Oh, sad Poet,
cartographer
of the heart,
mapping the geography
where sadness
is the topography
of your soul.

Oh, Cousteau
of the changing tides,
like an oceanographer,
an admiral  spying
the enemy on the horizon.
Your sorrow comes and goes.

Oh, builder of sad dreams
in your house of many rooms,
but one door. Like a grave,
a casket shellacked with
black paint, a mural
of a shadow on the wall.
Architectural sorrow.

Oh, you sad Poet,
open your eyes,
paint us a poem of a rose.

You may as well dance
to the tune of a blue moon.

Or sing a lullaby to the sun,
eat a bellyfull of stars,
try to keep away from bars. :)

How do we write about love?

It's too hard to capture in words,
and in verse it's even worse.

But the hardest thing of all
isn't when we fall,
it's when we let it go.

How do you say that, you know?

When the seed
of envy grows
into a big tree,
the fruit is bitter,
and the tea
from the bark
stains your soul
and your poetry.

If you think of me in the spring,
think of dogwood petals
in my hair, greener grass
and new beginnings.

If the summer solstice
finds you walking alone
in the garden of the moon,
remember that I'm somewhere
walking alone, too.

If you sing of me,
sing in the fall
in blue flannel and jeans
like the saddest song of all.

And if I pretend to die,
and you pretend to weep,
I promise to do it in the winter
when there are no flowers
to send in your pretended grief.

I spit the moon, a fingernail,
in the black eye of night.

Stardust was born
from the dirt of a lifetime.

I had the universe at my fingertips,
and blew it away like a kiss.

The world is a better place for my loss.

If I look long enough I'll see
mammoth bones with butcher marks,
a broken flint blade between the ribs
- an empty crib, Madonna's face, a swan
on a snake with two heads - instead
of lightly stained pine grains
on the back of a dusty shelf half-
full of myself, old books and odd things
with lost words waiting in the wings.

Listen, it's a beautiful thing
when distilled to its essence;
reduced to its purest form.
A paradox and a paradigm;
a paragon of perfection.
Epic in its arythmetic
progression; poetic.
Like Chinese arithmetic,
so hard it hurts. Yet soft
and exquisite, like a bubble
of love caught in a beating heart.
That place where poetry starts.