What happened?
You've changed.
Slowly distancing yourself from me.
It's scaring me.
What happened to,
Us?
Days go by and it seems as if you're falling out of love with me.
What happened to forevermore?
-K.L.

Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by,
As the Apache dancer
Clutches his woman.
I have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sent on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.
Joy always,
Joy everywhere--
Let joy **** you!
Keep away from the little deaths.

Dead weight
Living on the edge
Of burden casts a
Shadow in the light
For flat broke dreamers
Strumming their guitars
On broken strings and
Poets writing as the
Ink runs dry.

©Ben Ditmars 2014

ask your blood
your limbs, your breathing feet
what Poetry is -
a phylogenetic anomaly
in light’s discontinuity

or just…
the strange yearning of hematopoiesis

ask the silence in your lungs
the bursting DNA, reinterpreted
how it allures memory inside your bones
how it treads conventions of sleep
with the weight of a sigh

if you ask me
what Poetry is
I’d say: breath calligraphy
a winged dream of depth
on enchanted retina
the bitter-sweet art of airy harmony

ask your hands
what Poetry is
perhaps they’ll take a moment
to bloom