My winter love I loved in spring;
We met in my nativity.
But when I found my love for him,
He'd met senility.

My autumn love was much the worse,
He met me in my summer's heat
And when the harvest moon arrived,
He'd much too chilly feet.

My summer love was full of life,
But autumn costs a price too steep:
He'd wake each day at half-past two,
And I would be asleep.

My springtime love, though, God preserve
Until he wakes to find me dead.
He takes the winter out of me
And makes me young instead.

Those colours melt and drip and skip
They play on your face and
In your eyes
Whirls pop and sparkle
Like bubbles, first floating and
Falling like lead in the sky
Your chemical properties
Alter in the moonlight
The grass is the ocean
And I’m sinking down below
An underground explorer
Rediscovering what I don’t know
What I thought I knew
The universe like a project
Scattered and unglued
Pieces into pieces
Your molecules separate and congregate
I see a whole new reality
A beautiful complexity
Now so simple in a moment
Inexplicable, understandable
Epiphany.

I.
White’s imprisoned gray.
A black sole subdues
one red glove with a crunch.
There it will pause, fingerless
until the first thaw.

II.
The sun's amber frown of diminished light
slides down black branches
a blundered slight,
but when it hits the ground, it rides
wonders of uninterrupted white.

III.
Steamy columns of warmth
slip through the crack,
pawed open by blue purrs from his white cat—
a tonic wash, to welcome.
slush-slicked, black boots back

IV.
Nuzzled, from the muzzling of a drowsy-
days-long muslin wrap, brown earth bursts
through what white patchwork's left, to cure
her forbidden tramplers with a slurpy
and black-mouthed, aubade kiss.

V.
Winter’s white makes shallow breaths,
and exhausted she coughs black
complaints about the crushed
green of popped-down bottles,
a cellophane orange cat with a close hold
on his shorted stock of shock-
yellow crumbs, and the assorted other
man-made matter mocking
her color, but never her,
wherever they stay.

an ignored mountain so used to abrasion
it can hardly notice any of its mutation

the wandering man is stunned by its existance
not seeing its damage from off in a distance

every night the mountain wonders just how long it will be alone
constantly shielding the valley while having no shield of its own

so it disintegrates into a boulder, so easily moved
the exterior hardened as nature often proves

the rock always envied the clay its ability to mold
its ability to heat instead of remaining cold

but he cannot change the rock,
he cannot change the world, he cannot reverse the clock

and as soon as this man takes off and sets sail
the rock will discover that it is nothing but shale