As I waddle through the heat
I wish for knees from which to pray
The sun, the progenitor of this fruition
Golden we harvest

The hills whisper an ancient call
I grasp the earth between my fingers
Here the dirt and I are one
I cannot let go of her

The sheaves surrender to the sickle
The soul is sown
The soul is harvested
Ancient mouths rejoice

Harbors

blast furnace wind rolling off the prairie
the kind of wind that makes you realize
we were all born alone
I hugged the river hoping to find
some untouched ****** breath of cool
but ****** the **** for indifference he is
offered nothing
I headed up Hawthorne
wading through the souls
of the beautiful desperate
and the wicked surfeit

looking up I caught her eyes
hanging out her window
stretched out between
where love lives
and love dies
she looked down
peeling away the layers of her soul
offering a shade
that harbors the most twisted and distorted
remnants of love

later
on the outskirts
we watched Orion’s futility
our hearts gasped
as we touched
which was the hunter
and which was the prey
trembling
we fell into love
as the wind softened to a cool breeze

I tug at the edges of my reality
Just to make sure I am alive
Braking apart all the constituent elements
Of what it is to be human
That core mix
Of passion and reason
That yields and taxes
That starves and surfeits
What is more the soul
Than the flesh

Blackened skies yield truths
The way the winds drive your heart
In every direction
A poets vein hungers
For the needle of perception
That paints the picture
That may someday cure
The poet from being the poet

I’d spread myself across your canvas
If there was a certain amount
Of indifference agreed upon
At the outset
To start from zero
Releases us from the assuagement of resolve
Does anything need be more than zero

And I would open up all of I
If it were not for
That it has gotten old
And knowledge knows no religion
And I have no god
So the colors would run
The canvas more used than used
It would become faded and forgotten
Hung in repose
In the halls of a gallery that only admits
The sightless

But I would fall from grace here
Espousing such false and grandiose reflections
Silence begets silence
Words beget that…. resolve
For
It is the poets job is to kick indifference in the head
Until it bleeds some semblance of compassion

And so
As to not to end up praying to some small statue of myself
I will drip what I am across your canvas
Letting the colors bleed into the fabric of what we are
And if hung in repose
Then hung in that fragment of time
Where the poet grabs at some infinitesimal aspect of life
And breathes something
And breathes something
Into this…..

I had been tearing off little pieces of  my heart
And leaving them on the ground
Like a breadcrumb trail
That I hoped she would find someday

I had been whispering out into the space left between us
Simple words that rose from the void
Left by my leaving her
Hoping that a lite cool breeze
Would carry them to her

I had lain awake at night yearning for your her presence
Wrapping the imaginary her in my arms
And breathing our memories into the night
Hoping somehow, in her night
There was still some part of me there

There are some words that splash up against your heart
They gather up all the threads and fibers of the universe
They weave love back into the shapes that
Are once again recognizable

Sitting on the bed, her legs tucked up to her chin
Looking down through her heart
She said, “can we talk”
I said, “yes, what about”
And with all the gravity and weight of
Every word spoken anywhere, ever
She said “Us”

What it is that derives from us
Remains small
Stashed in dusty corners that are cluttered
with history and unread poems
We call on something within ourselves
To weave the entropy into a fabric
that we can wear throughout our existence,
colored it would be, but neutral in what it would evoke,
keeping us warm when the vicious winds
of love and hate rage through our village.
And yet…. allowing the coolness of joy to permeate into our souls
when such is laid before us.

Tender we are in these moments
Less than something
The sum of which is incongruent to truth
And our beauty
On that last page where we traded away our child heart
For the recognition of being something
We never wanted to be
Why did we ever cut our hair
The dirt at the bottom of our feet
Were prayers of acknowledgment
Grateful for how the gods assembled us
Tender and beautiful we are


The stars cross the sky to get a glimpse
Of this creation of duality
Flesh and soul
The spirit sings while the corporeal begs for its fodder
We are juxtaposed against harsh sky
Lifetimes ago we came to understand
The gods must remain indifferent to their creation
For the two must become one
They say the sun has a drumbeat in her heart
This is how the two learn to dance
Shedding the skins assigned to us
We are tender children here

This rational disordering
Pulls from the hollow
And makes love to these words
As we sacrifice ourselves
On alters hewn from
The roots and branches of our dreams
And yet the ashes are rejected by both the heavens and the hells
Could we not sip from this life ….the ambrosia
Equally ours as theirs
Did you know that a billion trillion stars love you
We are a precious gift that they gave themselves
For it is the soul, the soul, the soul…..oh precious soul