Walking past the playground at the park
in the center of my grown up city

I hear children, but do not look at them,
their parents’ eyes seem to glare at me.

As I carry on, earbuds infecting my head
their vibrant laughter derides my shady afternoons indoors,
the things my mother said.

Once I wanted to drink grape Kool-Aid, but my mother wasn’t home
and even though she’d told me not to, I decided to make myself some.

I climbed up in the cupboard and took the faded pitcher
then I took the translucent canister below, in which my mother stored her sugar.

I mixed the sugar and synthetic flavor with a knife
a cloud of purple powder rising up.

Despite the fragrant odor, I couldn't be sure I’d added enough.

After the ingredients dissolved, I was ready to drink.
I took a big boy, breakable glass cup from the counter and washed it in the sink.

I dried the cup and set it there, beside the pitcher on the table
But when I raised the pitcher up to pour juice in the glass,

my little arms were just too feeble.

The pitcher slipped, as I lost grip and everything got wet.
As I took white cloths to sop up what I'd done,

the Kool-Aid fell in torrid sheets from the table's edge into my mouth
as warm Summer rain did years later, inhibiting a game I didn't want to play.

The water falling was relaxing and sweet for me both times.
Each accident was my momental, purple rain delay.

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, again,
and I'm wearing green shoes, green shirt--
overeager as usual. I've never really enjoyed St. Patrick's Day, or any other holiday, for that matter, and I find
it ironic that the more significance we give to a person or
event the more their meaning is deluded. But it's good to have something to look forward to.

Today, in America,
St. Patrick may as well be a naked, red-headed lepperchaun.
People don't care about him as much as me; they don't get out of bed
each day that week wearing green and scoffing at
the timid early-spring sun gazing at the short-sleeved men and
brown-thighed women.
Maybe it matters to them that suntans at the beginning
are only de-tubed relics of an ancient, burning photosynthesis
relinquished to the ground. It matters to me more that
these women think-- even more, know!--
that it is too late in the early spring to cover their legs and
allow the pale, unready skin lie in hibernation.
They want to show the men their defined calves and
undefined dreams. They fain naivety with bright hues, such as Kelly.
And I frown, because I know they have to do this, or
I wouldn't notice them. Waking up and putting green shirts on
the whole week leading up to St. Patrick's day.
Anticipating the Spring, which is already here, they raise their glistening
arms in the air and lean back, smiling, to sing a toast to the short, Irish martyr.
Who wouldn't rub their flesh with dripping tongues for fingers?

I want you
                  to know that I forgot
the memory I wanted to expound upon here,
                  the tears I never cried make it difficult to dryly
blot the pages.
                  I suppose you know I never loved you, but
more meaningfully, I hope you now see how trifling and hollow
love is. Like a warm Spring day, love means nothing but the
nearing embrace of a dying star.
                   I want you to know what I'm referring to
in this line. It's called "astronomy." It seems to hold the
attention of other mystics, such as her.
                   But I want you
to know
                    that it's just about gravity and
luminosity and
                    what our star hasn't got, but
others have.
                    The wind blows my page as I'm writing this standing on
my porch, and I fail to
                    Look up. My hand holds down the dry, decaying
tree pulp in an attempt to stabilize the
                    metaphor for
Life
                    your absence has become.
When the dead leaves of last Fall rattle, I can see you there,
running past the chain-link fence containing me and the
tennis surface.
                     It would be weeks before sweat dripped from my nervous
head as we jumped up and down while others slow danced.
                     And then I wake up in my new apartment in a city
you've never been to and remember jumping was only me. It's been seven years, but
I still have my diploma from that early graduation--
it's above my fridge so I can ignore it every time I
reach inside
                      To drink the cool water and
remember the things I should have learned
and the time I ran fast, back
                       to your host parents' so I could use the bathroom
without you knowing, because my stomach was convulsing.
                        And maybe what I meant to say is that the earth's on
its yearly sojourn which brings me to that place-- that group of folding chairs
and the endless line of cows dancing slowly past the podium with nothing
but a piece of paper that tells them "you were once here."
                        It takes me on the highway, past my father's farms to that
man-made reservoir that irrigates them. It amuses Nebraskan farm boys
that the girls that ride along seem to know the way
                        better.
                        But you weren't from Nebraska, and you only knew the way
in water, in the bikini I helped you choose at target-- I don't remember the hue.
                         Your skin looked amazing and warm
                         transplanted, prairie-grass nestled gently on your supple thighs
under my grasping hands which held on firmly yet
were knocked off with the jolt as you spurred our gas-powered sea-horse, laughing
as we both sped off from our island rendezvous and
became oblivious of my self.

I sit in the open, waiting
            like Earth,
for Apophis to near me
                     and near me
                     and near me
                                 again                 leaving...
What
          *******
                       difference
does it make?

           Each time it passes our compact
dust clod in space
           I will be rooting for it
and that says more about humanity
than I ever could.

             Yep, today
was a good day.
              What the sun hath
wrought!

If naming is to ****, you remain a rose to me, or consciousness of Spring and thunderstorms with lightning strikes on green hills sporting tiny, yellow triangles on poles.
They pulsate in windy gusts of hail. The others would **** you out of the short grass, just to play on.
You have no value to them in their minute, diesel-powered, plastic cages.
Mowed shortly, rose, is the grass, so that their ***** can roll, unimpeded by friction with you-- your shape
and your form.
Your red, in the aftermath of a gray cloud is pernicious and sodry.

They don't want you, rose. They value you less than the sand they fall into. You are something outside of their game and they don't smell your odor at all. You could be the shortest tree, they'd chip away from you, regardless.
Why, rose, do you insist on planting yourself on their putridly pristine links?
Why not, rather, lie beside me, unraveled and plucked, on my bed? I get more pleasure from your dissection and thorny vulnerability.
I will cut your stem, yet feed you in a vase;
You'll grow before I take you apart.
Rose, we're all going to unravel-- some with fewer petals, some with fewer strokes.
But why be decimated by those who swing aimlessly the metal rod?
My lips, rose, and my tongue, don't play golf.
And aren't you glad?
When the thunder clashes and the rain comes, they can't play
but we can.

"Do you two know each other? Well, then get to know each other."

I, with my skin around the neck, your hands on my blue dress-shirt.

Yes, it's no regular dress-shirt; it's really a v-neck t-shirt.

But, girl, you don't actually have hands either.

In the normal sense, that is, you do-- of course. But not around me, or my dress-shirt
or v-neck t-shirt.

They are on your arms, by your sides and, without love, you carry them through the desert each day.

And your feet ply my shoulders-- because I am sand beneath clouds.

I am sand beneath hate, under t-shirts and under blue dress-shirts which are actually v-neck t-shirts.

I am sand, with your hands on my surface and my skin around the neck.

And sand does not find itself in the desert-- it just is.

Two shards of the same stone, eternally separated, though resting on each other.

Yes, I am closing your eyes for you.
It's good that way. What is wrong with not seeing?
Can't you still hear and touch or feel?
I would gladly describe for you what runs crookedly before my face:
Thousands of trumpets without whispers or meaning.

Yes, and it tastes so rich, like plaster-- white, average plaster.
Your songs, your opinions and meaning are, without vision,
pale, cool and evaporous, as April rainbows.
Therefore you all want to de-color them and call such rainbows
black-and-white compositions.

Well then, sweetheart, why are you sad? Have you not slept with your dreams of neutral rainbows?
Twice--
Eaten, your plaster-filled silence?
Four times--

And been drunk with the aroma of moist soil?           ONCE.
.Lewd.
"Ego cogito nihil"
Can you, after all, read?
Never, without the eyes--