to love
it is
the me to care for lips seriously fragile. the

for me

to leap strenuously knowing
and dance amongst unknowing
the towering cadence, my heart. to

the for me (love) the

sturdily upheave the slowly clamoring of soil,
and march widely the span, my kiss, through closing

and meet with your kiss, the legion, my soul;
(a parting of silence. a fiercely innocent foal)

do not lay me amongst thy hand
(towar' heaven ascending)
of earth stuff more come.

come thy mouth as daughters;
come thy slavering, come thy pistil keep.
a flower,

come. come as
riotously fragrant Spring
snowing easily with health.

come, and, steal my soul for sleep;
and place 'tween the knees of forests
***** bales of sighing wind.

come in most unsilent clothed
thy myriad of flesh.

come and life

unmeet thy thighs
,admitting,

perhaps the lather(your colour)
through me to seep.

A hippie hocked a louie on Sammy
when he landed in San Francisco.

Sammy didn't respond;
he just wanted to make
his connecting flight home.

Sammy wasn't proud about
some of things he did in the war;
so he figured he probably
deserved the garlands of disdain
an ungrateful nation bestows
upon itself in fits of self contempt.

Sammy shut down and tuned out,
soon his heart was as dead
as a tombstone until he visited
the monument.  

He would often recall the story
that as he approached the darkened
wall he could sense ghosts loosening
themselves from the black granite.   

Sammy swore that Jimmy Lynch
who went MIA on the final week of his tour
gave him a bear hug and told him
as long as the beer stays cold
and he don’t lose the church key,
everything's groovy and he’s
hanging tough until the rest
of the guys show up.

Jimmy pointed to the Lincoln Memorial
at one end of the mall and to the
Washington Monument at the other,
emphatically stating that our monument
was forever linked with the greatest Americans.

Yeah meeting up with Jimmy
helped Sammy to start shaken
off some real bad stuff.

Mazie knew her husband for a
month before they got married.
A week later Freddie was off to Vietnam.

Freddie was KIA during the Tet Offensive
and his repatriated remains are peacefully
at rest in the red clay of Georgia.

An always faithful Mazie
came to the monument
a few years after it was dedicated.  
She was struck by all the keepsakes
people left at the base of the wall;  
Zippos, baby pictures, a copy of
The Catcher in the Rye, a fifth
of Makers Mark, Pink Teddy Bears,
votive lights, a red 57 Chevy model,
a left handed catchers mitt, and
a pack of Lucky Strikes.

She palmed rosaries and
crucifixes that salved sore
running wounds and David’s
interlaced Star sounding a Shofar
pleading a case for peace.

Mazie is most moved by the names.  
Rows and rows of names. The scroll
begins in a modest manner and
as the wall climbs the names
of a country's vigilant sons and
daughters tower over her head.  
So much living history; spoken
in the unique accent of a country’s
diverse plethora of luminous tongues.

The stories written into the black granite
tell a tale from every state; claiming
the ears, heart and mind of every citizen. 
Each chiseled letter captures every bit
of sun and deep creeping shadow
inching across a great nation.

“I’m  71” says Mazie.  “When I look
upon the wall I see my 21 year old
Freddie as he looked on the finest
day of his life.  He will never look
any other way to me.”
  
“I didn't want to go to see it,” Franny said,
“a cold piece of stone won’t bring my son back.”

Franny did finally go...

When it rains the wall weeps.  
The wall wept all day,
the first time Franny went.

Many were rubbing
the impressions of
dearly departed names.

Franny too, kneels to the
presence of her son’s name.

With a mother's
grateful fingers,
she touches the wall's
damp surface; wiping
the drizzle from her
child's sodden face.

Kneeling before his semblance,
she rubs his etched edges
onto tiny bits of paper.

She sees him,
made manifest in the stone.
As if through a glass darkly,
a found son looks back,
onto the face of a caring mother.

Franny hangs onto the quiet
memory of his voice,
shimmering in the soft lilt
of a warm dark stone.

