Awakening

I stand before the closed venetian blinds
With summer morning sun a golden silent promise
Waiting, glowing and awake.
And blurred across my early morning mind
A hesitation, like the moment of a first kiss--
Most important choice I'll make.

...found this in a notebook; forgot I ever wrote it...not poetry, but something...

Old man
Showing me the old town.
Sort of hopeless hope in him.
Proud
A million stories
All true? Dunno--sometimes
Just want to ask if they're imagined. Or read.
Or overheard.
"See this lot? Yup, I own this one and the two across the street.
Bought for dirt cheap.
Know how much I paid?"
No, I don't know.
And I don't hear the answer. Too aware
of the vacant, dead houses, the dead town,
dead and still as a hot summer afternoon
with grasshoppers.
Only it's a warm winter noon.
Too aware of a sort of singing in my ears,
an inexplicable feeling of desperate claustrophobia,
an urgent desire to scream over his endless voice
over his success plan,
over his bitter desire to be right,
not when everyone else is wrong, but
because everyone else is wrong.
Because they are all wrong.
And I can't.
I can't shut him away from me like that.
Because some of his stories are true.
Because once I heard him admit to making mistakes in his life.
Because once he said the only mistake he ever didn't make was his son.
And I love him for that moment, however brief, of humanity.
And so I smile and nod, and try to keep the walls of my world
bigger than this ghost town.
Because the world is bigger.
More alive.
Right?

for seattle last year

mae in april, running headlong
caffeine steps of saturday,
and the world is spinning faster
for the children's games we play
lean your head back, don't be dizzy,
laugh out loud, forget the time
lean your head back in the music,
watch the dust fall down in rhyme
driving wrong way so they told me
gonna miss you kids he said
leanback make thewor ldspinfaster
fasterfa sterrou ndmyhead
don'tforgetthe purpleben
chestrafficstopperscoffeetown
nonoleanyourheadbackfurther
dontstopnowwe'llallfalldown...

Picture Them Home

I saw summer leaving, this last year.
He passed me on our street.
He tried to look past me, through me,
Anywhere but into eyes where he could see blame
Or pleading to stay.
He looked like a little boy that afternoon,
torn jeans, faded t-shirt, short shock of blond hair
and bare feet on a bike,
coasting down the hill
with the wind caressing his childhood tan.
It's hard to tell when you see him, sometimes;
he has so many different faces, from day to day.
But I knew it was him, that time--
Because he wouldn't look at me.

Anticipation

Airports are sad places, my mother said then.
But now, I'm not so sure.
Alone, I lean my head against the dark outside
And watch embracing wings.

Don't know that it's sad now, so much as human.
I feel the unborn's stir.
I think of all the love, and time, and lives inside
The darkness of these things.

No place else so lonely, and so surrounded.
The darkness of the womb,
And early morning hours. Anticipation. Yes,
It's that which makes us Man

Makes mankind my being. Our life is grounded.
Transition is our home.
So here we sit who can't, for all our human-ness,
And wait for times that can.

Shameless

Sometimes in a moment when I think
I'm gonna go completely crazy--
Not the good kind, the horrid kind--
When it feels like there's nothing in my soul but dirty dishes
and puppy puddles on the floor
and bills
and phone calls I hate making
And I stand before the stupid heater
And wish it could ease the ache in my back
I look up and see your eyes
And for some reason
I get a silly little memory from college,
of Russ, ten years older than I, scribbling away gently on his paper
red head and beard tousled.
"What are you writing?"
Just being nosy.
"A love letter to my wife--"
So open, looking up to meet my eyes.
"Read it."
And me, awkward, nervous laugh,
Embarrassed because I asked,
Because he told.
"Read it. Here."
And the notebook turned around, black words on a white page,
Standing naked and unashamed before me.
And I read it.
And somehow, today, life is not so bad,
Because a man wrote a love letter to his wife.

Contortionist

A childhood story said that far away
And long ago, men bound themselves entwined
In twists and curves so tight that where those lay
The limbs would join. That sketch still in my mind...

So much they lost. The beauty, and the form;
Proportion gone. And where there used to be
That grace of movement, they had dared transform
And hinder part of them that would be free.

And hand to head, and arm to breast, they stand
And watch the pennies fall before their feet.
But all I think of is the useless hand
And how that closeness is its own defeat,

And how perhaps I, like them, could be free,
But keep the things I love too close to me.