Lately I imagine
I am a tree
Perfect
in my imperfections
Mother Earth
cradle my roots
as I bask in the glory
of the faithful sun
Her rays satiate my leaves
permeating my being
with resounding hopefulness
I surrender.
nurtured
Utterly Loved
as and by nature’s nourishments
I am.

Unhappy poets understand
The blues that testify despair,
And force the fortune teller's hand
Through smoke and ash instead of air,
Their breath uncertain where to land,
Or what it costs the heart to care
For songs and dreams, the holy ****
Left drying on the forest's mat.

The sun that rises in the east,
Despite the longest night we've known,
Reveals an unaccepting beast,
Whose mind held strong till overthown.
Anxiety has steady feet.
Unhappy poets know their beat.

She loves the music more than words,
While I'm caught up in sentences,
The nouns and verbs obliquely heard,
The slanting lines of innocence,
Too often at the end of nerves
To have our tongues make any sense,
With nothing more than broken words.
Mistakes are human, I've been told,
Forgiveness from a greater soul.

She says the songs don't sing her name,
And poetry has scant appeal.
She sings.  I write.  We're not the same.
And yet our kisses make a seal.
With time gone south and winter near,
I  wish your legs, your lips were here.

~for those who will read this and weep~

the quiet ones,
the silent Job ones,
who quote not from the
Book of Lamentations,
but author their own,
based on-the-job experience

localized versions of cryptic elegiacs
accepting the wooden crosses borne,
stepping up to the
unrequested unforeseen,
then buried under, burnt alive,
yet never relieved by dying,
nailed by words, stronger than iron,
promises sworn, promises kept
with no ending date relief,
promises by and to themselves,
but not for themselves!

the wearers of crystal glass shackles,
adorned with decorative locks for which
no key did the maker make,
nor any divine creator
dare conceive an early release,
never no escape contemplated,
for the lock human, unrepentant unbreakable,
a decorative useless metaphor gesture,
a blunt “life *****” advertisement

I compose amidst a
bus pond of mismatched city folk,
a tapestry of ages colors and differing views on god/no god,
none would believe that as the bus sways me,
it’s in rhythm to holy choral music,
hundreds year old,
divinity masses and motets worships,
where one human can hide temporarily
a safe house,
to calm his questioning relentless
from the horrors of no answers,
for when the mind has no solution
to the rough and tumbling lives,
lived in glass shackled confinement,
the poets desperation equals theirs

summon eagles to transport these imprisoned,
but the shackled refuse,
I come to them but they wave me off,
I go crazy for once I was enslaved,
thirty years war that left devastation,
from which so many poems created

so I speak with heightened regard
of one who planned futures for others where his
non-existence was a founding father (ha!)

but the day came and
I was released by my own inactions,
but means nothing until a way to
away found
to release the yet bound early

got a couch, airline miles, hundred dollars
in my pocket and an unrelenting need
to save them, a consumption disease,
the glass shackled, at ease,
won’t rest till all are freed
this my creed
no one left behind

these cyber words do not mock
for they are unbounded, set free,
when
the flesh connects and the needs of the flesh
are stronger for they are in heart conceived

A bag of food for Saturday,
And maybe Sunday if it lasts.
It shouldn't be this hard to stay
Alive and see beyond the past.
The dragon takes the mother's claw
And holds the flame that heats the tar,
Coal-colored death drawn through a straw
In West Virginia's town called War.

The sun comes late in mountain towns,
On roads that need a new repair,
Still dark when buses make their rounds,
To draw the children from their lair,
Who learn at school some poetry,
That won't alleve this poverty.

Light rain
All hallows day
An orange-faced angry man
Disintegrates
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