What I feel

What I feel
when I feel, or touch,
my tips, touching your skin,
dancing delicately on top of it,
from back to belly and down
to thigh and calf, butterfly feet
peppering their precious petals,
is more,
more than feeling
yes, love, but also awakening
the me, stirring, I've been
missing
without you

(for Jill)

Toying with altruistic impulses

Stuffed as a dog, you slept
with the white belly I’d fancied kept
bare against the ground. Right there I found you,
and I didn’t turn you. Though I wanted to,
what we’re taught’s tough to set aside.
So I left you where I let you lie.

For National Poetry Month: Couplets!

April is National Poetry Month, and to honor the occasion I'll be participating in Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour sponsored by Upper Rubber Boot Books. The basic idea is to interview and feature poets from around the Web. Check out the links above, or visit this Facebook page to get more details. If you'd like me to feature your work on my blog as a guest post, please let me know in the comments to this post. I'll also share work from the poetry sites I regularly visit (you know who you are), whether or not you contact me, so please check in regularly during April.

The iguana that hides in your folds of gray

Chirp

No chalk shapes the empty
space swept in to replace it,
this cricket. Criminals, we’re
outlined by its final chirp.

What remains for the day

The good of it gets
no good bye. The good in it
doesn’t go, and what goes
is good for it – too good – too.

Down the knock well

Knock well. He's not well, when
you weakly unwrap a tap.
It’s where those light raps
go. And you'll go, unopened.

Saying little, a lot

he may
..............pretend

he means
he needs
…...........more

she does
she is
…............no matter

…............how he pretends
she doesn’t

This dream passes as quickly as its telling

Wherever you start, there’s a beginning,
it said,
beginning to lure me into its crystalline
blue, dotted
not by dots but by blurs of a deeper blue.
You knew
all along, as long as you could, it couldn’t, you
couldn’t, keep you
in the where there where you were. It did, not long,
but long
enough to learn. I followed it then, not wanting
to stop. Long,
it stopped and turned and smiled back at me, us,
a grin
tall at both ends. It wouldn’t end till mine was just
beginning.

My religion

My religion says, all this lively life is precious, not just the human kind. It says, there are no heavenly ups or hellish downs, there’s is, and it’s all around us. It says, there’s not one way for love to love, unless it’s without even this condition. It says, all we know is so much less than what we can imagine, and it imagines a universe of expanding beauty, one or many in a one that's universally beautiful and never wasted, not the tiniest bit of it, even as we slip away then back into it.

Whence it all changes

One day it’s March. One
crocus, then many bloom. Spring
takes us, gently gripped.

The malediction before a blessing

A short attempt at writing some fiction ...

The hand-painted sign above the storefront’s cracked glass door reads “Church” but it doesn’t read it with much conviction. The hallway beyond the three short steps up, with its bare white walls and spare, unfinished, wooden flooring, doesn’t do much to convince me it’s any more true.

After a few hesitant paces, the hall opens up to what I could call a room, but it’s much more of a tank, cramped, sterile, confined, and conducive to not much more than dark thought, or dark prayer perhaps. No, not thought, not prayer so much as wallowing, in a past or in a pity I am not privy to. I shouldn’t have said sterile before either. It implies a cleanliness this room doesn’t hold, and hasn’t held for days or weeks or months or even years, as it now holds a thick layer of dust I kick up entering its outer edges, a dust that resettles quickly and comfortably back into the floor’s cold clasp.

It is cold here, and I bring my arms in to hug my body’s heat a little closer as I move a few more steps within the room. There isn’t much furniture to see, just three metal folding chairs unfolded at its somewhat precise center, and a handful more stacked against the near wall I’d just passed. The stacked chairs haven’t been unstacked in a very long time, or so the cobwebs tell me. Cobwebs in fact seem to be the predominant decorating theme of the place, clinging to any open corner or plain face they can find. They couldn’t find much else to cling to here. No crucifix or stained glass or station of the cross hang about these walls, and the lighting is so dim that I can’t tell you what color the walls are. I could only call it dun.

Saturation

The clear muddle of it is
the queer puddles that appear
in the middle of now/here
without the merest piddle
or burble of a past nearby.

Where Irony forgets her breadcrumbs

Peace is that chaste
cartoon unicorn
we catch and paste in
with flossy pink clouds
and Popsicle-perfect
rainbows on dowdy
t-shirts or slickly
tactile stickers. It’s candy
cute and ticklishly
huggable. It makes us
feel the not believing
it a little less worse.

More than beware

Be air,
the tides,
en marche