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

Leap day

Leaping laggards,
we lag the leapers
leaping, we

A suburban street scene

This stack of bricks
sticks out a lonely branch
but it can’t stanch
the sadness trickled by
a sickle moon
for the rushed raccoon crushed
to the pavement

Don't think

See that tree
looking angry with broad
and black arms
low and at the ready
to barge in?
It’s there, but put out your
cigarette
and don't think about it.
What I tell

you not to, you know you’ll
do, so think
instead of the black-white
woodpeckers
who hang at bird feeders
upside down
and who sound like squeak toys.
Now don't think
about them, how they might

scar happy
trees with arms raised to blue
and a sense
of distance. While your heel
scuffs the butt
out on the walk, you won’t
be thinking
about the angry tree
before you.

Two-timing you, but for a good cause

I've begun blogging at another site, but that doesn't mean my heart isn't in this relationship any more. I'll still be versifying life here, but I'm doing some more prosaic work over at the blog for NICODA (the New International Center for Diverse Artists). NICODA is organizing an arts festival entitled "How We Are Connected" to take place this fall in Queens. I could tell you more about it, but why not go read the full story on their blog? Here's a snippet. You can click the title to read the full post.

How We Are Connected: The revelations of art and science

... Using the Genographic Project as inspiration, “How We Are Connected” (HWAC), an arts festival organized by the New International Center of Diverse Artists (NICODA) is trying to uncover similar connections, but from a cultural perspective. The HWAC project integrates theatre, dance, music, and multi-media from a broad range of artists, all responding to the deep inter-connectedness put forward by the science at the heart of the Genographic Project.

Not only does HWAC provide insight into the ways the modern and ancient forces of migration, both voluntary and forced, have contributed to the mixing of cultures and the interchange of different forms of expressions, but it also allows us to trace back the paths of development for each of those art forms and see how they’ve influenced each other as they matured together. ...

Inspired by true events

I’ve read the news, and its red
with painted lip prints, and the stain
of stranger thumbprints. They’re not
mine. Neither of them. They belong,
lip and thumb, paint and stranger,
singularly to those others who don’t
read or write such things. They may
bleed, them, but the blood isn’t red,
or crimson, or cardinal, or scarlet.
Pick a shade of red, and it isn’t that,
at least not until it’s too, too late
to stanch. The bully’s standard is to take
it all, all of it except the fall crisp that led
into this strangely warmer winter. I took it,
and I saved it in my bones to prepare,
but the cold didn’t come. Not like we
were used to. I’m told the bully wears
what he takes with a dashing style. See it,
that royal blue that outfits him? The flowing
robes? The gold. I’ve been robbed. We have
been. Not of things, but of a view. A view
with no room for us in its downside-up
very periscope-unlike perspective.
There’s no upside to the up-down
and just around the corner trips
I take. To the grocer. To the bar. To
the five and dime. It’s fattened up
to a dollar. And the slimming newsprint
costs more than what I get
without the paper. I don’t
get it, not the print, not the paper, not
the red lip prints, not the thumbprints
left by strangers, not the news
I’ve read and I’m reading.