longingly,
beggar moments longer