Life pushed me
to the edge of a cliff
So I chose to jump
(with my own free will)
ain't  afraid
Of hitting
any stone
As i free fall
Into the unknown

I remember being a young girl at the pool
Playing this game with myself
Where I would float on my back
Belly, face, and palms to the sun
I’d see how still I could be
And once I was as still as I felt was possible
I’d exhale and feel myself sink
Almost close enough to where my nose was underwater
Just before the moment where air meets water
I’d breathe in as deep as I could manage
And feel myself rise again
Back to the surface
Back to safety
Sometimes I still do that
Maybe you do too
Just in a different way

Is there an edge of forever
the virtuoso about to reclaim
the leap we try to endeavour
and ceaselessly try to aim.

Realized liberty, bike lanes,
okeh, Bret Weinstein is right, they do measure liberty

all my roads have double yellow lines, as a measure of safety
in a two-way world.
{which is partly why the code in DNA runs one way}

measuring minding
trips my trigger, to what I was thinking of writing
while watching a whispy-white haired man-my-age,
measuring the edge of a two-story house,

which a good man is building for his daughter,
down the hill, from where I sit.
That old man is bowed, in a compressed spine
kinda way,
bam bam men walked that way, in China, before the dams.

Tote that bail, tug that rope, nuthadayowe-der wise,
otherwise, aliens versus everything
pop knowns
you had locked away, in those gated intellectual troughs.
Yes, yes, troughs,
Pigs eat from troughs, cows eat from cribs,
chickens eat from dirt and sheep *** all the grass for wool
to pull over our eyes
filtering lies
like sunlight under big old Pines shading little old
Rosemary patches that feed bees,
wooly eyes, wise
meander, would you say away from world's wisest men discussing
what may be done, we set a spell, make peace with
having nothing else to do.

-- that sorta ran through my mind as I watched the elderly carpenter.
He was careful, but not afraid, aware.
He stepped from joist to joist,
at the very edge of the second story peak edge
perpendicular to the foundation square,

eye-ball-level to me
slow and steady he takes a tape, {such a witty invention}
a tape attached to a spring,
whereas once such things were actual hinged wands that unfolded
at the flick of an old wizards wrist,

then out came the soapstone, to lay down the line,
make the mark.
Here is where we cut, measure twice,
cut once,

he is sayin' in his mind, to me, I think, I imagine being told
this is how we learn what is right.
we learn to measure what works by what is.

If the distance between two points is beyond the reach, oopshit
I got distracted and he fell.

to the edge and back (inverted diversion)
——————————————————-

your life may throw you curves,
mine, straight edge blades,
lines galore, like sidewalk cracks,
jumping from safe to safe place

but always teetering tottering on
edges, like verses in the next poem,
trying to make it just to the next line
without falling in cracks, China bound

you can follow my lead, don’t though,
if I could, would willingly plunge, deeply,
for there is no safety in safe spaces, only
in the holy dark, cracks is the true safety

you seek, where poems roll on a highway
like Reno tumbleweed, humble before snow
capped mountains, these are the contrasts
where you birth procreations, poems yours

and mine die in childbirth,
returned to sender,
returned for retuning,
despair not, they’re coming
back to this world

guises in a different colored skin,
a different alphabet, script,
the meaning yet unchained and
unchanged, despite the

inverted
diversion

I sit on the edge of the world
where the sea meets the galaxy
and the water
begins to float.

I no longer think
of where I am
or where I am going to be
or where I was.

I am here
where the sky
is on fire.