love takes a
#life, but be not
#sad for,
#pain gives
#depression respite, but more that
#death, gives life
#poetry, so that in times of trouble it's
#you I see, as a
#heart in a lighthouse for a
#poem lost at sea

Todays tears in our eyes
from hearing a voice, a song back then
could quench an aching world,
if we’d just all fall in love….again.

O’ gather up those endured sorrows
my lovely friends of yesteryear and morrow
and set sail on these saline streams…
toward remember-when – foretold in dreams.

There – time and distance, have no say
There – we RE-arrive to not part ways
and what was once,
is happily, magically…always.

The only truth is the one I choose,
and choose,
                       and choose, then
what of these arrows
dipped in an elixir
                of delusion,
                                 and illusion.

Yes, a shaft may go awry,
but the archer always makes his mark
                in the blink of a
                                 bulls eye.

We’ll sooner slowly die from bleeding
than from the poison on the arrows tip;
listen for the bow of truth
               in the sound
                                 of the arrows slip.

The universal adhesive
for pairs who seek to be as one,
is in whether each can endure being two,
I as one, you as one
                I choose, you choose,
                                  we’re chosen.

He was love’s fool
A drop of rain
In a downpour of seasonal shame
A farthing in the fountain
Spent on wishes
Glistening in the fenlands
Of unreplenished riches

A plea, among the rustling
In a vast forest of variegated leaves
Sorrow among garrulous winds gusting
A path through
His wooded pathos
Blazed with love and lusting

Then a tear finds wing
On a falling leaf
Snapped from the limbs
by currents of heat
rockabye'd into halcyon
so misery and his companion
Forge a new coin

Thrown and flipping along an arc
A pinwheel casting solar sparks
Purling hope in a tumbling fall
promises anything can happen
To anyone
Anytime
at all

I asked my mind
why it is
you I’ve come to love
A hundred reasons given me
and still was not enough

So I asked
why it is
I fell in love with you
Knowing there’s a difference
between these questions two

My mind took pause, I shook my head,
there was no answer, none
Then revealed my heart, “beloved
“Why it is,” tis enough, that
I need not count past One.”

I remember a time when I
didn't have to remember a time

When butter only came in sticks.
And the trash men came every morning
When a Chevy was just a Chevy...
And my dad parked it for free
and the cops would give us a warning

Memories when freedom smelled like barbecue
and my fingers tasted like Old Bay
we crunched corn on the cob
and sat with lit faces beneath fireworks,
not watching, waiting, miles away

When it wasn't who had the bigger yard,
but which yards could be conjoined to make
the biggest football field
and our parents voices,
not cell phones, called us
to gather around the supper meals

I remember when
lawyers were great
because we hardly ever needed them
When we feared dying more than being poor
When we called them jobs,
not income back then.

I remember when an endless ringing phone
or even a haunting busy tone
required no further investigation...
because at least you knew
she was ... home

...When love meant you don't have to stop looking,
"just keep looking at me."
Because romantic love didn't grow in diversions
like weeds in fertile soils of commiseration
I remember you looking at me

I remember when you could hear me
draw a tranquil breath
between each  spoken rhyme
…rather than me listening alone
to memories tapped
into liquid -
                     crystal -
                                    diode -
                                                  lines.

There is a moment before the sun sets,
just before the top of its crescent
disappears below the farthest edge of the earth.

It is a divine promise of yet another
smoldering spectrum of burnt orange,
crimson and cobalt.

A promise of the days last warmth
before night calls us to dreams...
before we smile,

knowing, with the reminder on our skin,
that tomorrow, the sun will come up again,
only to leave us with this pristine moment
once more.

Such splendid sweet endings to a day…
never to melt into the same horizon...
never to burst with a less spectacular display of Heaven.

This is hope, tumbling over and upon itself...
writhing like eddies, lost in the directionless winds...
this amazement is just God,
sighing into the end of our day.

For Alonso, the day was sinking into dusk
But for Dulcinea, her knight was rising.
Long his lance’s shadow stretched
And thus his stories, picaresque.

He flaunts his tale of espionage,
Purring silent and clandestine
“there I sprung from camouflage
and smote these vile leviathans!”

“Oh, please don’t stop,” the gypsy cries
draining doubt from starlit eyes
From behind her fan of elegant slips
She retracts the rivets to her lips.

