Love Is the Risk

Love, the dutiful wheels

of time, the mother’s

milk, the arthritic

fingers rinsing your dish, the words

you can’t remember (to the music

you can never forget). Love is not the rose

but the soil kissing its feet and water

feeding its verdant bones and sun care-

ssing its palms lifted in prayer.

Love is the risk

the sky took, be-

coming, sacrificing,

letting the stars each take

a share of its heart to shimmer

with the generosity of a being

who has known how it feels to be

loved.

An Act of Courage

Open the body's gates. Now, let fear

come, up those steps of bone and down

pulsating halls, to the room

decorated with love,

chamber of the heart.

Offer your breath.

Softly say:

Welcome

home.

Sound Asleep

I’m the guy, you’re the girl

I am the bivalve and you the pearl.

I the habit, you are the choice.

I’m the lips, you’re the voice.

I the muscle but you the pulse.

You’re the desired, I the impulse.

You the shepherd and I the sheep.

You’re the dream and I sound asleep.

Anger, My Love, Protector, Enemy

Anger, my love, protector, enemy:
Did you force yourself on me
or was it I who chose you
while blind drunk on my weakness,
wishing to replace my dread,
pain, guilt, shame, to stop feeling sad?
You, shielding me from the pain of abuse,
from malice, unpredictability,
neglect, incompetence, stupidity,
and universe's cool indifference.
When you take my hands to dance
the fire around your heart scorches my skin
and the ice at your center freezes mine.
How my heart burns! I sometimes
wonder if this is what love must feel like.

To Think

I stroke your skin.  I'm not Hamlet.
I'm harmless.  Like the final rest.
Look here, my heart has nails in it.
They stop the bleeding.  Oft I sing
So that I've no time left to think.

I Will Forgive You

Forgive you how I did

For all things you had done to me

Now far enough for heart to see

I never felt what must be touched 

Unreachable

                   Unreachable

         Then                        for me

Forgiving you for

                                                     Who you are

The Lab

We're waiting to hear our numbers.

Later we brace ourselves for stings.

I saw mine smacking its thin lips,

Looking like a fat greedy fly.

All around I see perspiring bodies

That fear how they'll be graded

Under judging microscopes shortly.

There never is an essay portion,

Defending your brokenness.

This feels like a beauty contest,

No chance for old hearts and livers.

The red ink is most unforgiving:

Fix these and come back again,

Say the numbers looking very grim.

Earthly Carnival

I revel in repetition, I do,
like revolving around the lovely sun.
What Earthly carnival of life, these pine
valleys, these rural grasslands, rolling plains,
velvety rivers, groves of olive, beds
of wildflowers, these woods where lions roar.
This Ferris wheel of soil contains souls too—
in wrinkling skin, pumping their failing hearts,
who hold on tight as Earth circles and spins,
and sun takes in the sights and smiles once more....

Childhood's Monsters

Beneath my childhood bed myriad monsters
lurked nightly in darkness, hidden horrors....
Oh how simple was life for the young me,
life's monsters confined in space and in time.
Mushrooming they've colonized every inch
of my insides now, of the world out there,
blending in when need be, profess honor,
ones that look like me, ones in modest robes,
in Kiton suits, fatigues, dirty tatters...
some even capes!  Who to trust when I've known
monstrous hearts in some, some their monstrous brains?
But monsters live too inside chance and fate,
deep in the deafening hush of the world
where air, with or without you, keeps its form,
the sun's forever sun and the moon moon,
childhood's monsters gulped as if breaths in storm.

Do What You Love

Looking back at me, the slight counselor,
her head framed by thick shelves of dusty tomes,
strands of her grey hair stuck to her collar,
her crinkled dirty-blue eyes twitching still,
too dim to guide my heart’s drifting vessel,
said to me, “Do what you love,” in a tone
as though coming from bottom of a well,
not a shout, but an echoless whisper
of love that lives only to speak these words,
for when it stops it’ll recall the thirst,
heart afloat in ocean of salty tears.
So she drank her coffee and asked, Who’s next?

Life of a Poet

Producing poetry is like pushing an empty pen

Right into your guest’s sinless heart
Write as the horror in their eyes
Dulls engulfed into death
But pray at their dargah
Notice it is your own
We poets worship
Ourselves first
We murder it
Again and
Again

Happiness

True happiness is shy.
You need to be gentle and soft,
sincere and kind,
because happiness can always tell
when people demand its presence
only for selfish pleasures,
and when they genuinely wish
to welcome happiness home,
and honor their dignified guest,
with care at home inside their heart.

