Itching to fly

While on our different paths we collided like two horsing racing in the same rut,
When our eyes first met we cataloged our fears and watched them go up in smoke.

In this dream, we diverged across a river and found ourselves again in the same raft, holding on each to a paddle and pushing against the current faster because we moved in unison.

Inside of the forest I became your guide and you my salvation. Our quest as it went began as a treasure hunt of sorts. At the edge of the tree line and the antique bend in the stream I jumped in for you and your flip flop.

And now in your eyes I see the last five years of a life in which I would never have lived nor loved so emphatically. And I feel you letting go after a litany of contradictions because as you look at me with urgency to escape and build a new life without me, I see you seeing me hurt.

My pain is feeling like I am someone I am not. Lost in you, lost from taking too many photographs of the future. Lost in thinking about separating our books, clothes, dishes, dog and hearts. And now it's real.

And what hurts the most is that I know deep down you want the same as me, then and then but not now. We could change. I could stop cleaning up after you and could stop getting upset when I come home after your bed time. You could join every club in the city and I could find time for myself again in nature and neither of us would have to feel guilty. We don't have to break up our family.

And what hurts more is the alternative that seems most likely. A slow decent into alcoholism and bad memories. I can't stop you from a fate that you ache for and I won't stop you from flying wherever your nose is taking you, I just want this aching feeling of being in love with you to subside.

Forgotten bogs

The scents of the winter are carried in on your shoes, hat and gloves.

Mine holds the smile of the man asking for a cigarette in front of the towering glass shell I call my workplace. On my shoes I swaddle in the painful frost bite of the third grader who walks miles alone to get to school. There is a holocaust happening to the terrified, the lonely, the forgotten. It has been on airs waiting for someone to notice the swords that dangle,

the choice superstars that run the crashing hours of the poor down and down and down into a flooded stairwell--like the passengers on the bottom of the Titanic, they will drown first.

Pleased to meet you

When you changed so rapidly
to the point that your spine pushed
a woman onto your shoulders,shins,shudders and shimmies
-you got away with not acting your age.

When you morphed into a frame of mind
that jutted you into the woods to find and fund
your vernal pool, you absorbed your atmosphere
like the skin of the amphibians around your land.

And again your skin molted, like the adolescent falsetto
that drops the vase, it cracked and required new construction.
You stood taller than ever as your vertebrae cushioned
the new spills you took while painting a proud past.

And the pull of transformation takes you over-
board every time and I forget that you know how to swim.
But this is the fire that burns you over and forges anew-
through fight and vigor, rest and depression:
You had to feel the underside of the tire
in order to avoid shifting down a gear
without using the clutch-
-you are done grinding your engine without any oil.

Your shadowy aftermath

The hissing tea kettle that spits out Morse code calls
sounds exactly as the telephone and alarm on that old watch going off-
it beeps at the same high e! tone as the steam,
at 10:43 but we're an hour behind to save on daylight.

It's the sundown passing growth and vitamin D on down to our legs, our soil.
the living room lamp flickers to the beat of Ella and reaffirms our
dinner time dialogue is in-step with our emotions.

mary ain't you tired of this

This unwelcome pang that crashes down

like a flightless bird falling from the Lazarus beacon,

rolling off the ball onto a ledge.

She told me once a series of lies to keep me

from making a new trail, to prevent a wild fire.

Those lies now beat me with a punch and a one-two slap.

Because no matter how much thick Vaseline I dab on my

cut up eye brow, I still wipe my sweat in my eyes and blind

myself every time.

I've been trying to do it her way these last few years,

playing songs that will please her mind and heart

but her body doesn't bounce like it used to.

the little skeleton

She's been placed between double paned, scream proof glass

in front of the new park, constructed out of a need for nature

she needs nature to feel less like a stranger

she sees through the glass:

the sunlight at 9am, it molds around her shoulders

like a grandmotherly blanket on Winter break--

but there are no bologna sandwiches with cheese or games
like Kings in the Corner on lacquered table tops.

And as she looks for distractions to accelerate

the hands on the digital clock,

she hears the hummingbird tune that takes her to

those short December nights when she had a week

of female surprises. The sounds, smells and cold aches

flooded her again as she remembered the luscious lips,

lucid legs that wrapped around her neck, and the half lies

she told in the name of loneliness and love.

She was the coldest she had ever been that December.

Too many regrets that she now can't say out loud, she

has to hide what she really wants. She has to dream now

of the days when she taught wiley-eyed- smelly- fifth graders

about the rewards of respecting Nature, a lesson that was built

into their genetic code long before
they had glasses
and middle fingers.

Sailing Vessels

The thing that I used to crave
most
was my second hand music
created through my closed eyed bones,
and my own slippery hands.
Next came the lengthy desire for enlightenment,
any coloring book illusion could never be my pacifier,
I needed some satiation through the painful yet
empowering contraction of being alone.
Then out of the cave came ambition
which tied to sex neck marks
and detached partnership played the Les Paul.
The latter craving plays the hardest
on the teeter-totter, UP and DOWN
on the rusty balance beam.


My living notes played and written
were detailed analysis's through my bi-focal
like cataclysmic juices spraying from the
atom bomb, you felt them
first on your skin, it pushed at you from the breeze
and then came the heat that was cooked up
for the steaming masses.

My teeth have since shifted
and my diet differs now.
My hunger is still for patience since I fight and then
acquiesce. It's surely a tempting CGI effect
when my dreams play with my
eyes, pushing my lips to
create conflict and then to solve it.
Like I can just act like some robot
lacking a memory or a placated punching bag.

Fire It UP!!!
Figure It Out!!
Don't Fool Yourself!

I feel the shift.
Per usual, it's feet first
and on the boat that was once a raft.

Remember,
I have been in the woods alone.
You have been there too.