The Nile

The Nile

It seems my eyes are rivers, endless
and sun swept. Here - impossibly pure
and banked by sand,
is haven.

Limbs float, tentatively tied to
trunks deserted to new generations.
Half hidden, I am
the crocodile.

Yet, in the sifted silt
submerged, I am painted
a disarming shade of jade.

Wheal of Fortune

all
day off
kilter some poison

drip
seeping from
that rogue chakra

yeah
you tattooed
under my tongue

The Ghost of the Wind

There’s a ghost in the porch swing.
Some might say it’s just the wind
but they don’t know that the wind
around here is a ghost itself.

You can see it trying to change
things in one way or another
when it flips over a paper cup
and spills beer onto the outdoor furniture.

You can see it trying to remind us
of its significance when it lifts the curtains
up from your windowsills and sends them billowing
in the air like it once did the sails of legendary ships.

But mostly the wind has become content
to laze around the flowers,
to wander through the limbs of trees
and occasionally pull some raucous prank

like flinging an umbrella inside out
or tossing a young man’s ball cap down the street:
small, pleasurable things like retirees do
when they have relinquished their responsibilities

to the world and given in to the push
of the next generation, when they have decided
to live out the rest of their days in a porch swing
because outside the rain keeps coming down.

Cenotaph

I stroke your crumbled bones,
sun baked and weather-worn
in a desert graveyard.

I fondle the ivory relics of your name,
beat them into the earth
with the drums of my feet.

You don't answer.

Have you forgotten, in sewn-eyed darkness,
or do you still whisper,
as I do, in elephant songs?

This piece can also be found in Other Voices Project with a small collection of my work, or at my personal/poetry blog at Poetic Acceptance

Lisboa

I want to go
to the White City--
     nor with carnations,
     rhetoric, a trunk;
     nor with his letters
     to, for, and against
     himself.  
                   I want to 
go running and mugged.

Suspended Head

Pris

Heavy Things in Series

Claims stay the course, which ends in features that will rein in the
parties of doubt or production (those opposites). the course, you should
know (willing to travel this line), needs adherents. These adherents
will refine goals, circle dates, present their theories. In time, which
doesn't need to exist but willingly chooses to, all participants will
find situation and compression. This is the guarded path to compassion.
You may need more turns in your own walk away, or you may bound over the
obstructions, according to idiom and directive. No one finds feasible
deals in delaying the pronouncement. We tire in our time, we retire,
then we leave the field. The field, it is true, never leaves us. This is
the nature of our task.