Sandals slapping ******* glued stone,
Sun hitting hard soaking my clothes,
I like to pretend Im alone,
Empty houses vacant windows.
Dog **** smell wafts from my plastic bag
Scraped from a  carefully manicured lawn

Dog pants pull me from bush to bush,
Past awkward neighbors with no eyes,
Cant talk now, always in a rush
Another encounter to despise.
The trees could take the houses back over
Birds bees and deer make for good company.

My boy is four and loves the dirt,
He loves to smell the sunflowers,
Pulls them from heaven down to earth,
To softly imbibe their powers.
I stop for a minute and bow to them
And breathe their delicate blessing as long as I can.

no need to find the light
yours is more bright

I wish I could be as vibrant and bold as a sunflower
Wish my petals could stretch towards the sun
in hopes of growing. I wish these pale painted
faces would stare in awh instead of disgust.
I wish I was as yellow as a sunflower
or maybe an oddly pink tone fleshed with red
I want my color to be praised not discussed
like dirt being picked out of fingers

I have come to the realization that I am a sunflower
Beautiful, bold, and magical
My brown petals stretch out from limb to limb
meeting at my bud with a smile so dazzling
and eyes small but fill with love and hope.

I am a sunflower in the boldest of ways possible
like coffee with no sugar no cream. I am loved like Jupiter
loves Juno, My brightness is appreciated like a full moon
at 12 midnight. I could fill a whole field with my petals
just for your grazing but you don't deserve it.

I am a sunflower. What are you?

We sped along the highway,
Faster than two hundred year old clouds;
All at once a yellow blur of sunflowers
Filled the only view we had.
Fields and fields of sunflowers
Facing the south sun like a choir;
And ready for harvest.

Denise remarked she liked the seeds,
And the oil is good for pharmaceuticals, etc.
We use them a lot, I quipped.
But we were in a rush to see
Stratford's As You Like It,
So they never got a second thought.
Til now, you see,
For I'm feeling somewhat vacant.

I need positivity like a sunflower needs the sun
So what do I do when I'm given none?
I'm fed poison and breathe out joy
Bringing life through photosynthesis
Using my outward appearance to make people smile
But I'm cut at the stem
To be given to some much more special than I
And slowly start to rot
I'm given as a gift
Once I wither away and my fresh scent is gone
They throw me away and keep moving on
No one thinks about the sunflowers

Until they're gone.

Before you know it, the week is over.
Some bills paid. Meetings attended.

Congratulatory cake sliced into two
dozen squares for an engaged couple.
When suddenly, suddenly you discover

that a certain reticence has breached
the comfort and security of your partner.
Followed him to the coffee shop. Wedged

itself between his breakfast sandwich
and speech. Followed him to the city’s
public square where a large group of

suburban mothers dressed in loud colors
practiced yoga underneath spotty skies
in itchy grass. Where sunlight appeared

and disappeared from his brown skin
and wind upturned the corners of the pages
of a novel he read from as the reticence said

more to you than he had all morning
and the bees’ only agenda was to land
on the wavering yellow petals of sunflowers

and then take off into a day that would become
tomorrow's news and next year's history.

I'm terrified to say it out loud to say that I have fallen for your deep eyes and deeper thoughts.
Because I know that you can never hold onto me.
I know that something in my soul
will never let me rest.

I am pushed forward
away towards anything and everything.

You haven't noticed, love, that my heart doesn't stay one place for long?You haven't noticed, darling,that there is too much air in my veins,
pulling me off of the ground,
away from more than a few short moments?

I'm terrified to say that you can stay until the sun rises
because once you start seeing me next to you in a messy bed,
it will be impossible to not see me there
even after months have passed.

Have you not noticed, love,
that I don't plant roots?
That I can't hold onto much more than
a photograph and a dream?
That I can't help myself from becoming something new every **** second?
That one day, maybe soon,
I will pack up my bags and leave before you have opened your eyes in the morning and I will be gone.

On to the next life.
Not because I have to, because I carry my heart in my legs,
not in the ground.

You say I am a sunflower.
Yours to keep, yours to kiss and hold up to the daylight.

Don't you know, sweetheart,
that sunflowers only last a few months?

Her laughter pumps the gas, dumps the clutch shakes and rattles from each intersection
Her wet feet leave monster tracks long damp claws arching across the cement
Her hair grows brambles collecting thorns and twigs with the best of bushes
Her senses, corvid, snatching up dropped coins, pencils, paperclips
Her tongue unfettered, butterfly breath reels with snips of story and songs
Her eyes hold drops of honey, sticky sweet lashes follow the sun
sunflower cheeks blush cardamom on yellow velvet
glow butterfaced with dandelion kisses

Rough, regular under hand, stubbornly slate, unchanged unmoved.
if her soul is a garden there is a cinderblock there
holding down the sunflowers,
along with the grass at her core, it grows roots,
     but no moss.

Yellow horizon
Sunflower fields gently sway
just beyond the crest.