This deep core Vulcan gneiss,
at last emerged from the hardest stuff,
sculpts a perfect likeness of a tear stained nation.

The Harmonizing Four: Rock of Ages

In Honor of
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Washington DC

Oakland
Veterans Day
2013

Ask me,
Ask me now daddy.
What I want to do when I grow up.
I want to be happy.
No, not happy
I want to be happiness.
I want to be joy and cheer and admiration
Confidence and peace and optimism

I don’t want to be like others, no, I want to be love.
The smile that comes across your face when they say your name,
The look that makes your heart skip a beat,
The song that makes you rethink every second you spent together.
I don’t wanna be the poem, I wanna be the emotion behind it,
Not the first kiss, let me be the nerves,
Not the dance, let me be the excitement,
Not the Officiant, let me be the vows.

When I grow up, I don’t wanna be a doctor mommy.
I want to be the feeling when someone’s told there’s a cure,
Or when a parent finds out their child will live to be a teenager,
Or maybe I want to be 3 in the morning when a mother holds her child for the first time.

I want to be affection and adoration and passion
Oh, I want to be passion.
Let me be passion.
So that you cannot do without me, because nothing without me has meaning.
So that when you are playing the final strain or scoring the winning goal,
Or writing the last chapter or finishing the last paint stroke,
You will think of me.

Maybe I’ll be allegiance or devotion or respect.
I won’t be the soldier, I’ll be the loyalty.
Or the surprise in a child's heart when their dad comes home early,
Maybe I’ll be the feeling when a father meets his baby for the first time,
And the child already knows his name.

I want to be piety and faith and worship.
I don’t want to be the pastor, I’ll be the lesson.
Maybe I’ll be the obligation behind the first baptism or first communion.
Maybe I’ll be the words when someone so low is told someone loves them.
I’ll be the salvation of the gospel,
The redemption to the guilty,
The forgiveness to the sinners.

When I grow up,

I want to be the opposite of sorrow,
The antonym of misery,
The reverse of fear,
The contradiction of rejection,
The antithesis of disappointment,
The inverse of insecurity,
I want to be the alleviation of anxiety,
The ease of pain,

When I grow up,
I want to be happy.

Don't think about the girls
you saw on the street today
and how much more beautiful
they increasingly seemed to be
compared to you.
You are not an item comparable to another
you have not been fashioned as a commodity
you are nature, and nature does not produce perfect organisms
though they may seem to be.

Don't think about the boys
who do not look at you and
do not talk to you. So, no one
has shown interest in you for a while.
This is good news, you do not need a single soul
to feel whole. Twenty years and counting
not one of them have made you feel anything.
You can last a little while longer,
soon you may experience love.

Don't think about how messy
you feel and are. One day you will
learn to pick up all the pieces off the floor
and clarity will rush in again.
Till then leave your clothes on the bed,
but don't fret over school and your future.
Remember to live and be free
after all you are an animal

Don't think about how ****** the world seems.
Do not let negativity fill you and ******* you
into middle age, becoming bitter.
You will hate what you become.
This is not who you were meant to be.
You are a radiant being, let yourself be
filled with light and positivity.

w

          w



                         wh



                                             what loves


                                                     this
                                                        I?i
                                                      loves the
                                                      rushing of in girls
                                                      Summer when heat
                                                      does its lips in forked
                                                      seething.

                                                       I loves
                                                       the hush
                                                       of almost winter nights
                                                       and the concise
                                                       melancholy
                                                       of empty rooms.


                                                        I loves
                                                        the by
                                                        cherriest of wristness
                                                        to loosely
                                                        in vagrant slumber
                                                        stir whitely.


                                                        I loves
                                                        the brother of my brother, and
                                                        the little timid
                                                        of barely unviolence boys
                                                        (in fists very tightly which).

                                                         But.

                                                          w w   ww what loves
                                                           Iis
                                                           the most
                                                           of life
                                                           and lessing
                                                           too
                                                           of it
                                                           into
                                                           primest daftness of sleep.