Another breathless afternoon slowly vanishes as darkness screws itself
Around the horizon
Another dented chair from the kitchen, rag wiped clean and still damp, is dragged under old cottonwoods
Another light from the rented farm house goes off
Another frayed fan from Woolworths slaps the humid air with no effect
Another prayer for relief
Another sigh slipped from the prayer drifts in the night on a small journey to nowhere
Another attempt at escape for the old woman
Another tortured wait to feel a change, a yearn to feel a breeze, but yet still the heat
Another day of my short visit over
Another night like the last
Another like another like another

Another chair dragged close by hands work worn rough
Another scorching July night, in the low plains, in a sheltered valley
Another humid night when sweat drips off old chairs and old fans and old brows that pray
Another night when sweat has enveloped us like a wet summer jacket zipped tight around the valley
Another laugh from the tavern down the hill
Another place where they don’t go
Another moment for the two old lovers to share in stillness and be like this wind; of no movement, no sound
Another with another, forever
Another chance for darkness to spur the change, to stir the wind, or cue a cloud to rain

But no, just another non event …this evening of hope
But there is no cue
But there is no change; there is no breeze
Swelter is relentless and constricting
But these two patriarchs will share this evening’s oppression like their life,
…together,
Both, of substance and hopeful, with little to celebrate
But they will cope and do it all;
Meet the challenge of life, like this night.
with very few very, very small words


Gram and gramps of the country
in the summer.
of my youth .
in the evening
A few years from a/c

Somewhere behind my eyes as I rest
At that precious slanted sieve
A vortex forms, where life’s radio station spins its tunes
Softly, constantly, the songs of living play  
  

Concave not convex; oh so inward bent
Songs that filter in reality
Not affectations that filter out
The real thoughts
These songs: As I listen behind my eyes

There I lie wrapped in a warm blanket
Insulated by the down of warm contemplation
Open to the possibilities of my days
Moving at the patient meter of time
Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly

There in imagined lyrics I drive a winding highway
Up and down grade
Side to side; a 4 wheel on ice; screeching
Relief from studded treads
Fear from the dreaded cliffs of my psyche
Steering by a wheel I hold untouched

Sometimes there I hear me floating free
Like a brilliant, March 1st kite, tightly tethered
A tail of memories keeps my level
A parchment lined with expectation
Thrusts me upward

Or there I lie by a black hills stream
Toe dipping in and out the water
Like a bobber with no real hook
Fishing idle prospects
Touching life’s possibilities obliquely

Or there I am driving small autos with my friends
Us like hectic bumbling actors
Seeking the road out
Spinning around fountains spewing water
Crazy cross way paths that
Pass in phase and double back

Simple songs of truth

I.
Come hither soon sweet yellow ball of spring
With honey dipped and blazoned slow by subtle fire
To this our porch of winter dour
So laced in white and tied by frost

With bounces quick and deftly turned  
With your first touch from feathered flight
Pray, brew this cold
To spring’s own sweetened mead


II.

Smash well that bloat of frozen drift
And melt it into crooked runs
Like mountain streams reduced to flow
Away along the curbing

Lay low the lengthy strings of ice
And turn them into fresh warm drip
And bid new sprouts to split the brownness
Of their ceiling

III.

And as you bounce
Strum lightly on your warm and flowing breezes
And so the gentle music play that heeds us of
Your coming

IV.

So soon… Oh Spring!
In lightness fed
In greens to live for months this time
We may bloom in rapture’s rise
And loose these blocks of numbness
That harshly choked our move and flow
And seal our days with light and heat
And sweet passion’s move return

Night Song:

Night, pray, notes of a song…
Three chord rocker
Groans of the trees on a noon walk with the old brown dog
Her bark to gain the outside
The Strained “s” sound of a ball in flight to soar
North wind pounding against the outside wall
Measured beat of the sprinklers in summer

Screams of the little blond cousin on the steps
When gleeful freedom rages wild inside
And safety cradles his growing spirit


Night, pray, words…
Unspoken thoughts between old lovers..
“Hello” of friends as they meet again after decades

Young brother and sister in play, familiar,
Hushed promises to share
Coloring new pages in the same book
Heads close together

Hum of a cloistered family at meal time
Joining in the delicacies of life
At a shared table

Our Father who art…

Night, pray, love…
Of  later day working family
Stretched full
And their journey to tie life
With a thread of gossamer
And not break

Off her curtains delicately
She takes the little ones outside, else she **** them where they light
And lets them fly free in the humid October wind

Sunshine has brought the late summer smoothly home to our cottage
Back from the razor cuts of autumn’s chilling rain

Like tiny cooking woks in reddish copper, overturned and spotted black
Lady bugs of late fall,
Busting out like small brown flower buds around the house,
Wings like petals

Inside and out
Skiing down outside our window panes, boarding towards safety,
Falling free,
Crawling on curtains, digging in tight

She sets these free for one more chance
Saving them
As I would
Seeing the bond that those who do must honor
And try to overturn the tumble that we toss in like weeds
And right ourselves and stop the spin

And of the heart there is a bleeding
Of the heart there is a leaking
Draining hope in colored drops
That pile upon the clotted dirt
And drain our souls away

And a heart is not for thinking
No reason in a heart
A heart is not for profit
Where’s the pay for all the work?