Alonso mounts the moment of his concupiscence
to rescue the fair Dulcinea from her diffidence.
But the windmills turn for our quixotic man
Whose delusions are rescued by a chaste heroine.

Years later a man was overheard in Cordoba…
el estaba hablando con unas senoras
“Oye musas, puedo decirte,
he visto algunas cosas.”

“…mi vida se salvo una noche estrellada
por una mujer de gran belleza
que volvio a las tablas de la fortuna
aqui, en mi reino de Iberica…”

Prologue:
                 sitting at my desk,
                 Criss-cross applesauce
                 gasping like a dying child.
                 Dying to flee the corpse of a man.

I, not a child anymore,
Whose imagination is a broad highway
Layered between the wings
Of a dragonfly

Behind me
Stumbling the furrows
Dust from age trails in the eddies
It is I, running like a child

Wagon wheels gargle and giggle
Ungreased, unglued
Another child watches, and watches
******* 99 pebbles in her pocket

Dandelions blink awake
From dust sewn,
Sun pinched wishes

Lost lashes behind me
We, not children,
Chase circles into soil
Tightening the noose
Around the son of the father

Dragonflies sip
Morning reflections
From a pond surface
My highway’s washed away.

Love is a steady wind
that erases what we know of it
as soon as we try to grasp.
It is pre-eternal wisdom,
named by God,
whispered only in the heart.

A feather softly landed.
Let it lie.
Ti’s an attribute of another name.
Eternal light,
Not intermittent flame.
When called through lips
A sound, a kiss became.

When a breath says “love”
It’s lost to winds,
Only to land
if it flies again.
Of this fierce glow
that Love and You
Within my breast inspire,
The Sun is but a spark that flew
And set the heavens afire.

Even shadows choose to whirl
lithely in the beams,
romancing other silhouettes
seeking revelation in their dreams.

Compassion, do not hasten them,
nor wake them from repose
for in the moment two dreams alight
the awoken lover glows.

Stand boldly in love’s mystery
as slings and arrows sail,
through the strident journey
hush, listen for the nightingale,

who’s song seeps through a cloven heart,
mending fragments into one;
seek the source that hides unbroken
in the brilliance of the Beloved’s Sun.

She’s underhand throwing words with her mouth
The boy leans in past natural borders, to study the agenda in her eyes
He is built like a bent paperclip,
with bottlebrush forelocks, a barracuda jaw.

Between her bare legs, she gently squeezes
a cup of iced hibiscus tea.
She reaches down and lifting it to her lips,
I feel mine part, in thirsting sympathy…

Her upper thighs blush wet with condensation as
The boys eager fingers click on her knee,
like ice cubes in her sweating berry hibiscus,
floral melt cascades down her throat.

Fairy breath lands on my shoulders - my silk overcoat
It makes me dissolve with memory
of my beloved tea picker,
a cocoa skinned Sudanese girl
traveling the road to market in Al-Junaynah,
swaying in the truck bed under a warm sun,
dreaming of red karkadeh flowers
and a paper clip boy.

If I knew who I’d be
by the last written line of this poem.
If I knew who’d sway, besotted, beside me
to lean in and catch the last word
of our maundering sobhet;
If this, I’d never have left
my Beloved's company to begin with.

I crawled wild-eyed from the depths
of the inexplicable,
cold embers of abandoned age,
To go there.
To go to the tip
where the flame flickers
and breath burns.

The Beloved is the earth,
my awareness, roots.
If this,
then love is the water
flowing through the rock,
drawn up the vine
to fatten the grape.
This drunken dance
is a fruit harvest
We fools are the wine makers.
Who gets who intoxicated?

Bestami Bayazid said,
       "I am the wine drinker and the wine and the cupbearer
I came for from Bayazid-ness as a snake from its skin.
Then I looked and saw that lover and beloved are one
I was the smith of my own self.
I am the throne and the footstool.
Your obedience to me greater than my obedience to you
I am the well-preserved tablet.
I saw the Kaaba walking around me."

I say, I arrived in this place two sunsets back
but I did not have to travel to get here.
The earth makes its way around the sun on my behalf.
My journey is both a somber desert
and a purling rain forest
It is my pause that makes one or the other so.

A hungry sparrow hops cautiously through bread crumbs
strewn around a fat loaf of bread.
The feast is on the table, our hands in our pockets,
our mouths sealed shut,
bellies full of hesitation, we circle the spread.
Empty are the stores of those who
Cannot sate their hunger for truth.