Happiness is pure and simple,
requires only that you meet
its soft presence with yours.
Happiness will silently sit,
caress your arms that long
have held heaps of hurt within.
Happiness will sing,
perfume the glory of your being,
cool the treacherous loathing within
with every flap of each wing.

But only if you care enough
to invite happiness home.
So open your windows at night,
let this shy presence now glide in,
unseen by the glaring daylight.
Listen for the soothing sound
of it preening its feathers,
consistent as breathing,
or the calm regular beats
of peaceful open hearts.

Feet

I hear between you and I

explosions that wail
that sting the skin like hail
griefs crystallized in time.
With my fingers sense
sympathy’s frostbites
mutations of distance
carved into the hearts.
I see myself but only
with your eyes falling off
the Earth into the clouds
pouring into oceans
sinking down a million feet….
Oh how I miss hearing
the sound of your feet….

Fool my Heart

I shut my eyes
trying to fool my heart
that I'm fast asleep
But here they come again

Creeping out as if from under
a shut door into the moonshine
swelling out like diamonds into the dark
one and two and then a trillion tear drops

The Law of Conservation of Love

My eyes rained upon the sheet last night,

smudged my formula of Xs, Ys.
Emotions make a shameful mess of things,
I thought, exhausted cried myself to sleep.

This morning I upped and killed a lost fly.
I don’t care, I don’t believe in karma.
Life’s unfair, I’ve nothing left to lose.
My heart sleeps, my eyes are red but dry.

Tomorrow I may wake and slowly rise
and desire to, or consciously choose
to believe in the conservation of love,
to trust that love is never truly lost.

And later when my hair is grey and white
I may kiss an adrift fly, apologize
to life at large and my own injured heart,
that I doubted the invisible formula.

Paper Tooth

She made a paper tooth for grandma
with plenty of gold and silver glitter.
What gaudy thing! grandma said, bitter,
as if expecting the tooth to have been better,
not flat, not a child's gift, not yet another thing
she has to smile at, useless as her own sweater,
as her own memories; her bones.  Her heart.

Compassion

Compassion is not time
that passes without looking back
Or confused air
once a breeze and then the storm
It pours
not as water that freezes in the cold
It's not the sun when concealed
by darkness of a mindless cloud
Compassion does not cower
like fire in the downpour
Is not seduced by alluring words
Will not crumble beneath untold
unfelt sufferings of the world
Compassion can never be known
but from the experience of breath
through the revived reborn field
of heart that softly beats—
despite the ravages of time
howls of dolor
despite springs of agony still unhealed
and shattered memories that keep order
as fearful guards blocking the roads
despite the snoring snow-covered wolves
and homeless feelings running for cover—
having felt an openness and softened care
as if the city of heart is much much bigger
as if it's a room that welcomes and can hold
that and the breath and has room to shed a tear
as if the heart is vaster and warmer and wiser
beneath the damage and the falling snow
as if the heart is patient enough to wait
for blossoming spring and fruits of summer
But these are only words! 
Who could really know
why this time the breath had beamed with joy
returning all content
up to the mind from there

What I Want

I want the leaves to never turn
I want the terror on the run
I want the limbs of anger axed
I want my grief now kept in urn 

I want the leaves to never fall
I want the love to never fail
I want this love to come and stay
I want this love to be my all 

I want the leaves to never break
I want the tenderness immune
I want our softness always safe
I want our hearts to never ache

I want my life to never bend
I want my trees to never age
I want my time to never pass
I want my verse to never end

The Ghosts of a Room

When the moon shines red
And the darks cascade
When the length of room
Has become light years

When the ghostly hush
In the silence yawns
Through a hollow tune
With the breeze for tongue

Now compassion swoops
Through the cloud of tears
Down on injured hearts
Filled with lonely fears

Filled with homeless rage
And a scalding shame
And strangled with guilt
Of venom-clawed blame

Then compassion flies
With the hearts in beak
Over ruby lakes
What is there to seek?

Soon the wordless room
Breathes the scented dawn
Everything the same
But the dew-kissed lawn

Shoulds and ifs and whys
Never here reside
Outside the window
Of the room inside

Only lady bugs
And where grass now parts
There the earthworms romp
Wee-little, their hearts.

Short Poems #3-4

His Love was Thrashing 'Gainst her Heart

His love was thrashing 'gainst her heart, 
then pulling back, releasing shards
of colored glass—erect like guards.
His love and hate displayed; like art.


************************************

Perfumed Sunspot

The alley boys had asked if I
had tasted June's perfumed sunspot.
I've gauged devotion only by
the nightly pecks of moonless sky.