Snowscape V (the end)

The winter white takes
shallow breaths
and exhausted she coughs
grey complaints
about the crushed
green of popped-down bottles,
a cellophane cat
holding his short stock
of shock-yellow crumbs,
and other man-made matters
mocking her color
but, not her,
they don’t fade away

Snowscape IV

Nuzzled
from the muzzling
of a winter's drowsy-
days-long muslin wrap,
brown earth bursts through
what white patchwork's left
to cure forbidden tramplers
with a slurpy, foul-mouthed,
aubade kiss.

Snowscape III

Steamy column of warmth
slips through the crack,
pawed by purrs from his cat—
a tonic wash to welcome
slush-slicked, black boots back

Snowscape II

The sun's diminished light might
seem blundered if not for the wonders
of winter's incomparable white

Snowscape I

White imprisons gray.
A black sole subdues
one red glove with a soft crunch.
There it will pause, fingerless
until the first thaw.

Christmas 2010

‘Tis this,
Christmas
morn at the end
of that clutch of days
Christians named 2010,
and the diffident sky
can only manage
one irreverent blink.

There they're here,
candy cane lights
with green-garland ears
and drunken noses
to point my way through
snow-drop-hushed streets
robbed of their rush-about
and vagrant shouts.

Then’s when
I’ll take it,
the harked-upon angels’
high stool, and make low
the hollered occasion
with a devilish wink
to swivel
their pin-cushion heads:

“Yay, I say,
for unto you is born
this day, in the city of laid
lids, a savor!
Look for true
love in the cradle
of your straw-strewn hearth,
and unswaddle it.”

Christmas can't come (soon enough)

Mom-hassling arm tugs
Earn him burning glares of "Cope!"
Ascetic calm falls

In the beginning, we got lost to our endings

The jelly-jiggling slop first had to flop
before it could waddle
ashore into this muddle of last gasps
and becoming
where middling deaths swaddled in gauzy breaths
emit a consonant-rich sussuro:

If you don’t recall the swirl-swept depths
where we furled it,
can you keep that promise in shallows pocketed?

So we began, and with the begetting
a rosy cloud plumed forth from our two
terraformed lips,
its delicately distinct petals mushrooming out
with a thorn-less, serif-soft voice
to bestow this frothy font of atomic confusion:

Let the forgetful sea rinse over now-handy fins
to hard-edge etch
their starfish straight lines in a slurp of soggy sand.

The mothering molecules haven’t lost
their smothering ache to forgive
our thickened skins
and they still cling to us, cooing about a lulled drift
past bye when we’ll climb the thinning links
back to homes cloaked in a sifted light:

The loves of your heart-filled heads, no matter
how starkly pled,
all waste away to join us in our timeless waiting.

Undomesticated scenes

There’s no life-
likeness in the dioramas
he meticulously pieces
together with stray remnants of lost
childhood, but there may be
an uncanny resemblance to truth

Ode to the winter solstice

He may be bits shy,
tucked in there behind
a ready excuse of clouds,
but from today he spreads
our pocket-lint days
with radiant smiles,
and lingers longingly,
beggar moments longer each time

A birthday wish

It's not that rocks don't
Feel. Keep still your eyes, look. See
Our shy smiles shimmer

Cupid's need for archery lessons

Can love's long shot con
us with its loft, drop
a steel tip to spark
flinty hearts, and burn
away sleeping stings?

I make up words, and they return the favor

If cupple were a word,
it would be
homophonically
linked to couple,
but there’s the small complication
it doesn’t exist, not outside
the confines of this poem.

Cupple (verb):
To gently join
one’s hands and hold
an object in a loving
and inquisitive manner,
somewhat cautious lest its essence
leaks out between the cracks.

Possible poetic usage:
Spy me, one tiny dot
spiraling up
a spiny staircase of crystalline steps,
until I’m picked, pinched
and cuppled by a darling universe
before she takes me off to bed.

Will cupple make a break
and elope with its old-world cousin?

I can’t say, not in a voice
convincingly heard.
You see, I’ve lost all taste
for those dictionary words,
a touch hushed within bindings, tightly bound
while my pretenders nose around
their glossy jackets.

It’s not that I’m wishy-washy
about cupple’s ambitions.
I’m just happy to keep it here with me
in my wish-washed state
where there’s no point
beyond the widening
smile of our gradual arc inward.

---

Special thanks to Kay at Immersed in Word for lending me the word "wish-washed".

The mind reels

Here's my latest attempt at an animation. I'm still making mistakes, and learning from them. I'm going to go back to the written word for a little while before I attempt another one of these (they're very time consuming).

