The earth is her playground beneath her feet.
Everyone around her sees that she’s sweet
And full of an innocence in her play.
She won’t stop until she’s seized the day!
Life is a fun game for her to beat.

She plays with the tadpoles that she finds neat.
For them, playing with her is such a treat.
They dream of being frogs so that someday
She’ll kiss them and make one her prince.

She traps them in a jar once filled with peat
And takes them to her home so they can meet
Her family where maybe they’ll stay.
But their dream isn’t her dream in any way.
Now it’s fools and liars who softly bleat,
“She’ll kiss them and make one her prince.”

There are lightning bugs
in the killing jar.

Oh no, I dropped it.

All dark now.

Good bye.

If love was a jar
I'd be at the bottom
Tripped fell and stuck
Why do I take that leap?

Why do I let women get the best of me
They all mess with my head make me think I am dead
Numb and cold

I'm not here I'm not there
She's everywhere
I like being in love just wish it wasn't so deep

Like I said I happy I decided to leap
This is weird
If love was a jar

I've never been able to yell
or scream at someone.
No matter how angry,
or how hurt I am.

It's a blessing
and a curse.

I live to please.
But who?
Myself? Certainly not.

Sometimes I get so angry
that I want to lash out.
Break something, throw
something against the wall.

Watch something shatter so I know
what it looks like inside my heart.

I pick up a jar, ready to hurl it at
a stone wall.
But just as soon as my arm pitches back,
it falls slowly to the ground.

I sink to my knees and the jar clicks softly
against the ground as I place it next to me.

Soft sobs raking through my body
As if on their own angry rampage.

Fingers dig into my hair, pushing it away
from my face, so that I may see clearly.

To see the unbroken jar still sitting peacefully
next to my hand, now flat on the concrete.

Fill your heart, fill it as full as you can.
Fill it with memories most warmly hued
and remember them well
in all their glorious, sweaty,
kindly brutal
minutiae.

Remember each drop,
each bite,
each individual dust
mote dancing
the still, hot, sunlit
February
Thursday.
Remember how different
places all have their own
unique elusive
smell and how
it is impossible to describe this to anyone
who has never lived
anywhere else.

Fill your heart with all those memories
of the best kind
of home grown hell.

Fill it until its tears are forced out.
Fill it against the long, cold dark of parking lost.
Fill it against mysterious hate.
Fill it against misery and mud and hard
frozen
bottle
glass
lies.

Fill it so full it can't ever sink far down.
Burden it with buoyant stories
and weigh it with
hypnotic winter flame.
These are the things of which
the cold terror to
victory apocalyptic will be born.
There are no second prizes here.

Fill it with the certainty of the worn places
where the chairs met
the table
each night.

Fill it with the truth of
the gnarled and sun-warm roots and
the indisputability of a Beetle motor accelerating and
the violent pirouette of each spring
and the ozone smell and
the way wet wood screams at the sky and
the way the sound
hits all ears the same
regardless of
their color or
what side of Line Avenue they’re from.

Remember what line you’re from
and to hell with the rest.
You must mind your own.
There’ll be water
if God wills it.

You are never too far lost if you still know
your father’s face and can still remember
getting milk from the tubes
in the
silver metal cooler
and the red cookie jar
lid as the
adults smoked at the green kids’ table
and everyone mostly had blue eyes
and red hair and there was always a phantom killer
lurking  
right beyond the only hope door
before you were ****** into the mirror
world and
*******, but
kids sure do have to make some
rough choices
before nine o’clock.

Keep remembering and when you remember,
remember even deeper
remember in yet greater detail and
practice that remembering until
you
ARE
the dust motes
the milk tube
Thursday
roots
sun
until you ARE each drop of sweat
until you ARE the phantom killer
and the red cookie jar lid
the straight line of smoke rising out
of the ashtray and
the motor and the
scream and the
ears and
you ARE all these things
and you ARE
and you can’t really say where these things begin or where
you end because you’re not sure that
anything really does end or
begin
anymore.

Beginnings and endings
haven’t much meaning after
everyone has
shown their cards and the worn places on the chairs have
met the table
one
last
time.

Choson dynasty,*
you utter from a stub
on the stand's neck,  
your eyes admiring
pimpled spaces or
the bulging curves
of the moon jar.

It is imperfect like
papier-mâché,
the hollow centre
surrounded by
a slumped figure:
two bodies thrown
as lovers, where,

noticing a crease
stretch the belly,
the mating halves
fuse to function
a wholeness like
the moon we make
when we hold hands.