The empty belly of a sparrow
sees the universe in a morsel of bread
So of what use is the whole loaf.

Who we are not, weathers through time
be it by water, wind, will or wine.
Gazing into the talus of our becoming
Amidst the course, drifts the fine.

Our purpose is to bear the breeze
With lips to cup, till weakened knees
Besotted within a life between
Pre-eternal, post eternity.

Thirsting through our body’s gristle
flows the milk beneath the thistle
you, true content sans container
Are pulsing spirit, interstitial.

Beautiful mosaic
Of a fragmented heart
Made of clay and
And broke apart.

Parched by drought
What more brings rain
to remembrance
of the Beloved’s name.

It is in my silence
that You hear
how my burning thirst
mouths a drought of tears.

Hearts pump harder
when we bleed, as
Absence sounds the hollows
Of the waiting reed.

Into enormity of emptiness,
the vastness of the beloved to disclose
The sweetest water ever sipped
– by the lovers parched and longing lip –
is the fragrance of the wine red rose.

I dream
She lies
with her eyes open
flying fish leaping
from two placid oceans
catching moonlight
in their silver scales

I wake
She lies awake, not seeing
that I watch her
talk to God
I can tell from her fathomless gaze
And I am amazed
at how far her eyes
can see

She lies, I lie
woken in each others eyes
My pond, her ocean
I drift – in her devotion
to seek beyond measure,
Yet it’s not the conquest
of her vision
but the silence
in her surrender

She lies awake
dreaming
My eyes opened,
Sleeping.
At sea, it’s
us three,
an angler of stars
the Beloved
And thee

I slip an arrow from the quiver
Oh last messenger please deliver,
This note I’ve written from my heart
And without which, I’m only part  “
I licked the feathers, drew the bow
Closed my eyes and let it go.
I hear the fibers resonate
A gentle sound for such a fate
Point, then shaft, then feathers fly
A line of hope across the sky
I open my eyes but lose its sight
A glowing arrow, in waning light
Wishing all its time aloft
I’m unaware the note slips off
Falling gently through the air
It softly finds an archer standing there
Drawing arrow and preening feather
She pauses and begins to read the letter
A kiss of words to hush the shiver
Returning her arrow to its quiver.
In her heart, she bears the note
While my heart longs for what it wrote
Oh messenger please hear my prayer
Return my note with an archers care.

You’re too used to your blunted ways
Worn habits of reason is why you stay
So tired of hearing the same arcane
From a heart that cashes in on pain
Grab your Sufi sluicing pan,
Ya Allah, let’s pull the gold of soul by hand
From this parched and grinning desert creek
Sift the dust and graveled speech
Unlearn the ways you understood
Mine the vein, the pay is good.
Trade the bone china we can’t afford
For tin cans, wool, and a Damascene sword.

.
.
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.

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.
.
.

Up here, hollering winds unsettle dust
softening on Empyrean
rising thermals graze cloud meadows
Up here, those who dress in shadows
dare not enter dreams of men.

Upon my brow this nimbus glows
Bestowed on my ascent
I bow in flight, on wings wraithlike
eschew the day to chase the night,
in bolts across the firmament.

Surrender brings lightness to a leaf
Behold my feather, the freer’s blade
Time is but a morrows thief,
A bounty box of verdant leaves
Released before the ransom’s paid.

Oh Icarus, what have you done?
Our escape was not your calling
Through life we sleep and death we rise
Yet vanity undreamt your vaster skies
Into an ocean, woken, falling.

(but this is an excerpt)*

"...There she is.
Lover has been wearing the same sneer
since the dawn she was drawn from the womb;
only today,
I notice it has softened, faded.
It is even more perfect.

She had the cerise lips of Calliope,
pensive and piquant.
I never saw them pursed or closed. Instead,
the corners of her mouth curled into parenthesis
around some sardonic remark about to be made –
yet all this time,
I had never heard her speak a word.

Exposed below the weight of the cosmos,
I imagine curled-up dreaming foxes in their dens
and I close my eyes
and she fades into existence. Clarity
in crisp blue jeans,
poised with hips sweeping up sensual imaginings
from a corpus of creative possibilities.

