Those Small Bones

seventeen years old -
dancing barefoot on the concrete
in spite of all those small bones.

your hand in mine -
all those small bones.

**

Published in The Maynard

Audio: https://anchor.fm/honest-chaos/episodes/those-small-bones-ev9vg8 

YouTube: https://youtu.be/HAdTepRuMik

This Isn't Another Poem about Writing Poetry

If it were another poem about writing poetry,
and I'd slipped it onto your dining room table,
right about now you would be realizing
how you had been tricked.
Right at this moment
you would find yourself dashing through the kitchen
and out the side door, comprehending that the screaming
you are hearing was coming from your own throat.
Seeing a windfallen stick next to your carport,
you would snatch it up, snap it over your knee
and jam the jagged point directly into your right eye.

With the stick still lodged in your skull,
you would return to your breakfast, now able to finish
in peace. Shaving would be a little complicated,
but luckily you had already pulled your T-shirt
over your previously stickless eye.

Waiting at the train station, people would give you
an occasional glance. You would nod, the stick
exagerating your motion, and keep reading the free
newspaper with your one good eye.

Some dude might sally over and say knowingly,
"Catch a little Dr. Phil this morning?"
You'd say, "No, someone slipped me
a poem about writing poetry."
"Dude" the dude would respond,
"You can't trust anyone these days.
Someone slipped my brother-in-law one of those -
he ran right through the sliding glass door,
jumped off the deck into the hydrangeas
and hasn't been seen since."
He would clap his hands together as if landing
in hydrangeas would have made a smacking sound.
Or perhaps it was to emphasize the speed
with which his lost brother-in-law
had made his escape.
You would be indifferent to this physical metaphor,
but grateful to have survived your own scrape.

"Sorry for your loss," you'd feel compelled to say
as the cars rattled to a stop.

You'd find yourself turning to the right a bit more
as you entered to scan for wayward pieces of paper
with courier font in choppy lines
before you sat down again.

Magic (published in Moon Drenched Fables)

Those who lack magic in their soul,
who instead have clocks for hearts
and gyroscopes behind their eyes
who never misplace time
or lose their balanced walk

use words like "depression",
"bipolar", or "schizoaffective disorder"
and "disorganized speach and thinking"
resulting in
"significant social or occupational dysfunction"
to describe those who live their lives
at the tails of the consensual,
far from the mean,
or the small.

It is exhausting to have liquid light
flowing through your veins,
you can try to explain.
But the fact is lost
as the clocks tick and the gyros spin,
pens scratching down notes
classifying this as a metaphor
or worse.

Sometimes it is just easier
to go along and pretend
that it is not possible
to speak in colors
or to lift up the rug of reality
and peer deep into truth.

Coin of the Realm

There is a city below a hill
that was once my home.

"Look kids, it's the Lights of the City!"
my mother would cry, capital letters in her voice
as we crested the heights
returning after bed time,
windows rolled down and a river
of late summer air blowing across our faces.

We would be bleary and sprawled out
on the folded down seats of the beach wagon -
but we would pull ourselves up
and shed blankets,
grasping the back of her seat
peering around the head rests.

And then
framed through the windshield
the trove of red and yellow,
white and green, blue dancing:
all moving or not moving -
the magic burst out before us -
we gasped at her powers.

I knew then that I was of royal birth -
my mother an exiled fairy queen
able to summon mystery from the ordinary.

Too young to know the free lunches
each day at school were not tithes
I was entitled to as a prince,

it wasn't until I was a teen that I learned
the coin of our realm bought nothing
in the cold kingdom we were banished to.

There were days when she would stare out the window
and I could see her strength fading.
I would try, as children do, to assure her.

Secret, secret I learned I must be -
in this world of willfully mortal men
living in cities below hills.

I speak to the rain
and the wind between the leaves -
the icicles hanging from the gutters
in the winter dawn, fire in their hearts.
Sometimes I draw out fireflies in the summer
long after my daughters should have gone to bed -
my princesses,
eyes filled with sleep, reaching to be held.

"Look!" I tell them,
"You only need to look and you will see!"

and quietly, I whisper, I pray:
"Choose to see. Choose to See!"

"Chickens" published on Words-Myth

http://www.words-myth.com/page8.html

a small recognition... (not a poem)

Congratulations!

