Bare Feet and Feathers

The cat bathes with gravity in a taffy of light pulled from our star and knotted to a home made afghan, a hand-knit event horizon. A cat bath is an infinite Sunday condensed into a self-absorbed mass of luxury and fur.

(inspired by two poems. The first is "Memo from the Desk of X" by Donald Justice. The second is "Like Gods" by John Koethe) God, make this desk bleed the consubstantiation of me. What Divinity I might have, make its stain spill out in letters in words, in imagery, in faith, in raspberries, in feathers, in heaven. I'm crying citrus to an aluminum ceiling Hard rain splatters back. Silence. Mine is a desk of flat packed pressed wood. My shoe is as real as my sole. It walks on earth, on concrete, on asphalt in rain, in snow, in heat, in gloom of night. This is a field divided the poetry of possibilities versus the prose of facts. My soles stamping out rhythm My soul exiled into night A stanza as vivid as a crow in the snow. Good night to dreams no night for dreams Let wine be for forgetting. Step over the wire and embrace the facts. The Justice Memo received let poems go extinct.  

Step up and out of the stream into your authentic chair leave the banquet behind your eyelids acquiesce to the universe, every pore. Tie a string on your thought this thread of sincerity Tie it quick to the fringes of time pregnant with the helium of hope. Three feathers of a wing  fly straight through heaven into the heart of God.  Your truth, your humility, your freedom.  You paid no tax for a moment No one loved what you knew or hated what you need For a second, you were nothing but free. 

Some embers catch  a tailwind to conflagration Some embers fade like memories of the womb Jesus and his seed, the sower of truth.  Save one seed he forgot; the seed in stasis.       The seed            in                   stasis. It was the comfort  that became uncomfortable. It was the money  that became a liability. It was the sacrifice  that      that became nothing more than                  sacrifice If I were caught in amber... In amber, I had fought An amber of half light  lived in a lens without life. Static golden light.  Honey without sweet might as well be ice.  It is the ember of an old man, the ember in an old man, The ember of this man, the ember in this man. The ember in stasis, the ember pending. ember, ...

My poem is my virus. I am the parasite. You are the host. I violate your membrane with perverse imagery. Your soul is eternal. Mine is not. I will leech into you. I will bleed into you, all of my DNA. All of my relevance is in this syllable... What sound do I need to make to destroy you forever? What is the rhythm of significance? I am as arrogant as a plague. No effort can sterilize my filth. This disease is as certain as death if you have read this this far. then it is too late. You are too far gone. When I die, you will carry me with you into dense crowds of loved ones, into temples, into courts and classrooms. The infection will spread to your tongue. Your voice. Your sound. And you have become the parasite.

It was Sunday when I was kidnapped by bees and taken into the soil, told to contemplate my cuticle... Contemplate your cubicle and tell us what's fair, Loving the myth of the millionaire of loving the truth in the air? Bow down and be low, be among, be within, be with us, be in the Earth and love the soil. Know your food and celebrate. Celebrate the simple. Damn the fool. Damn the Chief. Damn the cool. Damn the thief. Sieze the power of your palate savor the taste of your ballot. Celebrate what is ample make yourself an example Love the whole and the real. Let your neighbor grow your meal.

My tomboy listens My girl pouts Those shadows beneath her lips. How open can open be? As open, as open is she. One in ten? One in twenty? Too, too many are set free without ever an apology. See me. See me, see me. Let me waltz through the lobby. Announce my arrival. Be my Siren and blare a triumph, a secret, our love. love me love me love me My tomboy. My siren. (my secretest secret wish...shhhh) Homosexual molecules loiter somewhere on the horizon. Needles march a cadence. Black cards dispersed into the galaxy. It is a sinister tarot that tells me to take fifty dollars and let a man take me, and put a needle in my arm to win your sympathy. So, let my head fall into your lap brush my hair and hum me a tune. I know... Middle class white boys need not apply. Yours is a passion that rides whitecaps Mine is one that rides the undertow Middle class white boys dance to revolution songs "The night is made for lovers" I danced barefoot to Gloria....