My lover is standing on a cold brick sidewalk
of a city affixed firmly to the soles of her
black suede boots — as if the earth
would fall out from beneath us
if I were to lift her up.
The profile of her face is obscured by
strokes of deep mahogany tresses,
woven with striations of brushed brass. I study her
smooth and flush skin,
the curve of high cheekbones, and the gentle bend
of a gloved wrist
as she tightens her black scarf..."

Our moments collect in concentric rings about the nexus
Of a first embrace, adorned with Autumnal colors and scents -
We lovers blend, cupped gently below the stir of flecks and dapple.
Each leaf high up quivers in the bouquets and knows when to let go,
Fly and fall to earth.

Whispers from a rustling canopy climb down the bark encasements
Of these tall and somnolent trees, thirsty leaves that clatter and kiss,
Wink awake – brilliant – hold our gaze and suspend our hearts.
In a pirouette amidst the amity of recollection and premonition -
We shimmer in an iridescence of saffron on copper – remember this.

Moments light up, each one, for just an instant, the last of our lives;
Each conveniently the beginning of forever and forever smiles at us.
Rippling across the cycles of solstice and equinox, we radiate –
A nostalgic procession toward unmade memories, like tree rings.
We fly and fall in love.

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.

A seed found furrow in my brow
Awaiting harvest, hungers now

Through my fertile mind’s palimpsest
A vine breaks soil where memories nest

Pushing on with a writhing stem
From deep brown earth toward blue welkin

With nostalgic rays, a star unfolds
a leaf, a story, yet untold

Each bud a poem that’s yet to bloom
In flowered couplets for the moon

awaiting dawn, for petals pleat
to release a blossom’s fragrance sweet

And from one strand a spider weaves
a gossamer web on trembling leaves

to capture prey that seeks to read
Poetic verse among the weeds.

Plant and spider thus conspire
conscripting minds of like, inspired,

to sew words of thorns, that never wilt
till every bough, a bookshelf built

Discordant leaf chatter
argues over the path,
dispersed by a nettled wind
This is the Fall of my life.
Every breath shivered
and twirled on the air,
Fogging a glass piece
Through which I stare.
At lions at play
in the depths of my soul,
fierce and gentle
On ethereal fields.
Moon rays softened
on the curves of your hair.
now stars on their nightly procession
clatter like ignited leaves
Across my path,
where all will join the Fall.

Quietly sighs the dawn
long and languid through the hours
All to come about lies in wait
Per chance, to say
Something sagacious,
Something great.

Dreamers wide awake;
So erudite and perspicuous.
As if their dreaming
were to dream
away the smothering Incubus

That sponges up the will to act
by a forlorn soul expecting
that fortune’s grin will have it's heart
as effortlessly as it's wanting.

Stock-still and stunned of mobility
Tipped teaspoons heaped with emptiness
Into steaming cups of void
Sipped by thirsty lips of young
on blarney stone, a kiss and tongue,
to speak their yearning with sang-froid.

Dear Ed.
You'll have to forgive me if I
stop favoriting most of your work.  It's all spectacular,
and if good poems were gravy,
I'd need more bread.  
And a bucket.

But you see,
33 years ago, despite my uncontainable appreciation
for the many high school graduation checks,
I broke me sense of gratitude
while handwriting out scores of "thank  you notes.”
Now, I’m unable to offer even the slightest compliment
with these ungrateful fingers.  

So forgive me, if I'm hard-pressed
to as much as click a “heart”
or a “thumbs up” button;
for even one more of your upgrades to the Holy Grail.

And don’t bother clicking my stuff.  There are no more
thank-you fish in Walden pond;
I’m ingrate enough for the both of us.

Just know
as my mouse goes quiet, your **** is **** good.  
**** good.
"And that goes for the rest of you
poems."

By the end of this poem, those once vibrant
shall slough off in horizons of necrosis.
As I tap out completion,
their summer cedes to countless performances;
actors bow before the closing curtain of Autumn.

The maelstrom of summer-lovers lulls to a murmur
And the great Mevlana’s couplets and Khayyam’s quatrains
Float away on the formations of down-bound geese.
You’ll hear the Doppler shift of devotion’s goodbye
On the whines of the locomotive’s whistle.

By the end of this poem, the thistle fades
from heliotrope to gun metal gray.
The clandestine scent of “once-whens”
Wafts into a future of “now-agains.”
Yet, this new Fall is bittersweet.
Before another ******* of trees,
a red rose blushes in reminiscence.

