Have you ever seen a tap dancer
sit on a stage
with their legs crossed,
their metal plated shoes
facing away,
and their sound stolen?

No?
Well, have you ever seen a girl
sit on her bed
with her legs crossed,
her feet tucked, hiding,
buried away,
and her voice silenced?

Time slips backward over little slivers
Of love and broken lives,
Gathering them up, using the soft mess
Of once-blessed feeling mixed with
Grand passion,
Until it knits together the pieces of
Hate and love like a potion:
Unseemly, neither black nor white...
And we refuse to see it.

Time rolls forward as we ignore it,
Over hurt as well as joy,
For we have taught ourselves to lie,
To say that nothing matters in
The “grand scheme of things”...
And so our life passes us by.

Until, one day, we discover
We are alone even as we stand
Beside those we love.
And we know them not.
Where love resides,
There loathing and resentment
Peek from amidst the ruinous
Muddle, which we created,
Simply unaware.

We two may stare into each others’ eyes,
As if two strangers,
Wary of false hopes and lies.
Stale passion bonded to forgotten vows
Leave us helpless, caught in a patterned
Web of half-truths and hidden threat.

Soon we are reduced to stiff civility,
“Sly apologies and polite regrets”.
Love dies more slowly than the ability
To end the dance or forget.
We settle in, like corpses in a crypt,
To the slow departure of ourselves.

As the mind rises up above the scene,
We take it in, gawkers on a highway,
Aghast yet unable to refrain
From still more self-flagellation.
Another empty day drags by
And in our lonely, separate prisons…we stay.


Rediscovered on January 20, 2019

The ruins between my ribs held us static
We were parallel lines that were never coincidental,
A could-have-been intersection that ceased to draw itself
Just before the point of tangency.
You told me it was I who stopped pursuing you,
That it was I who fashioned these rusts in my own gears.
Apathy was my choice,
Until I saw the concern that lay beyond your hostile mask
That left me wanting for the unknown.

my belly grows the size of a bag of apricots
there is a will at the bottom of a lake that needs retrieving
the car sank but the body made it to the shore and changed her name by midnight
come springtime the ice melts and the water is back
crawling upon shy ankles
there are growing pains who find a home between nettles and
the hives of adobe wasps
i never could cohabitate with nature
when they ask at parties where i've been
things that are at rest stay at rest

When you think and think and think
and yet find yourself rooted
to the same spot

(you’ve thought yourself into stagnation)

fight or flight has become fright

suspended between awake and asleep

life and living

hiding and revealing

(thinking… and some more thinking)

Sugar is bad for you,
especially,
saccharine maple thoughts
that you cannot afford
due to the hazard
of overweight ego
dense with the aftertaste
of adipose fantasies
clogging the arterial bonds
that tether you
to solid ground

Stop the caramelized madness
from carbohydrating your soul
into victim obesity
causing the full
arrest of your spirit

The sweet is guilty,
distorted in mirrors,
a negative image
of a past feeling,
present reflection
born of the collision
of intentions and consequences

Desires aren't ripened tangerines
They do not fall off the tree when they are ready
They do not fertilize the roots below
They do not shrug off the sense of un-pickedness,
just like that,
Not like tangerines do.

Desires unspent are starving termites.
They bite into living bark
And burrow into the breathing deep
Past rings and rings of precious age.
They corrupt the tender core
And, soon, no new leaves grow
And no more fruit drops.