I’m lying in bed with my legs open.
You perch your hand
inside my thigh.
Nothing sexual about it.
It’s just a good place to put your hand.
Category: Poems
Part of Me Has Gone Rotten
Right now I’m trying to find out which part.
Somewhere lies a cankered sore,
as on the foot of a bum,
who’s been walking for days with no respite;
offered no help from my brain, my heart, my knees, or my eyes.
My stomach’s a landfill,
through which he rummages parts of last night’s meal,
worn down to bone by the thick, rich stink of unrequited bile.
Upon his surfeited burp, my white cells collapse inward with paranoia,
my lymph nodes hum ever so slightly.
I’m flesh-sick.
My eyes are last night’s cloud-covered moon;
memory beset by dusty moths hungry for old clothes;
heart bubbling up through my neck like a fountain of molten coins;
knees speak only to the weather, ignoring both nerve and vein.
Part of me has gone rotten.
I’m trying to carve out what’s dead without spilling the rest.
Cherry Trees
With steps across the field you stride,
despite the calf-deep snow.
What lies on the other side?
I ask but you don’t know.
What field, you say, what snow?
To it you bend and place your plow.
Upon bestowment of this kiss,
a cherry-bearing orchard puts to root.
Not a limb does the lucky sun miss,
nor does water overlook a tender foot.
A woodlet free of serpentine hiss
is your breast, and all its fruit.
Morning At End
I need morning as the dune does sand.
Everything smooth as a pond
tucked away thick in a woods
no one hikes through.
Until the neighbors,
high on coffee and grits,
take their cute little dog out to piss.
That tree it lifts its leg on
used to be morning.
Now it’s stinking-wet noon.
Black Skimmers
Birds of the bureaucracy,
they made the country what it was
but did little for the land.
Hydrant
A fire hydrant drowns in the sand.
It prays for the waves to reach its feet,
to lubricate its spigot with the shining randomness
of which only ocean is capable—
toy rubber dinosaurs, light bulbs, mismatched shoes,
mismatched socks, chairs missing a leg, saran wrap.
It gave up years ago looking for the perfect shell,
its pipes thick with grit, its undelivered postcard beauty
in no way self-consoling. O, hydrant, wait, wait—
the clouds grow blue with chaos,
the pelicans flee in threes;
your time is coming.
That Didn’t Happen, Did It?
We conjure a garden of
tendriled and well-leafed
realities. Deep is the soil
of time when we sprinkle
our plans like crystals of blue
fertilizer. But most futures die;
we can water and sun only one.
The Surfers
Their arms swing like windmills,
friction free, disproving grade school
texts which denounce any theory of
perpetual motion. The surfers cling
to their boards like scholars their books.
If waves were words, surfers would read
the dictionary from cover to back and,
upon arriving at Zurich, would stare
at the azimuth horizon, yet dissatisfied,
pressing the ocean for one more walled
utterance—a salted syllable, a wet grunt,
anything working its way back to shore.
Humilis
The cumulus clouds hover steady
and low in the evening sky.
They are blue or white. Their choice.
They don’t need to give a reason.
Blue because they want to;
white because they feel like it.
When they’re ready to
roll their own die, they shake
out to sea, join other clouds,
frustrate the surf with rain, and
contemplate the breeze
in another life, as sand.
Rain Sequence
I
A cloud, glowing purple
with mischief
puts a hand on my shoulder
and nibbles at my ear.
Its menthol breeze
hastens me to cover.
When the rain comes
—pitter patter—
I ask only that
it leave its hailstones
at the door.
II
The storm went off.
The storm has no lights.
He’ll come back on,
by tomorrow.
The lights went off.
The lights went down.
Rain and thunder,
by tomorrow.
III
Aha, I caught you—!
—Caught me at what?
It stopped raining—
—Yes, but it’s still wet.
JBR.com 