The Bewildering Stories Review Board has selected one or more of your works for the First Quarterly Review, currently on line. We're very happy to extend this recognition to the outstanding prose and poetry of the season that's just ended. It will be listed again in the 2009 Annual Review due on line on December 28th.

You may have already seen the "1QR," as we call it familiarly, but we modestly refrain from assuming that everyone logs into the website the first thing on Monday. We're just taking this opportunity to send a semi-personal note (it's going to all the "winners" at once) to thank you for providing such good company on line.

Please keep up the good work; you have interested and appreciative readers!

Don Webb, managing editor
Bewildering Stories
http://www.bewilderingstories.com

Prairie Prayer

when I died
Samuel buried me
in the breast of our land:

cross made of wood
carted in from somewhere back East,

a cairn of stones
each pulled one at a time
by his hands.

then he remarried
and continued to draw corn from the dirt.

all things come from the dirt,
all things return.

the cross dried in the prairie sun
its splinter bones blowing.

the rocks settled
and forgot their purpose.

by then Samuel, too, was gone.
as were his wife
and their children.

my thoughts come closer
to the wind each season
so that sometimes I cannot tell
who is speaking of

carrying grasshoppers
and bees
and pollen

and who of

forgotten husbands
and unfinished wombs.

curse

Curse

Don't confuse Death's touch
with the bony cartoon digits
of a Halloween costume.

Death's rendering is ever so subtle,
her finger is precise
flicking one adenine loose
from the fresh, wet nucleotide

like an assassin might nick
the break lines of his victim
letting the red fluid drip slowly.
The car will stop today
at the intersection, but tomorrow
or the next day is always coming.

And so you blunder along
self-satisfied
and all the while the rot begins
nestled beneath your areola,
sending it's roots deep and slender.

This unfathomable thing
is not subject to righteousness -
and when the lump forms
you flail about fat-fisted
cursing Death
but she is long gone

and you are alone.

woman bird

cloaked in black,
the color that absorbs all light

she mocks the songs you know,
that you are vulnerable to,
though the words have no meaning to her.

lyrics pour forth from her mouth
and you lick them up like honey -

"choose me, love me"
she sings.
this word she comprehends,
like all predators do.

surprised, you look up to find your lips
covered with tar,
warm and thick and inescapable

and the chorus you thought you heard
is really the moaning of eaten souls,
gutted and rendered and forgotten
in the filth.

only your eyes are unclogged
and finally wide
as her beak finds purchase in the flesh of your chest
and the nuzzle becomes a tearing of bone and sinew -
she has won her prize.

she only wishes to fill that void,
and you cannot blame an animal for its hunger,
passed from mother to daughter,
mother to daughter.

Doing the Hustle

I find "The Hustle"
on a friend's "Pure Disco" CD
and burn it to my iPod.
With the door closed,
the lights dimmed,
and headphones jacked in
I finally push play.

Sultry, hushed voices
enjoin me to
"Do it!"
and a tweety flute,
a cheezy electric guitar,
and a not-altogether unpleasant
trumpet begin their silly melody.

"Do the Hustle!" the voices command
like Sirens,
and I am suddenly seven years old,
laying in my bed,
the Superman bedspread pulled up.
My parents are in the next room
playing records,
trying to learn this dance,
and the tango, and other last gasps
of form in modern art,
while avoiding the coffee table
and the black vinyl love seat.

Things that make grown-ups happy
are incomprehensible
and they can only be watched
like cloud banks forming on the horizon.

Tonight I am in many places and times
as the horn blows
and the strings and bells accompany,
and somewhere there is the sound of soft footsteps
and laughter - I am not sure of when they are
or I am -
"Do it!" -
but the clouds are pink and gentle
and beyond them is a safe sea.

**

Audio: https://anchor.fm/honest-chaos/episodes/The-Hustle-e10qh87

Every Night it's Just the Same (published in Shaking Like a Mountain)

Tom Waits and I
sit across the aisle from each other.
The train is moving again and
there is Rod Stewart
at the front of the car;
beautiful men and women surround him.
Light flashes on the walls
from an unseen disco ball,
He is singing Tom's song
as the steel wheels chatter
over seams and joints in the tracks.

Is it like this every night?
I want to ask
when I see Tom watching,
face smoothed of emotion.

But I know we all ask this question -
will I see you tonight?
Equal shares of hope and fear
as the "you" is filled in
with approaching faces and names
like stops on the downtown train.