The Movies

The industry
Is dancing above our heads
An alternative reality
So much more pleasing
Than the making of beds
The punching of clocks
The regimens of diets and pills
Tap dancing and drum rolls
Someone kissing someone while someone is bleeding
Guns are drawn though real police seldom shoot
Credits and panning and praising and frothing
Casting the lost horizon
In a sickening smug sunset
The envelope, please
And the winner is
The illusion of mind over matter

Harvest

The air is electric
With spring wheeling in
The wind magnetizes the flowers
In bloom in the garden where I laid my soul
Bare to the earth last November
One of these seeds will become something wild
Something new for the world
To remember

Sadness
Drips from leaves
Into the valley
Lingers in the foggy dawn
Wrings its lonely hands around me
Knows the face that I put on
Woman
I slide down
Those sullen eyelids
Sun has risen, she is gone

Pretend to Be Air

Pretend To Be Air

Someone was whispering—
Somebody I knew—
Someone who watched
What I was turning into

I was left at the doorway
Saw night rise and then fall
Transfixed by these shadows
That murmured and called

I can stand in the vacuum
Imagine your hair
Breathe slowly the autumn
And pretend to be air

By the bedside I hover
Inhabit your dreams
When you roll to the side
It is hard not to scream

These are the mirages
Of one who was whole
These are the visions
That shattered my soul

I can stand in the vacuum
Imagine your hair
Breathe slowly the autumn
And pretend to be air

Blowing Yesterday

In an era when the glitter
Had overrun our lives
Plastic and metal creations
Ruled the day
You came in on the silence
Riding waves of wheat
And blowing yesterday into my mouth
Then when the sparrows all flew south
You held me through the winter
Running with the water
To the spring
Running with the wind like it was
Blowing yesterday

Lover in Winter

Despite the numbing
Of mind and of body
The dumbing of synapses
The buried emotions
The words made of ice
Hearts besot with rum
Day wrestles with darkness but
All is not frozen
All is not lost
I love you

Healing

Here at the Home,
we permit daily visitors:
the pastor, the accountant,
the lawyer, the cop,
the actress, the dancer,
the school teacher, the shrew
None of these people really know you
Therapy may help to deter the disease
But should you find yourself looking
at the law from nine different angles,
remember what was told you before your
personal Big Bang,
before you were made,
The Original You….
And the little blue pill
by your bedside