Today I clothe myself in a Thicket of green leaves,
Embalmed with the fragrance of white petals.
With only the memory of ruffled sheets of linen
and of the silent robes smeared with salt and water,

I drink the ink of the blue sky and the colorless air.
Soon, I will join my Father and converse
with my many children in spirit.

Soon I would be carved into wood to sit in silence with furniture.
To be dressed up like a babe and keep only one expression
on my face: of pain, of hope, of kindness.
There is nothing similar between an image and the actual.
We are almost separated by a hairbreadth of a mile.
When can they see that what is visible is seldom what it shows?
I was a carpenter once and I knew what can be contained and what cannot.

A man I once knew kept with him a jar of seawater
He reasons that when he wakes up
He is reminded by the vastness of the sea.
And he embraces its fragrance: Salt and water.
Can not a jar claim a portion of the sea as his?
Or to put it in perspective is it not the sea that embraces us?
Our mouths and minds are still, left open and dull in silence
Waiting perhaps, in solitary meditations or when in drunkenness we will talk.

I and my other self are one.
But soon, after I have gone another will take my place,
he will embrace us like the sea
Even in places where no sea is in sight.
One thing is certain: salt.
The tasteless air will ink new births of sea.
Today we clothe ourselves in the nakedness of our adopted innocence.
We will walk with the many children and again converse in the garden.

- 10OCT15

You've once recounted in memory
with that young boy vigor
of a hobby collection of that sort.

I find it fascinating how you could
maintain our feigned interest in naivety.
You kept us so long in silence.

You've kept all these things in
jars and cabinets packed in
tight spaces.

And as little and as inconsequential
that butterfly memory that you kept
in a bright jar up in your attic;

let that ripple strengthen into a wave
but i will never be what you willed
and kept for so long. A butterfly

clipped and dipped in formalin
for your tiny framed collection,
that pride-start, if you even had one.

-19FEB15

It kept her inside the workshop,
the only noise, a sewing machine
quietly purring like an old moody cat.
Spools of threads closed into fists,
Fingers curling back into their tiny shells.

She places a piece of cloth on the table,
The open seams sticking out
like the yellow stains of a neck fold.
An old worn out shirt with little holes
filled with imaginary garden trolls.
The smell of moth ***** seeping out.
Curling her lips like a slug with a pinch of salt,
A hesitant hand moves deliberately
as if feeling the roughness of a warty toad.
To keep one is to improvise, to mend spaces
tightly with thread and needle on skin.

She will say to herself: “I will keep him close”
Her little lover’s shirt on her small bruised frame.
chipped, she will drink liquor bitter.
She will drink it long and drink it deep.

November 2014

How does the mountain thank the breeze?
How does the ocean sway,
A changed direction switched to thee
A wave who could not stay

Two mere creatures of the dust,
And one, by far, the better
Deep below the world's thick crust
With dreams matched to the letter

The icy breeze may hold the truth
Which one, unwisely, held
The other, so,  had thought, 'forsooth!'
The one, too far, compelled

A ring, a wrap, of roses neat
All thorns and vines and taint
Around, around, to near defeat
One never was a saint

And so one leaves with fear and hate
After layers of mistake
Some will think it comes too late
The other one might break

But this was not to spite from one
And not in fault of thee
Nor in rashness, careless done
Mayhap one day you'll see

How in this truth, so taught by act
The withering may start
The found are far more lost, in fact
Without a place in heart

And so one says goodbye at last
To her friend, the other
Though space between their lives is vast
They'll meet in yet another