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.

Something Black and Red

Walking to work

Covering my ears as always

Past the scream and grind

Of savage machines

My feet deep in heavy snow.

Suddenly I saw:

By the construction site sat

Balanced on the edge of a curb

Something black and red

Under a thick layer of ice

Immune to the December sun.

In those days I didn't know

what a scarlet tanager 

looked like dead

or sounded alive.

Buried by the Shed

Beyond the shed and past the troughs, I shed  
dry tears synonymous with voiceless coughs—  
the music of the operating room,
where maggots swelter, born buried in work.
  
The past exhales as though a sour simoom
that scatters scabs of unrequited love
that choke as ashes clog the live windpipe,
or fast monsoon that floods the living-parched. 

Grief

I haul my grief up
The hill to the burping pond
of tears for stiff frogs.

Short Poems #1-2

I live inside a box I've formed of sounds 
of letters—meaning-making music, bounds 
of human-living—written (voiced), to rhyme
and rhythm.

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

Existence: Side effect of death, decay.
So many never birthed; but birthed, all die.
Thus life is fall from death; but death is whole.
Death is the soul; and life, entombed remains.