She's kept so many keys, cut long
Ago to doors and boxes, locks
On gates and diaries, on wrong
Or bad directions, wind-up clocks
Long stopped and not remembered well,
That maybe should be thrown away,
Though skeletons will sometimes sell
In sidewalk sales on judgement day.
Increasingly, the future's picked
From options found along the road--
Reaffirmation, habits kicked,
A heart that bears a heavy load.
Kind words prove yet her greatest spell,
Her keys cast in the wishing well.

I once knew a girl from Kentucky,
Whose husband would not let her f**k me.
He landed in jail,
And could not make bail.
Now all of my friends call me lucky.

The rain this morning falling strange,
Unheard for weeks while grasses browned,
At first unrecognized then changed
To gratitude that heaven frowned
And cried again on broken land,
Healed cracks and succoured trees and vines.
Would that were true of everyman
And woman born in these hard times,
Observant where the seed will drop,
Terrain that takes good faith to sow,
That generations may not stop,
That rain will come and ice will hold
Our struggling sons and daughters,
Who cleanse the heavens with their tears.

Fall mornings, he believes, will show
The way back, stretched from afternoon
Above midday, an hour now
And then another, three more soon,
Arrested from the night and laid
Upon his plate with nothing more
Than coffee, toast and marmalade.
Resisting what he used to score.
The afternoon could use a source,
Some meditative carousel
To mitigate the old remorse
Of what has not worked out too well,
And what will come, familiar fright,
His long acquaintance with the night.

All colors and their absence mourn--
White page, black pen design the mind.
Bare bodies blow Gabe's copper horn.
They leave a twisted trail behind.
What's left unwrit is lionspeak,
Transcripted worse than poetry
Encaged in shops that smell and creak
From correlated symmetry.
Unbending letters, cold steel rails
Truss up irrelevant decrees,
But broken grammar jams and flails
From supplicants on what were knees
Aa ee ii o u
Come hear what's lost, spit out in blue.

The news is not good news today--
Hide from the wind and run from rain,
A boat on fire, gut sick gun play.
All told, a litany of pain,
And I, perhaps I should feel worse,
Should give anxiety its due,
The medications being cursed.
And yet the sky outside is blue.
I claim no sense of innocence,
While holed up here--a sonneteer,
With lit incense and cupiscence
For that woke fear this craft can't queer,
This horrorshow, this pixeled glow--
Trade winds that blow where words won't go.

Supreme Court ****, supremacy.
Recession.  Constitutional
Embarrassment and lunacy,
A beast whose belly's never full.
Broke minds have given up on love,
Our bodies scarcely understand,
Wish something, somewhere--up above?
Could mastermind a better plan.
This oldschool wordplay broken down
Can't dance in darkness, or hot sun,
While bullets tear through white and brown.
We've overdosed, the children run.
And what can any human do?
Socratic poet asking you...