This skin I’ve worn
has fit me snug
and served me well
for some time now
But I feel it shifting,
bristling,
drying out,
curling up
I know the day
is coming soon
when I must
shrug it off
I have carried as much
of the past as would
cling to me
Like a glacier drags
the gravel of decades
behind it
And I am finally ready
to empty into the sea.

– mrg

Take a walk with me
through my soul, over
miles and miles of open land

Through the forests
brimming with honeysuckle
and songbirds

Along the jagged majesty of indigo
mountains jutting like saw teeth
from the pink-gummed horizon.

Do you see? How you color
the sky over it all?

Watch golden hour spill like a
molten avalanche across the valley –
sunset planting a rose in every shadow.

– mrg

The mind is a beast
we are all tasked with
taming

But how? When mine
ducks every lasso, throws
me from the saddle, kicks
dirt in my mouth

Is an ocean of riling blood
beneath the throbbing
bruise of sky

Colliding thunderheads
thicker than smoke threatening
a slaughter of rain

And I:
shipwrecked in its mess

A splintered mast and torn
sail swallowed by a wall of
water black as my most
poisoned thoughts

Sinking like a pearl to the
shifting, tectonic floor of
my own body

Drawing breath through
a mouthful of sand, my pruning
hands bound by the mangled
leather of a pair of reins

Yet reins cannot tame the sea.

– mrg

While you sleep I trace the tender
green stalk of your wrist.

Over the upturned Earth of your palm
and along each curled stem of your fingers

tipped with marigold. Warm rainwater
pools between our two hands pressed together

like wet leaves. The frown lines etched
into your forehead remind me of tree rings

or keys of a wheezing accordion –
smoothing then wrinkling again.

Its song whistling through your nose on
lazy morning-breaths. Whispering

in and out of the thousand golden Aspen leaves
quaking from my untrimmed chest.

Your blooming into my life marked the end
of the longest drought season.

I smell the dust settling. Hope taking
root beneath the arid soil.

Love’s monsoon moving in over the horizon,
heavy with a blessing rain.

– mrg

Through the windshield,
the moon hangs low
and enormous in a sky
of frozen obsidian

We sidewind through
the neighborhood
for a better look at
her face

It is harder than it used to be
to see the moon

She materializes in and out of
the rows of houses, emerges
from the silhouette of one
pruned hedge before diving
behind another

We chase her
to the top of the hill,
passed the last lonely
skeleton of a streetlamp

where she glowers down over
the rooftops uninterrupted
like the massive, golden
eye of God.

– mrg

I want to quit my job
at the restaurant

Escape with my beloved
to a mild-weathered mountain-
sweet spot

Put hammer to nail
and start building
our lives’ work

Plant the seeds our children
will watch bud, blossom
and fruit

if we ever have any

I want as many long years
together as we can get

I want to live to be 100

I want to watch the world
evolve into a state I can bear
to leave it in – in peace

I want to open my eyes
in a place I know God exists

where the souls of everyone
I love welcome me in an embrace
of feathered wings

I want them to say: “See?
You were right! We’ve been
here all along.”

More than anything,
I want you by my side

And if the time comes
to make the long journey
in another body,

I want you to follow me
into the next life.

– mrg

Many moons have risen and set
over the desert since quarantine
began, and now

I am losing steam

Stopped reading my horoscope

I get high earlier and earlier in the day

A method to combat my mounting stress
as this country chugs up and up towards
the evasive summit of this pandemic

Surely there must be some other way
to transform all this nervous energy

than digging my heels deep into the
locomotive floor, through iron
and dirt below

But the usual channels are blocked

Besides, nothing I write can stop the days
from passing

One into the next like railroad track
building itself beneath each spark
thrown by another revolution of steel

Or keep our unqualified conductors
from ushering us forward, foaming
at the mouth, closer and closer to

the end of the line

A train wreck the people won’t survive, but
the economy will.

– mrg

No matter if the universe is an accordion.

However many parallel worlds
may be wheezing in the folds of its bellows.

No matter how many other
versions of ourselves there are

stumbling around in circles in the dark,
retracing our footsteps from a past life

in the next. No matter if we’re all pawns
pushed around the chess board

to someone else’s gain – I like to think
we find each other in every single reality.

A thread binding our fates that neither time
nor space can sever.

I choose you over and over.

– mrg

The window in my childhood
bedroom facing southeast
hasn’t changed –

Same scratched sill, torn
screen

Sticking in the same place
when opened too wide –

but the world beyond it has

People walk their dogs
wearing surgical masks

The hospitals spill over
like cupped palms beneath
a broken faucet

And yet beyond the window,
the world goes on:

The absentminded Aspens
shiver in the gusting wind

Shaking their leaves like
tiny tambourines

The cattle graze in the
pasture, unbothered

And the familiar saw-
toothed silhouette of the San
Juans lords over it all

as it has for thousands of
years before me, as it will
for thousands of years
after I am gone.

– mrg

One day, I will summit
the mountain of my own mind

Rocky and daunting as the
trail may be

How many times
has the pickaxe of a thought
struck gold in a vulnerable vein –

the sheer cliff face crumbling
away beneath my clenched fists
filled with loose gravel?

Or the crevasse of a memory
opened up without warning,
threatening to swallow me whole?

I have been buried beneath
avalanche after avalanche of anxiety,

lost my footing just as the
peak came into view through
early-morning mist

As many failed attempts as it takes,
I will keep climbing toward the
pinnacle of my potential

where all the fears and doubts
that towered over me once

will seem microscopic from
such a staggering height.

– mrg

The first day of Spring
has me in a mood to
shake my remaining
winter blues

For months, the shutters
have been drawn tight

It’s passed time to crack
open a window and air
out my lingering stuffiness,

shed some natural light
in the corners of me where
darkness has settled

Sweep my mind clean of
the tired bones its been
chewing over

Scrub out the ring that has
formed around the tub from
my wallowing in self-
pity a little too long

Finally release all the
negativity, resentment,
comparison, and doubt I’ve
kept boxed up in my closet

And dust off the gratitude
I’ve been slacking on
practicing – break myself away

from the screen and out into
the bluebird day tugging on
my hair

Already I feel lighter, the
air somehow easier to breathe

I sense my internal scales
leveling again, the heaviness
lifting from my chest like
a melting snowdrift

A moon of many names is
rising tonight: crow,
sugar, worm

Its sign the same for all of us
returning to life beneath it

Who were sure we would
suffocate beneath another
year of our own dirt

Who, in our winter, have
denied our spring

She rouses within us now,
unoffended

Brings with her on the thawing
horizon an answer to our
prayers for a fresh start.

– mrg

I keep looking for a light
at the end of this tunnel

And as it shrinks to the size of a
distant star by the day,

I am forced to face that I may
be in store for a longer walk home
than I thought

What is a virus,
but a force of nature?

Consider this a serendipitous
wrench thrown in the oiled
cogs of the fuming
Capitalist machine

Long have I dreamt of the day
the wheels would stop turning

Now it’s here, and I find myself
reeling like all the rest
from the whiplash of its
abrupt halt

The present overtaking me like
a sudden darkness my eyes must
adjust to, my mind grasping for
an end or a shape of it to rationalize

Aftershocks splitting the faulty
bedrock of society down the middle

A landslide of uprooted lives
crumbling into its hungry abyss

Residual dust pluming into the
doomsday sky as the last few
fingers of fading light vanish into
the coughing shadows.

– mrg