By this poems end, I’ll be in love
with the chill of an approaching season
wearing the brightest flower in my garden of poetry
One last choke on the rising smoke
as the last painful stanza goes
Into the solemn procession
toward the sacred pyre of leaves.

Sadly, I dreamt
in forgotten words
or none at all.

A child stooped low and picked up a stone
About yay big, with a rounded edge
He could find no reason to put it in his pocket
So he jumped to his feet instead.

The boy’s eyes narrowed as he thought of this stone
About yay big, with a soft smooth face
He could find no reason to keep it in his hand
So drew back his arm and aimed.

His thumb and forefinger curled around the stone
About yay big, and obsidian black
He could find no reason to wait any longer
And his arm sprung like a steel trap.

The youth caught his balance as on went the stone
About yay big, with a glistening sheen
It skipped once, twice, and it lost momentum
Disappearing in the ripples of the stream.

So are the thoughts of aging men
Holding dreams in the palms of their hands
They cast their stones along the surface of time
And spend their lives trying to find them again.

Last night your bedroom was tattoo-parlor-red…

You were a relentless *** machine
and your Alex Esguerra painting was knocked from the wall
during our rough housing. I found it
broken behind the bed
when I was looking for my second sock…
the other sock was still in my hand when I woke.

I love the way you always fall asleep diagonally
across the bed, so that
I lie awake, contorted and trying to figure out a way
to fit comfortably and proportionally
into your sprawling unconsciousness.

Yesterday, I loved your morning countenance;
void of expression
as you looked down your nose at the coffee press.
Your upper lip rested heavily on the lower, which seemed
immovable, that I’m not sure it will ever change.
It was too tired to be a pout and
I couldn’t look away –
so I must have loved it.

In the throws of passion last night,
you moaned that I made you sick to your stomach. I asked
if it was because I was too far inside you. You said,
“you’re always too far inside me.
That’s why you make me sick.”
And then you came and
rolled off of me.

I woke with only one leg in my jeans,
my mouth was coated with body paint,
and my chest was clawed into military ranks
by your flesh filled nails.

My other leg was propped on top
of an old pine blanket box at the foot of your bed
and my right arm was folded behind me
and numb. So I threw a sweatshirt over my shoulder –
I think it belonged to your old boyfriend, the one
you made the Esguerra painting with –
and I walked out of your flat leaving the door open.
Your cat slipped out behind me and
followed me downstairs to the sidewalk.
I didn’t care.

I sat blankly staring at Sweet’N Low packets
under a newspaper rack at the coffee shop on the corner,
holding my mug for what seemed like
an eternity of suspended animation –
the grip on it’s handle was the only thing
that connected me to the planet.

My eyes held that same lack of expression as yours did, but
my lips were parted so that air could
flow freely in and out if it
became necessary.

Sitting lost in state, it occurred me, that
I deeply and authentically affect you
and it has nothing to do with *******.

Your boyfriend’s sweatshirt was a size too big for me
and I could tell he wore Creed –
I saw a bottle of it on the toilet tank. It’s redolence
clashed with the aroma of roasting coffee and
I was startled from stasis.

So I left, walking out to a cacophonous city, where
the sun had just exploded over the horizon,
and I smiled into its blinding brilliance.
As the door squeaked closed behind me to a snap,
I looked to the right for a moment,
then turned left.
I had no idea where I was walking to and started
blithely swinging my arms
as I accelerated my gait.

I still had my sock in my hand.
And your cat is probably dead.

These days, the “sell by” date
dictates the menu for my morning meal.
The next torpedo through the torpor
will be the sound of last nights unfinished dinner
scraped into the centrifuge of my garbage disposal;
separating hardened gruel into densities of curiosity.

The absinthe must have done our cooking
as I’m not familiar with the remains
and I can’t even boil water.

Damning the torpedoes
I ponder my death
and my whirring mind,
as it spins apart the densities of a girl
still passed out in the crevices of my couch,
spun-out shards of cold, pungent, pulp.

I need something for the pain
... instructions on the label read,
               “take two pills on an empty soul and
                 call your publisher in the morning.”

Writing on an empty stomach
only exacerbates this unfulfilled addiction.
My motivation is a hope that one day
I’ll overdose on literary completion
and die quietly in the dawn
beside my “best use by” date.

