For the First Time

Feburary 28^th, 2011

I was honest and resolved;

Knowing, certain, strong.

But knowing keeps longing around,

Denying breaks my solid ground.

Is self-restraint a virtue when all it does is shy love away?

Again and again?

How much was acted?

How much was lied?

If one thing is certain.

It’s that I should have told you sooner

How I didn’t feel within your song,

A melody to score future reflexes

To grab love by its first notes,

A tree saved from painful timbering,

A garden set with clear eye lines.

What Do We Think Pines Want

January 30^th, 2011

That for what we want we pine?

Is it for the sky

That skinny trunks rise tall,

Or to catch much sun

Leaves cluster as needles,

Bunches to sweep it from the air?

Is it to hang soft and yellow jewelry from branches

That when washed or winded

Dust cars just cleaned

And clothes hung dry,

Or to transform its subsurface holdings

To tastes more liked by tap-long toes

By the soft falling of slender fingers?

The heart knows not what it wants

It just wants

And can be directed

Through ardent work,

Painful in the straightening,

To better things that take fulfilling light

Rather than others that would have it wanting

Aimless and desperate

Devoid of home

Lead senseless and voracious to an emptiness

Not seen on earth

Save in the lifeless eyes

Of the crooked lives and their darkest forms

Worse than those of the dead,

Lacking the certainty found in the end

Still maintaining dread.

We pine because we aspire

To vague inklings of what we might be,

To ourselves without limit,

Whereby some limit all others

To their own image

To take and abuse

In a fashion to present me as them.

The light that’s caught is first thinned,

Then disregarded;

Bunches that bind are broken apart.

In racing toward heights unknown

All roots are abandoned

Emaciating the model.

What’s left is mutilated,

Now marred and unfamiliar,

Lost is he who left

In devastation of his hands against his body

Used against others’ faces,

Their apparent truth obscured.

In his blind pain

He felled the pines,

The scene no different than the soil

Strength absconded in the falling.

It is not enough that rays abound

As light goes unseen

To the tired remains

Still staring up

Sitting under the last tree

Granting last light

In thickening shade.

To Be Guarded is To Love.

March 24^th, 2011

A wall on a lonely landscape

Keeping most of me from you,

In bright sun does hair fly

In the face of emotions kept

From the creek, damned

To only be let out by self betrayal,

A flood where streams once flowed

With the care of gravity. To have

Water without thought and a path

To lay back in,

Let river run over root,

Fall over rock,

Cascade past barriers keeping

My hand from yours and your heart

From mine. If only

Ground flow escapes barring measures,

Protecting the integrity of respect

And a budget for pain,

I look forward to the day our waters surface and meet

At the fork, where hills between us submerge,

Joining, we hold together tight,

Journeying to lower lands,

Awaiting the unbridled expanse of the seas.

Words On the Playground

March 7^th, 2011

My heart in the grass

Your eyes in the grape juice

My love let to pass.

Exposed to soft knives

Of kindest malaise

By the swings I sit and you

Stand without walking away.

Without turning your face

Lips deliver white flowers

To my feelings

To morn and to stay,

But not to embrace,

With a slide sending hope

For buds another day,

On a tree less attractive

Fruit offered that do

Little to keep

Temptation from bloom.

Let run was the truth

And then might it rust

Bolted in place,

A ladder, with dust.

The old heights forsaken

For clean bars to climb

Metal left squeaking

Disregarded in time.

Will my heart keep playing

In fields never plowed?

Will I have found love

Someday to abound?