Darling one, lock the window,
Darling one, lock the door.

The lives we tell ourselves,
are folded bits of paper mache,
multi colored lullabies,
Strange alien colors and grass at sunset.

The moment when our mothers call us home and the crickets sing when we hope we get the sleep before threadless darkness comes to terror and torment our innocent hearts,

with monsters who are not the kind that live in the far dark-but the kind that live in the desolate house 304.

Darling one, lock the window,
Darling one, lock the door.

It is then we learn to guard the lives we tell ourselves we will have,
and the lives we can afford.

Darling one, lock the window,
Darling one, lock the door.

(C) DM 2017

Sweet pleasures of life
Sun, air, food, water
dreamland,
and a poet's sweet kiss

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

In bars wandering amid the metal and cages,
amid the loud banging of voices, dull as broken bells
rung from the sloshing of drinks, in shirts red inked with wine.
Smoulder and fog, cigarettes now drawn and dead
down this cold alley of vagrants painting nightly,
wildly until dawn.