The Sun Meets

Beat the long arm of the coke red sun
deep into the place where the sun meets
the sun meets, meets the,
place where the void ends,
and something begins.

When the night hints at its coming.
Its successful foreshadowing
causing me to rejoice
at the passing of a fraying day,
and sometimes leaving me cringing,
and wishing to stay awake
longer and longer.
To keep myself from sleeping away
the time I have free of obligation
and inevitable failure.

But as you all know,
The night passes long or short
for all.
Long Nights! Stay in your resplendent fever!
Keep me in your circle
and never end.
Time can not stop,
but sometimes,
Oh! If morning would just never come.

The Resting

Dusty little chickadees
hop on in your hunt for morsels.
Small writhing dust worms
hidden just for you.

Rangy, audacious racoons,
only intimidating when
you know you're being watched.
Hang in the oaks,
and throw your stones.

Flickering little ones,
stay away from the satanic crows.
They watch you with their blackness,
their haunted feathers reach for you.

Wind falls,
cresting the plains
with its soft hand,
hanging just above
the voidless conspiracy of grasses.
Together, they made it impossible
to forget the natural world.

It calls to me,
beautiful, bleak places
of rest.

Splashing

Break me down to the underneath.
I have a soul so black
that bats don't even want to live there.
If you have found
that truth before now,
do me a favor and
grind me under your heel.
Not just my black soul,
but my flesh, my organs, my bones.

You will come up radiant,
blowing up in the water
and scattering the orcas to
all corners of the core.

You will come out finished,
the golden tips of the
sunrise's scalding hem
rising to reveal your kneecaps.

And me, not even fit to lick
the bottom of your shoe.
I am a crazy fool to ask you
to look at the dully lighted
lanterns in my eyes,
even though they flicker
more often than not,
and notice the illusion of light there,
instead of
the shuddering blackness
lodged in the take over of myself.

And somehow,
like I can be sure of the absence
of light in me,
I can be sure of the presence
of light in you,
and your choice to move in with me.

The War Monument

And he overflows
with hearty sentences.
He stands in the public places
on purpose, He knows
that it's the same as
the baseball stadium in Boston,
in Chicago, in New York,
and he always wanted to
hit something really hard.

Ignorance runs its long courses
through impressionable people,
who have not yet begun to age,
and they think, stupidly,
that he is a baseball game.

Entertainment for their sleepy minds,
but wait,
this entertainment feels
it feels
and he reads his crowd like
a badly written book
and the veteran's tears run down.
They gather,
they shuffle closer
and he has his audience.

I am wearing brown,
my darkest hair, white skin and red lips
are sad that this wintery sacred place,
this wishing vacant space,
that is bottling name after name,
of lives now in a burglar's bag,
is being used
for a dirty soap box,
and there are people here
who are falling for it.


So, I take my small face
and my brown boots
away,
and I try
to respect everyone.

Learning

Someone is snoring,
somehow lodged in with
the students, veterans, schoolteachers, and tourists
this unfortunate sleeper
need not feel rejection.
We all looked
peering over our musty books
the corners of our faces turning upward
and the mystery of comedy
turning a light on in our tired souls.
Even though we snicker,
and some of us condemn this ragamuffin dreamer
over our stacks of books
for the distraction when we have to learn,
this careless sleeper
snores on, and slowly
we let ourselves forget it into white noise.
Until tomorrow
when we will turn to our love
and say, "Yesterday, when I was in the library...
someone was sleeping."