autumn lake –
leaves rocking
in a trout's ripples

--

birdsong –
how it amplifies
the dawn

The teenager sits curled around
herself in rehab, matted hair, skeletal arms
bruised by needles, scarred wrists,
metal gouged grotesquely into and around
every orifice, sunken eyes exuding
a generous measure of fear and defiance.
God, She could be my daughter,
had my daughter inherited
my weaknesses and propensities.
Her demeanor tells me more
than her lack of words -
She is filthy, scabby, loathsome.
She looks at me and I can tell she's
thinking the same of me.
Judgmental *****!

--

Just before waking this morning
I dreamed I was still walking with
a cane - I found myself walking in a
very shallow stream, wading nicely
as it were with just the cane - lift one
foot and then the other, no longer tripping
and falling. No need for the walker,
no need for the wheelchair, just the cane.
I was free again. My mother, who
had died years before, was in my dream
and I was showing her and my wife how
I could suddenly wade in the stream
with just a cane. It felt so wonderful. Then
I awoke and after taking a few minutes
to clear my head, struggled to my feet and
with the aid of the walker, dragging the
bad leg along, I made my way into the
kitchen and brewed some really strong
coffee. If I was going to be awake
I may as well be ****** wide awake.

--

You are banded for life -
marked and set apart
to be despised, hated.
The yellow stripes tell it all -
you're to be feared
should one get too close.
Only among your own
are you accepted,
and then but tenuously.

--

It's probably always been there, this
transcendent connection, a strand
to the ethereal, a most excellent
poetic cord smothered by youth
and denied each time it reared its
beautiful head, left to writhe, waiting
the day when age and character
finally fashion the person into a poet.

What use had youth for deeper emotion
other than lust? What use the forming
of feelings into higher expressions,
so often ridiculed by the young?
Comes the day, however, when beauty
and sensitivity prevail and poetry flips
on the switch to enlightenment.

--

Gliding just above the aspen thickets,
nearly scraping their golden canopies,
I cling to this exquisite dream hawk
for all it's worth. Dipping and hovering
as the hawk is prone to do, I am soaring
with the updraft to where the air grows
thin, I'm becoming faint, and the world below
is somehow irrelevant. I can even see my
disheveled bed below where I lie dreaming.
Gliding, soaring, hovering, in my dreams
of flying I soar tree-level and prefer gliding.
I fear falling at the upper heights, but
this time, in this dream, I am become brave,
choosing instead to challenge the cumulus
and with no fear loosen "the surly bonds".
--