Hopes we take into our sleep
Become the seeds of dreams to come;
Fears then, roots of nightmares.
Stir our hearts awake,
If you must
Wind gypsies crooning quixotic notes
Dappled like leopard in dandelion dust
Caught in the clatter of castanets
If poems were sheep, this one would be black
That one is black,
And that one is black.
Pupils leaping into pathos,
Without a splash,
That one is black, that one is black.
Somnolence, when ripples lull
Where all lambs go, when somnolent,
When somnolent.

A poem is a bird
in a gilded cage
a pining soul
on a weeping page.
Open the door
but still it stays
Close the door
and it flies away.

This love is going to **** me,
Each remembered kiss, a slice
to my heart, drawing rivers of words,
to exsanguinate on pages upon pages
of never-ending, ending.
Love bleeds like a sorrowful spring
and yet I keep defending, defending.

Tonight is a night to embrace the lover
to rattle our shells from our ocean's echo
and stir like soul winds wound
in contrapposto... An inhale cedes
In a sigh sweet staccato.

Within the offset sheets of folded rose skin
cured as parchment, pages to be opened
A torch cast shadows on the hearts wall
The rose is illuminated by and all
born from the light of creation.

Impregnated by dew, grape swells to a drop
to burst and roll down the blade
of the vintner's sword into the goblet
O tiny red ocean, O fermentation
release me now, the ransom is paid.

He said I've plucked many roses
from countless bushes
Placed them in fine crystal vases.
But you are a garden
and I, to die,
have been placed within you,
In placeless places.

This one catches flight on another's breeze
so many cross winds to the sea
This one leather, that one caramel
to be brindle, to be softened
Kun faya koon, kun faya koon
Be, so it is to be.

Oh God, I hate this distance,
that keeps my mouth watering.
Watering for Thee.

Some friends are like the leaves in fall.
From the verdant spring they unfurl
in their splendor and vibrancy.
In soft whisper and summer hiss,
they stage the hues of blossoms and ballads
and whistle birdsongs from hidden branches.

Elevating from their ecstatic state of equinox,
these satellites drift into the so-long’s of solstice,
and from hue to hubris, calling come hither,
lofty leaves dance and whirl and vault
in the Autumn air for new friends of fair,
who too will turn like bookish pages into pulp.

Fly from twig in twilight, oh friends,
fade to saffron, russet and rust
carmine to cobalt into forgotten pyres of time
Fall friends, fall into the dirt and dust,
For in the spring you shall route the roots
from which fresh leaves feed, unfold, and revel sublime.

Her whispers writhe upward, warming my lips
Chased gently by thoughts, and fingertips
Which pulse over keys, sewing words onto fields
Of love thirsty parchment, tenderly peeled
From shavings off banyan trees, twisted in time
Woven from tangles of roots and vines
That glimmer and glide on the twirls of her hair
That coil around dreams as they swirl in the air
And reciprocate whispers that blend into sighs
Reflecting like moonlight in opening eyes.
Honey silk visage and java, like brindle,
Eyes like flint against frizzen, will kindle
Fire in the heart, calling men once missing
To a resplendent nexus, of lost souls kissing.
Arcadian journeys of body and mind
Sing from fathomless depths of space and time.
Geography traversed by her steps, sublime
Bearing piedra de ijada from a far eastern mine.
Electricity leaps in passionate arcs,
from skin to skin in dendritic sparks,
That strobe over rhythm beneath the sheets,
as lovers listen and friction speaks
in syncopation with shuddering breaths,
from sodden mouths that sweetly press,
And I close my eyes in synchronicity,
but even closed, it’s her I see.
Tasting the salt of a single tear
A harbinger, for the moments near.
High on the hum of hopes embrace
as rapture and destiny hasten the pace,
I open my eyes to watch her go,
but once inside it starts to grow
into a poem unleashed in my heart,
By a byzantine kiss, after lost lips part.

Broad shouldered lions
stand over the ocean’s quietude,
roaring thunder in the surf,
thudding sand laden questions
with salt soaked and matted paws.

Surly supplicants beseech the sea,
whose tides answer only to the sun and moon.
A lions home is the African veldt,
so, go home king of hearts…
The seeker leads and the answers follow.

For, what gives the lion his strength,
is the softness of his dreams.