Yet every beat will push the air
Upon a chest in slightest fashion
And heave the buttons out on standing up
And so a blanket on the back
And never quit, oh my heart in darkness still

And oh the heart is hard to write from
Better luck from brain be given
For each letter that you stroke
Like the beating of that heart
May pry you from a different beat
Of those so close and easy bruised

And like a top so hard pressed first
By sacred palm these oh so many turns ago
To spin until the revolutions stop
And wobble slowly to the end
In its last slow  electric bursts
And topple to the floor

When soon
I touch again the naked grass
It caked in layered frost of grey ground street
And clay of Lancaster brown-girded on its
Many slender leggings

It could the start of summer be

At spring no cake of rotting ice
But clay on slender leggings
No snow to hide and stifle life but spots of clay and grind
And chance for life at angle down the side

As on the side a hole upon my trample
And greenish specks of life

Standing by the weathered deck rail
I stare down at the larger fly
It walks around the glass obelisk that towers above
And studies it as  
I a glass ringed skyscraper down town

Wings flicker golden in questioning bursts
Looking at the welcoming hole in the bottom of the trap
Inside some are swimming in the mealy water of sweetness
Ugly crazy eight paths in their last circles

Some are climbing up the glass walls,
Entombed, striving futile escape through the silver dome
Some still fly their trapeze patterns before their last dive
Wings flicker golden in questioning bursts
Pondering what entrance next

The lines on this dusty road
The curly yellow lines of mothers
The stop signs of elders
Like the lines on this page
Drawn by columns of pipes and chains
Swirls and loops,
Are whispered by the muse

To infect your mind like they do mine
Crawl like no other and angle the same
Like no other

Is this map of disease? This mangle of dna
Like me?  Obscure and unmatched,
Unique, These words that we hurl
The pace, the spin like a baseball pitch
This pitch like no other or like some other
Lowly thrower?

These lines intrigue me with their varied
Shapes.. Hopeful slight diseases to pain your
Mind like the flu your body to
Alter thoughts like strep your throat
Little curly figures in your mind
Like none before with angles set the same

The water on my fingers turns from cold to warm
In a burst
And slips through my open fingers
With the night
As I step in bent to a cascade
Of a thousand pleasant bee stings

Water caresses my head
Like a slow dive into a warm pool
As I anoint weary aching
With shampoo and soap

Then only the water to ease and massage
Like the bubbling water flow of life
On its journey
Like time , that tactile fluid which too we cannot catch
Or hold
Like this morning water through my fingers
As I bow to drain out
The morning awakening
And rise into the fresh swirl
of this new day

what the birds do (ft Sophia J Ashlan and
Nateive Son)

Set your love free; America!, let it fly
Free it from those small cages in your mind; cross your street; America! And visit,
Cross to the side you think as dark
You’re grown up now; let it soar
Let it see a clear scene, from a new neighborhood,
Oh, view the scene angled wide
Face out and reorient;
And take in all the light
Oh, the precious cleansing light

And please America what the birds do through the air
So let your love

Soar love, Let the wings that spread over the nation; America!  (Sophia J Ashlan)
Shelter the ones who have given Everything to you
Like the birds be free; Let your spirit not wither;
Oh America, Do not despair; Perhaps hope is here...
Like a bird song, the song You love more than any other
Like a bird Know that your only limit Is you; America!
And live life like you always have
Free like a bird on the edge of a branch

Let your love rise, America!  And Search!
For its likeness in your darkest view
And where your likeness dwells; oh, embrace it
Cradle it in your *****; hold it there and rock it
Then more than double will your power be;
Seizing all that common
And lighter as it drops that difference
Oh, and lighter as it drops the hate

And America your coffeehouses are bogged down by bandwidth    (Nateive Son)
People addicted to screens cannot know what we mean and it saddens the jaw
So if you must stare into the light, stare into the sun
Be entranced by the holy radiant one

Let your hands reach out, America!  To connect,
As the sky connects with the horizon at sun set
Let that life force worshipers share, that feeling felt in the bones
And in your mind, and in your true heart
That you are webbed to all that breathes
And all that is in the universe, webbed by that beautiful unity
That spirit of the self, that all connected love,
And oh, let it reconnect this nation

And please America, what the birds do through the air
So let your love
              let it fly over America