They told me to write what I know;
Well I know how to say "I'm sorry"
so much that the meaning falls through
the bottom of your glass
while I sit on my hands and watch it seep
through the cracks of your front porch.

They said,  "Write about something you love,"
but every time I see a passion in my life,
the grey around me ***** in its color
like a vacuum
and I'm left with empty, open palms
an a house much too clean to call it home.

"Write about how you're feeling."

How can I tell them that
my smile learned how to lie with
my teeth cracking behind it,
and my eyes know how to crinkle when
my smile gives the command?
That this demeanor is a machine
with outputs and executions -
but sometimes even machines break
and they need someone to fix them
because broken hands can't use a wrench
and a smile needs something to feed off of.

So in the end I write about writing,
as meta as it may be -
Because, in a sense, the process
Is all I have to talk about.

~for Bex~*

in the flesh, not really, but I was...

ordered five bone china coffee mugs for you,
from the Artists Gallery, all scenes of nature,
painted by Canada’s Group of 7,
to go with the Lawren Harris mug,
'Lakes and Mountains'
from which I am currently sipping

for when I thought of you up north in Ontario,
I thought of my mom,
who was Toronto born and bred,
and the caramel oranges of fall
that have not yet arrived
in northern Manhattan,
but have already peaked in Ontario,
in late September

I smile,
while voyaging on the curving line of thought perusal,
at all the things that have already peaked,
someplace else,
and that have may yet, be late, arriving in my life

and I dream of:

all the poets who
I will never meet,
the living and the dead,
all the poems,
I will never finish, perhaps, n'ere to start,
never chance to speak, or chance to peak

all of you, sipping, from those real mugs of porcelain,
that are soon to arrive, via an imaginary railroad,
running on creosote stained ties of caramel orange,
built by a namesake, that I can no longer imagine,
but whom I knew
so well in my youth

my mug is sadness filled by
those stillborn verses that will never chance to peak,
but am comforted by the knowing,
as long as there is freedom to write,
that there is hope for one more poem
to be imagined, sourced from deep within,
drawn from the cool well water
of happy wishing