I’m just passing it along,
All has come - to become gone

But for a fleeting instant at most
love is a guest of an eager host

I become aware that sender I must be,
which is how it now arrives with thee

This golden dove, thy gaze, the time
Carried by messenger from the Divine

Over the Bizarre - this cloud passing by -
Is a trader’s exchange across a bartering sky

Tis only suspended by my arresting eye
Then off again, I let it fly

A poem, a song, a painful illness
Ecstatic whirling around the axis of stillness

Gone from gone, as gifts unwrap
What’s given is done, to be given back

Finding it’s way to hand and heart
By hand and heart once had a start

So you who arrive had come before
I saw another close a door

Waiting, a package sent to ourselves
arriving like stars in a hearts black well

I lean over the edge of introspection
Down to dark waters of a captive reflection

In the ripples of light and shadow I see
A present returned, and the present is me

Am I light emitted or light received
Where am I on the wheel of destiny

All I seek is its cycle's center
Blessed reunion of recipient and sender

I take in teaspoons of light
to feed the darkness…
and it still growls with hunger.

Nothing craves light
more than a shadow
with a secret it wants to show.

I polish mirrors

My story is the collision of what I say
with what you hear or
something careless
That I’m here for

just a sentence
Poorly wrapped
A bow untied
    Unzipped
          Unstacked

All fallen rose petals
Under-watered
wilted pages
Roots of wounded
Periphrasis

Antlers shed
Their velvet read
With some words flown
from lips and bone
much is left      unsaid

Forensics show my story
     s-stumbled
Witnesses heard three shots fired
My story channels
Along sidewalk seams
It seems my time expired

That I was right handed
makes my writing
average
marginalized
a ricochet of plans gone awry
Life stays two paces
ahead of mine

Still this story missed it’s stop
Back to the pages of *your story again
when do I drop my polishing cloth
where does this sentence end?

Skin is shred by ricochet
Shattered marbles shot
by childish thoughts at play
from a circle etched by a blunted knife
into the hardened dirt
of a playground, paved for life

Threads of clarity
patch weary fabric
The cloth of poetry,
real people, real drama,
real tragic

But love holds the hand
that holds the pen
that writes
poignant poems
Where even the homeless
Find a home
wherever the writer can

Earth-candy piñata wrapped in parchment
scribbled with sonnets,
couplets, quatrains
for bat armed readers
and sweet-toothed beaters
swinging at iambic what-ever-meter

Poetry is the ancient press
for the records of humanity –
who drags its demons, ghosts and fairies
from open graves to cemetery

These,life’s dark tunnels through the heart,
Seekers of light endeavor to plod,
Relighting the torch as the flame gets colder
Carrying their stories on heavy shoulders
to deliver our bounty to God

A glowering beat ******
shuffles frayed hems over avenue
I, propped up preened,
through the door he trips,
to find a pew
All this, I watch
with a dour view

Down in a beanery where souls are served
coffee with a shot consciousness,
who nibble on curated cakes of ****

Awaiting liberation from these surroundings
It's a cacophony of diatribe, cackles,
Disenfranchised, dim-witted opining.  
Counting,
quarter time of a song I’d sing to myself
if this woman before me would just
stop talking
over the music in my headphones;
she's talking to me from a bag of bones

“You resemble my brother at Microsoft.”
I asked, “well, is that good?”
And then she asks if I too work at Microsoft -
I detach one earplug, and spit at her feet
"I can't imagine why I would."

Crazy. We, those, who dare to thrive
like dew clung to a thin thread of spider silk;
and how we slide
down, in a moment, a little more
when the breeze of our prey,
quivers the chord

My deeper thoughts ride out
on the tip of a swordfish
dipped in fine finned fears;
from the undercurrents of this vicious tide,
to throttle the banshee that screams with eyes
filled with crystal tears,
that fall into my coffee mug
and sweeten the slake
of our bitter drug.