Water on the brain

My hush-hushed secret,
rush-rush waves will tell you,
isn't a leaked taboo
of still, stale waters,
or worse, worry-wracked seas.
It's too simply my clipped
and unwary tale
of the calming ocean
I sensed when I waded
into the shallows
of your penetrating eyes.

A glimpse of things to come?

I've begun learning a 2D animation program, and I hope to use it to create short videos for my poetry. Here's a very brief attempt at animating one of my drawings. As I get more adept, the results should be a lot less primitive.

An apostate's creed

When I was spongy
soft and daisy yellow, my father poured
forth with piety his cleansing love
for god and country, and he poured
it into poor little porous me.

It was a sop I tried to hold
but just as gold wings go
and clay feet come,
so my faith in blindness was replaced
by a bookish seeking.

The small wrings and smaller
squeezes of his uneven hands
told me god wasn’t 'man enough,
and any bounded place was too cramped
a space for my odd inklings.

Then I found this upon the further
side of knowing: Nature lives and dies not
in our world alone,
but there’s a universe to breed
and spoil with my loving’s expansion.

It’s always cycling...
cycling before me...
cycling through me...
cycling past me...
cycling in spite of me.

Ever never blinks
and no quill’s ink tallies
those woes and wants
played out on the twinkling
stage of our weakling moments.

Outside the familiar
rhythms of my childish loves,
I’m left
pledging to do no heavenly harm
as I spread wide these arms
so inadequate for embracing the vast
elliptical clouds of intermingling
light and dust,
and in flying I’ll fall toward
but not reach
the core of my sunny belief.

Bunny swallows owl

Inside the bunny suit
my ears are still small
and round, and percussive
sounds come to visit me
costumed in white muffles.

Inside the bunny suit
a bead of sweat itches
my nose to rabbit fidget
and wiggle-twitch where
my fingers can’t reach it.

Inside the bunny suit
a thin layer of nylon dots
inserts its silky self
between me and everything
I fumble to touch.

Inside the bunny suit
the outside world’s broken
up by a half-dozen holes,
and green strands fuzz the focus
of each fragmented peep.

Inside the bunny suit
probing orange lights
make kaleidoscope shapes
through those same cut
openings. They distract me.

Inside the bunny suit
I can smile at and feel
closer to the fantastic
creatures who surround me
in their own decorous skins.

Night mares always look back

My night, marish, clops through
a mirror life
some mad scientist might
have coaxed to self-replicate
into an intemperate ooze.

I’m standing there,
and then I’m not,
lost in its reflection
and aflutter with a flabbergasting abandon
at having met you
after a bushel of now grainy,
barren years.

It is me, and it’s not
or it’s both, I can’t say
who it is, who turns away
panicked by the befuddling
indifference in your voice
before it trails off
and tumbles into a cruel muddle
of swallowed gruel,
where I’m unable to skim out
the love I loved in you,
once, or spoon
one meager goodbye.

Sweet meets nothing, and nothing wins

The sweet-meets-
nothing, I said,
wasn't at-all
sweet but it was
nothing, unlike
the some-things-
said by better
for better-haves
sake, in their own
lesser-than-
less original rite,
and it's that
nothing-unlike
I'm quite fond of.

Miracles can wait

He whiles an Earth's worth
The saintly stone eyes won't roll
Servilely his way

I take a secret pleasure in being disabused of my fonder illusions

It was
put a bow on it pretty,
our democracy
with its polka-dot accountability
and its tissue-paper truths.

The discount-bin card arrived
separately, postage due,
and with a punctilious script
it promised us
a curlicued freedom from
antiquated forms of expression.

Our very love was
ceremoniously given,
but was it
ever right-
fully ours?

Let’s render up the flattering
notion of own,
as it's grown so fatty
lipped it wears a perpetual pout.

The gift was merely Caesar’s
grandiloquent concession
tagged liberally,
“To: Us,
a meekly over-entertained many
whose we, drained of meaning,
poses no coherent threat.”

Not yet.

Some compromises we do

Straight-striving, a white
............. oak sapling bends
.................. (it pretends) willingly
..................... to the lapping of grey-
......................... hound gusts. It knows
............................... the musts of a thin-
................................ skin (if and when,
................. it can endure) will loosen
........... some with thickening. Then,
........ well, the strength comes
....,. to laugh at always
in the passing wind.

Some compromises we don't choose

her brittle bones balk .... before
......... their daily battles
but for a living .... they give in

Ticktocks go away with the clock

In the gloom-heavy
looming of our preordained
hours, stretched minutes
lie with their alluring
promise, the endless
seconds to come