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

God undoes everything
From interstellar crystalline
To keep a distance in between
Each fair feather
in gusting flocks
in shifting weaves
with sequenced wings
numbered bezels of the clock

ripples role in circles, serpentine
spilt in pools of synchrony
beneath the melt of icicles
drop by drop, a metronome
ticks echoes in the vacancy
and tocks within those secret spaces
of snowflakes falling
and that between
a billion stars reflected, all,
in separate eyes that
once had seen until
all light went out in unison
with one wincing blink,
so darkened skies.

Such well planned placement,
where all things converge
into the vacant.
Where all things converge,
Into the vacant.

Love's mystery unraveling
is a star burning out...
Naught but a flame without its coal;
a constellation sans axis
to circle about.  

When it's meaning exceeds
the object of dreams,
Let it go,
let it go to be loved
to smithereens.

Those days recall less colors
and even less sense
With longer hair like Jackson Browne,
Pensively reeling in half rhymed ballads
walkin’ like Dylan and shredding our voices
like Springsteen.
“walkin’ real loud…”

When poets sang and singers
Listened, from a freight car door
Waiting on an old white fence
Anything that made an album cover.

My crew was meticulously unkempt,
one day shy of a much needed shampoo
but okay -
we were just 'okay' then.
...Surely for another day.

Our moms were old with
thick rimmed glasses and smoked
and our fathers,
they were smoking men too
wearing two shades of gray
tucked in all the way… around
And around, my dad and I went.

We spoke with twisted lips
Groomed our eyes and looked out
From behind narrow poles
and ***** brick walls
That gave, what we knew of our souls,
This, sorta clandestine refuge.

And our pockets
Were empty, our wallets -
were empty .
Except a beer cap and a phone number,
Scribbled and torn from the corner of
a Houghton Mifflin textbook.
“I’ll call her when I get home.”
Let’s go home.

Sitting on the hood of my Torino
I scanned the streets, smelled the tar
Of our last summers burning.

These girls hugged their diaries to their chest
and we’d gaze
we’d gaze through
Sunlit dust and dandelion fairies
eager to unbutton their secret stories about us,
always about us,
and our eyes made such nimble fingers.

We were outward bound on inward glory...
always thinking about love
hoping on plans that’ll get us "laid" by
a girl who wears daisies in her hair.

Big sweet flowers for the butterflies
Stirring in our stomachs
Fluttering to land softly at the entrance
of her big – sweet - flower.
My generation loved love.

I wrote to your sacrilege
Toasted your haram
You were an idol among the dregs
I was a totem in your palm
Love lifts within the scent
leaving the body to quiver
all once between us, rent,
only combustible twigs to give her
Hence,
We ask of death to teach us life
Burn our nests
For torchlight
to shine the way home
and weep of love for which I'll die,
For writing such a poem.

Like a once broken promise, she came to me
Out of my past, across forever seas
Recasting truth into the furrows of dreams
Sewing intimate seeds that hushed the screams

And unsolved riddles of throttling fear
If one day more, hope would not get here
Over rolling swells, far from land
Spices and driftwood and contraband

Like caramel drippings from a Dali sun
Her eyes cast the color on taught sails of muslin
She sweetly falls soft through scents and caresses
Like a settling snowflake on winters dried branches

She is more than a feeling, brighter than sight
She is the stir in the morning to my withering night
And I recall her breath, a fathomless deep
landing home in the heart, from a precipitous leap.

But the bitter serenity when out of my sight
Is her touch to my soul like raw senses at night
I spiral away, she¹ll not get here in time
To keep me from falling deeper in mind.

In this strange numb world, it¹s just her and me
Afloat on the tears, of wounded poetry.

Love's letters clattered in currents
Winds curled to stillness,
in a talus of potpourri,
Season totem, a cluster of hope,
waiting
For one match pulled and struck,
To scare the ghosts from the pyre.
In a choke of smoke
from sweet attar,
Loves heat fans
the embers within
the hearts own fire.

So many words
wrenched from mouth
and wrought from hand
Contortions,
twisted spoken grip,
we strip the evergreen needles
from the bough
and let them fall from the fist,
Sprinkling fir
To the earth as grist.

Had not a sentence stretched from
pulsing ink well
by plume to parchment, or
from warm breath of lip’s beseech
What then of our night would say,
And of our day to listen.

If we do not dare with deeds to fly
Then the falling never ends,
And poem, eternal, ne'er to begin
Loves expression, not its desire,
Is the cachet
to which both life and death aspire.