Do you and I go to cursing randomness
Augh! the sight of willing hearts and decorous smiles
Proceeding through the years to mirror souls in trials
Beginning like the play of pups, intense
As from their little eggs birds sing contentedness
The young begin and end their day complete
Open and generous in mind and spirit
Impediments are only pebbles, these brave toddling edifices
Of he who goes into the Night of Giants
Bold with language, legs and bright contempts
For crippled History in all its hoary dilemmas
Believing events discrete and not triangle
Fear, Expectation, Love, these truth condemn
All be transformed by the consolation of wisdoms
For Cole
To Hide or Not
Hinge on emotion is insecure
If another were to know, Oh, No
Keep your private secret.
Bolt the door on honest and pure
But hide from others, deceive your
What’s hid from self has most control.
Without – you are aware
Fantasies rule like rumor
Who’s to hear, someone must hear
Telling secrets means they aren’t.
Swings on poems and friends
Trust is a hammock somewhere
P’haps it’s best to be alone
Can’t say what I don’t see
Reluctance, refusal, or aversion
Surrender or disown
Awareness Dilated
Before Green and old cricket take their leave and presume
We distinguish between absence and loss
A thing like belonging absorbs.
The screen door out back, and light among talk
Between friends, why, memory seems safe
Of the past, pricked by sounds soft as Soon
Will be gone or seem so when sharp
In simplicity – no longer opaque, now eased by
Riches of trees, In winter I become divisible,
Cold sharpens being, spaces between,
Movement should be easier
Yet burden is defined by plummeting
Mercury – the symbol of flight. Ah, yes I shall miss you too?
Subjectivity
Cooperation is not of today
Thought, the captive of dismay,
Rendered an easy bent reed
Prevailing winds decide my course
Wait to debate – for a thoughtful force.
My reason was clear on a recent day.
None relate to what I say
Can’t reckon or consider,
Gone the will to deliberate
There’ll be a better day for something’s-at-stake.
Now buried in blue heaven
Say, What if God were lost in emotion
When called upon to judge someone
Does he, too, fail to cerebrate
When feelings prevent him evaluate?
If I Had Known
If I had known how to balance a thing
There should have been nothing to learn or bring
From place to higher place through streets
Desolate, abandoned black roads of grief
The bottom of a hill seemed oh, so fearsome
Enough to halt my aim toward home
It was as if my legs were drilled
Unaffected – stilled against thought or reason
Looking back I see all manner of kinds
Mines and bleak, ladders arising
I learned to ride a silly cycle
While men and kittens kept making things lighten
(October 2006)
I Saw My Spirit
I saw my spirit in the dawn, its silver
There then there – on a sparrow wing.
Shouting – Not flying so much as flexing
Its power to divide the air – Slicing
Between heartbeats unseen
I saw my soul where tiny feet invaginate.
Confess under duress of extended throat
Its force – its mass times vigor
I see its aim – in a forgotten eye
On a scene that is spread like life -
Oh! sunrise on a feather
What news you bring on a beam!
A shining bay stretches out behind -
I Knew You Once
I knew you once -
Sometime – in some place
Home of my heart
Heart of my tongue
Defined in a Moment
From the moment I heard,
watched him on the piano,
my fate as devotee was sealed.
a young age – I didn’t know
The chords of rhythm and sound
penetrate like the answer
to an ancient question,
the most enduring threads of self
His body sways
with the forces and power
of what he now fills the room
While his hands pound out the keys,
I exploit a golden, tandem tease -
love and music.
If The One
If the one you chose doesn’t
Want your love, your self
Is there anyone at home?
How? I ask and where
Be here – who never goes
Be now – who never stays
And the biggest endeavor
You would fill with pride
When secrets are mislaid
(2006)
The Boy Plays
The boy plays as though laughter
Will be banned across the land
His toys arranged in organized
Symbols of imagination and control
In a milisecond the determined bravery
Of his speed drama flattens
And the gaiety of family cannot
Lift itself higher than his mother’s caress
He and his habits not discussed and smiled over
At the dinner table where seating
By his imprimatur, everyone did not say
This gathering was the one he’d always wanted -
When dreams are fulfilled only children cry.
(2006)
