This time was designed
just for us to wear.
Soft puffy clouds
skittering across the sky,
bursting red geraniums
bordering the cobbled
pathways as we stroll
arm in arm watching
the world go by.

Breathe in the beauty,
allowing the electric charge
of exhilaration to
pulse through your body.
We are surrounded by
birdsong and intoxicating
smells of mimosa and jasmine.
We are composing a symphony
with scents instead of notes.

We are completely safe
and protected.
Let go of everything--of thought,
reason, time and simply flow
with your heartbeats.
Illusion is its own reality.

Night is falling and our
picnic in the courtyard
filled with whimsical topiary
and candlelit table is ready.
We have been transformed into
divine essence, into spirit and soul.
Just breathe.

I've seen you hurt
and I know your pain.
Sorrow courses through
your veins like an ******
and yet you are
my sweetest refrain.

Someday you will take
off your cheap polyester
dress of corruption
and put on a glittery
incorruptible couture.

You are so fragile,
a bent sapling
with bruised shoots,
grazing the earth
trying to make
it in a society of redwoods,
oaks, and few weeping willows.

Your courage wraps
around me like a shawl.
You are my angel
with broken wings
and a tilted halo.

Someone I loved has gone away
taking half my existence.
Her imprints remain all over my heart.
Tiny museums of personal randomness
are all that's left.

Her chiseled beauty was made of
silky clouds, stardust, moonlight
and sonatas powered by the sun.
Memories of her rise up like
a sweet grape arbor.

I wear the perfume of her life
like a welcoming embrace.
Flowers wither, but her
perfume lasts forever.
I'm blossoming in the glow
of my mother's aura.

Death is no enemy, but rather the
foundation of gratitude, sympathy,
and art of all life's pleasures.
Only love owes no debt to death.
My mother's love will linger long after
the wind has erased her footprints
from the universe.

I want to etch my soul into your skeleton,
all 206 of your bones
so I can possibly be something you always keep inside of you.
Let me be your frame.

I'd ask to be your skin too,
but i'd be ridden of much too soon.
I'd be scrubbed off when you bathe,
shaken off in your sleep while you dream.
I'd be the dust piled on your keyboard,
brushed off when it gets to be a sore to your eyes.


Skin cells renew, and I want you to feel fresh every morning
so I take that last stanza back.
Please allow me to be the skin that covers you, and the blood in your veins.

I am your second body.
If yours ever abandons you, let my heart pump your blood
and let my skin act as an umbrella to your  beautiful insides.

my fingers, the same fingers
that played the guitar  
I mean look at your fingers,
the same fingers you licked
after getting the sticky pale red juice
from a cherry popsicle on them  
my fingers were dug into the tall grass
my mouth, the same mouth I kissed Amelia with,
the same mouth I ate hamburgers with,  
was pressed against the ground so tight
mud was getting stuck in my teeth
and my ears, the same ears
that heard my first sounds
were filled with colored noise, with black noise
with screaming from people I thought I knew
and those mortar and AK 47 rounds that came as fast as hail stones
and then those same ears started ringing,
but ringing is not the right ******* word
because it doesn’t sound like school bells
or phones you are eager to answer
and I can’t describe what is sounds like
and anybody who does wasn’t really there
but it is easy to say 45 years later it was
like something you knew, but you didn’t know
whatever it is you knew, and contradictions
are imperatives and declaratives, not interrogatives  
like the people of “the world” think they are  
and people of the world are filled with interrogatives
and you are filled with answers
that won’t come to your tongue
because you are still spitting out the ****
from the rice paddies and the lies you needed  
to keep you from sticking the barrel
in your own mouth, but they, those who weren’t there  
wanted to believe even more than you  
so they could still look at you without thinking
the blood on your hands, the blood coming from your lost limbs
the blood oozing into the mire in some script
the dead donor did not know--all that blood
could not be spilled in vain, though you knew it meant little
when you rinsed it from you boots,
or even when splattered in your face  
the same face that smiled for the little gray square
in the year book eighteen months before      
or maybe a million years ago
in the land of affluent aphorisms
and fingers on bra straps
rather than the rock and roll auto switch of your M-16
the fingers, the same fingers
that squeezed the trigger  
and killed something inside you
while the rounds sliced the exploding stinking air  
you were happy to silently breathe

the coffee flowed through tales of three lovers,
all dead now, somehow  
he managed to squeeze in a live one, number four,
over apple pie with melted cheese  
she was still coming around, usually after her AA meetings
helping him fill his apartment with Lucky Strike haze  
(only woman he knew who smoked unfiltered ****)  
he did not know why she watched him drink  
maybe he was her 40 days in the desert,
tempting her with the libations
she loved more than her own flesh,  
(her son in Waukegan with his sober dad)    
maybe he was her test, he didn’t give a **** he said  
she was quiet in his bed
often, like a thief in the night,
she would be gone when he woke in the morning  
a book or two missing, ones he had read
and filled with notes, some with pages torn out
that lined his walls, even his crapper he said  
where he could stand and drain his lizard
read Ezra Pound and Elliot and ask himself  
why the **** did those guys use so many words?  
when he ate the last crumbs of his pie, he told me
he meant to ask me the same question,
but the answer would be too long,
that I asked questions that did not need answers
I tried to tell him
I felt the same way, but
he fired up another Lucky Strike,
and asked for the check
which I would pay
and I knew, he would hear nothing
I had to say