Butterflies I

When the phone cut out

Those would be the last of our words

Hanging as a fog to obscure

The reasons and way back.

If you could see the way I

Look at you and feel the way

I want to touch your hand then

The skies might clear and you’d

Hear me again.

When One Can Summon Enough Energy

Waking up early can be sublime.

Without needing sleeping bag, backpack or food,

You summit highest mountains.

You see light born brilliantly on each leaf,

All trees born again in the rays,

The quiet of a scene that will turn riotous,

Hearing prophecy from birds of an awakening world.

The stillness allows you to see that you unfold

Into being by early sun too, a slow awareness

That alarms protest. The morning air is so cold;

Even the hottest of days rolls out gradually.

I am a Book

Once, at my first

I had straight edges

Clean pages

All was perfectly aligned.

But through the rain

My spine has bent,

Pages warped,

Whites soiled,

Never to return

Until, recycled, you find

New words, new hands.

Some say it showed character,

But it reads like regret.

Next time I will don a sleeve

Since you never know

When the rains will come,

Then suffer the age of my fiber.

In the Shower

Black water runs down

From dirty ears I scrub,

Scum from a soul dragged through the dirt.

I feel a pain in my breast

Not one from running too far

Or unbalanced health,

One of a neglect of understanding

Or the importance of knowing what it was.

If emotion is the blood flow of my heart

Then you have tried to halt it,

Not wanting to hear

About complications on the ground

Trying to keep clean, uncalloused hands

From manure that has blown

Into our faces the more we shovel.

To the soil we will burry the shit

Of your ignorance, to be transformed

Into life-giving incentives, to hold

Water with which a seed can grow

Or by which I can be cleaned again.

With Community There’s Politics

So don’t get involved if you can’t dance.

Never cease to watch your back,

The janjaweed are coming to kill

The crops and rape the community.

Bastard orphans will roam the streets

As families are broken and redefined

Based on loyalties and who can keep

Their head down the lowest.

Look to the border if you make one false move.

They are always watching.

They know all you do.

Your ancestors will be told the pettiest

Of misdeeds, regulating you to death.

Don’t try to grow your own food,

You’re not to have a will.

Don’t think to travel by night,

You’ll keep record of your every step.

This is not your land,

But make yourself at home.

I Thought Things Were Turning Around

The hope was as false as thinking

With all your heart that the sun

Wouldn’t set on the horizon but in mid-day

Decide to go backwards to bed,

Like believing that the ocean will have its fill

Of river water and stop its own evaporation

Denying the clouds their formation

Denying the soil its quench

Denying the basins their lakes,

Like thinking a generation could decide

Not to have children ending the whole human enterprise,

None of which are probable nor graceful.

What we’re left with are lungs that are pained

To supply oxygen to an ailing heart

That has all but stopped pumping itself

To keep a mind alive to know these wearisome things,

That change at the most fundamental levels

Is as impossible for creation as for a person.

A Window for a Mirror

Once there was a desk

That would show you what you wanted

In the mirror towering above.

When a thought worth thinking appeared,

It was seen as his face.

Good thoughts developed smiling days.

Others dug lines at arrogant eyes,

Looks only as handsome as an original thoughts,

While ideas orbit the same nose chin ears

Allowing prediction of season

Knowing a mind’s warm productivity

And halting freezes, no wrinkle or glow

Unexpected by a stifled imagination.

Then the mind wondered.

What lies beyond the planets?

To see the world as it had been

And continued being.

Then the mind dreamed

Of what was unremembered,

Imagining that which it didn’t believe,

Recalling the unknowns of a universe

With chaos and a broader center.

As the heavens broke into a thousand

Reflecting pieces, he saw in a jagged shining sea

The endless possibilities of a world outside

Of himself, found in a face that will ever change

In the lights of the sun at a desk placed

With a view through a window showing

Inspiration from without, hoping for lines yielded

From more happiness than not.

Once inspired, the mirror was replaced to find

Courage to gain life through window’s transparent

Glass. Allow the spheres to break, the firmament

To fall, and find roaming grasslands

Grazing yonder to yonder

A world of vistas displaying beauty

And pain, not in vain.