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!"