Next

Trees whisper secrets

As their branches bend
Limbs victim to the coaxing wind.

Starlings in their magnetic formations

Drop from the sky 

As if they'd forgotten how to fly.

Aluminum bins carry human remains 

Sent to float forever 

Into Outer-Space.

entangled

A string of light pulled from one end;
The flower opposite is opened;
a cloud descends upon the plains,
watering a fresh crop of weeds and grain.

No phone calls for spirits

No taxi rides or airplanes for past lives
The celestial strand uncoils and divides 
Pulling itself apart from a force found
Between ears, hair, ego, spine, and stars—

Full of all that is ever near, and still so far.

Arrived

I did work in a church,
but I wasn't doing no praying. 

Over and over every day

I arrived to wash clean the painted lily nave.

There, on the chapel walls, chiseled beneath the pigment

I uncovered a truth I already knew, but could barely comprehend.

I watched as it rose into bloom

Laughing with the church bells that chimed through the town,

Calling to everyone from a place wide and within; 

Where mirrors made of clay mined from the ground

Reflect worlds beyond worlds beyond worlds

Through endless machinations of sight.

We watch them swirl through space and time 

In a silvery dust,

All naked and knowing, just like us.

The sky today

Clouds move through the sky
Or are the trees gliding by?
We are all floating. 

A Treatment for Tulips

You hear what is explained to you

But you don’t care about the meaning 

You want to see the beauty

Quiet, still, and painted pretty 

Clean, pale, and lonely.

[You are the tulips

Fragile, bright and bursting;

She is the winter 

Cold, long and enduring]

You believe the invisible one sees you

Through the blood and dirt of time

Just you it sees 

Through the flood of tears

Shed for others like you,

Who buried her behind their eyes,

Who she wrote to in her special code 

To resist, To rise

Quietly, powerfully: As Is.

[You are the tulips

Fragile, bright and bursting;

She is the winter 

Cold, long and enduring]

Soft flesh of rainbow petals 

explode from the powder white snow;

The Earth keeps turning

She always knows when it is time to go.

You are the dust and seeds and other dead things

Cradled in her howling winds.

Tulips wilt and crumble, 

Winter never ends.

Indivisible

Lead tied to feet
As invisible as the in-between
Indivisible as your breath expelled
And the air I breathe
Still, we sink.

There's a radio station in my head
Receiving first printing
Collector's edition
Limited pressing
Endlessly repeating
A message I can never remember.

I reach for it, and it slips into the cyber infinity
Black holes of rage, gravitational waves pulling everything
Toward a formless, impartial fate
As it reflects back through the black of our eyes
The center of what you see as I;
But is this skin part of me, this largest organ of my body?
How can I know for sure until it touches something?

The center—if not the flesh that surrounds me

Nor the air I breathe, then touch it.

For if not to be touched, what should this skin live to be?

February 16 [of a kind]

Rusted metal, green leaves and wet petals
Copper and rosemary spilt from the gun 

Held from both ends 

Loaded with lead or lies, 

Both a death of a kind