Dirt Road IV

I urgently shout

I desperately run

I wave my hands

To get a ride to town.

My mothers sick

The broken gate,

The funeral to which

I know I’ll be late.

No matter how mad and disappointed
My black eyes and bowed stance be

You don’t stop,

You never stop for me.

Housing VI

I hear the voice of my mother.

She cries loudly from the temple mount

Of the contentment of stolen water.

Without looking up, I listen, but through my tears

I have no words, no rebuke, no comfort,

Only wisdom, always dressed in black, sits with me.

Among the mountains I hear the call

Of a silent spring, hidden and blue

Under fir and spruce, awaiting the summer

Toll of its feast and unveiling.

Housing V

At first I ground my teeth

When asking myself why I was gone.

Later I would wake up to clenched hands

In the dark, next to me a pillow--lonely.

Do you ever discover fists

When sitting, walking, thinking?

As if this divorce would be over

If I could hold onto her breath’s air.

Left Behind III

As your excitement bubbles

A wrench knots my innards.

With each item you neatly packed in,

Undone is my social sweater.

There is no exaltation without a sundering below.

I am left behind as you are freed.

A sentence of solitary freedom.

As you fly away I’ll take a picture

To touch that assoiling wind

In captured film, my instant shuttering.

Left Behind II

Sounds of an electric toothbrush

Ring at the sight of crusty outlines

On porcelain sink.

Drawers only half empty from packing

Done too slowly, of a broken e-reader,

A family portrait, used paintbrushes.

A colorful collection of permanent markers,

Bottles of empty beer in a line up against the window,

None looking me straight in the eye.

A half drawn plot plan, like the final walk and goodbye,

We rushed to avoid the end by sitting around. Now

The course to come is left to intuition.

It doesn’t take a discerning eye to see

I’ve been left to clean up their mess.

Left Behind I

This place hasn’t changed. 

My space remains constant

While yours has been vacuumed

Formless and void.

I bump into traces drifting around all morning,

Specters of a world forlorn and lost.

If only they weren’t real, horrid reminders.

Birds you named continue to fly about,

The handmade beehive still buzzes,

Fish swim gaily, trusting your hand

To feed them at the dimming of day.

Huddling Pigeons on Warming Tile Roof

Eight, dun grass in mauve setting light,

The trees that exhale by dropping leaves
Having held their breath all summer
Relaxing in the worst of wurthering winds,

Finding a pilgrim's fire in the deepest mountain winter,
A stream whose trickle continues months past rain,

Whispers that the end of life isn’t just being riven

Into cavernous silence, but climbing into a cozy bed—

Dreams that manifest when all things stretch

For spring rays beyond the solstice, bounding in ecstasy,

A  limning of verdure again.

Housing IV

When cracked like a nut

No protection left

In the blinding, drowning world with

Silvery, prying devices,

Make like seeds and let fall

The hard withholdings of your outershell—

Bitter, brittle small—

And sink, sink deep

Into the ground around you—

Soft, cool, satiating—

To the root you will find growing until

Once your legs are strong

You stand up into the sun for the first time

Finding harsh rays the source of your energy

And storms refreshing to the core.

Housing III

Would you feel it

If I told you I wanted to hurt you?

Would you stop

If you heard the wedding had already past?

Would you come back

If you saw my suitcases, ready to leave.

Would you care

If you learned of your grandchildren on graduation day

                        Having excelled with a quarter of your brain

                        Both brilliant eyes.

We’ll never know how the future would have come,

Until death we’ll be apart,

Lunches missed and cancelled,

Letting ashes go to ashes

The dust of loves to settle on the mantle

Of the house I grew up in

Now sold twice over to indifferent markets. 

Housing II

There’s my house.

I’ve just come from out of town.

Finally, a summer at home.

Weeds. Dead branches. Patchy grass.

Did they put a TV in the living room?

Don’t they know it’s for conversation?

Are those Christmas lights still up?

You leave for a year and all has changed.

I wonder how they’ve painted,

And how big my cypress has gotten.

The garage is open.

We did build this house.

It’s alright to invite myself in, right?

13 years we lived here.

You’d think new owners would respect

Instead of pulling—frantically?!—a gun.

I love that color though.

Housing I

A vision:

After years away, coasts and oceans apart,

You will return to the place from which you ran.

Your thoughts have never been far from it

Though the replacements have been spectacular.

You will fall in love, build a home, and take care

Of your parents. Life will be love and all is complete.

As you pull off the covers to turn on the coffee

Sober realizations. Most dreams never come true

And there’s no going home. It no longer exists.

I’m late leaving for the presentation. 

Sitting There

 

I wish you were sitting here

To tell you all that happened

And ask how your weekend was,

How your sister is doing,

If your expectancy grows as hers does,

For an intimate future.

Why do you study alone,

Dark night by lamp light,

Cold to the finger on the window?

To read from the pages

And but find subversive sages

That delve us into soils

Where we are charged and adsorbed

By inner-sphere surface complexes,

To find bidentate our covalent bonds,

Stable through low activities,

Working at substitution to have and to hold

A place within structure to last

Throughout the ages or at least

The completion of this inexplicable titration.

Life Has Been Spinning

Spinning

Spinning

Sweetly, with energy and filling

Since the third spin last dropped.

This rotation is coming

To a stop. With it will die a universe

Of friends, places, feelings, memories,

Securities held together by a force so centrifugal

It's predictable that I'd let its motion stop

To respin the direction of life,

Yet again

For a future that seems to continuously jolt

And close a past, endings

To the person I am and now was

To never be again with such definition

That those who never go will never know

As a line whose waters mix

Over time with tides at the ocean,

Only adrift in itself.

Place my line on these currents

And the fourth wave looks finite.

The importance of this wave diminished

More and more by the progression

Until such a day that waves should be wished

To leave a still pond to a life beyond.

On this wave I will ride, as long as his hand

Helps me spin life greater than before,

With promise that the one to follow will last

Until the final waves where reality isn't broken

But rested in.

I Can't Tell You How Deeply I Care

We displayed all the reasons how,
Letting alone the reasons why

I look at you,

And want you.

Your smile brings me close

To a home, warm couches waiting.

Looking out the window at a budding maple

I need to see you

Sitting nearby for class,

At your desk when passing by, 

Approaching as I turn the corner.

Hearing the wind through the window's cracks, 

I need your voice to come to me,

The day about which to talk,

At least a text to say hello,

How'd it go,

Good for you.

While the pain smolders

The last of my carbon gasps for air.

It is life in chambered pressure that consumes

A spirit and yields a heart,

Released after burning

Much truth

Such power

Love reborn.

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.