Category: poetry

Lost in utopia

The lizard has lost its manners and is pulling a grumpy scowl across its face
The blue flower strays lackadaisically in the wind
Tall towers stroke the sky

We’ve lost our minds but we haven’t yet lost the universe

A half formed thought streaks across the sky in plaid letters
What do the letters say?
We don’t know.
We’ve lost our language and misplaced all our punctuation.
We flow through abstract sequences, colors bleeding into other colors.
Inanimate objects tell us what to think
Until…

We finally hit our head
feel our own blood run down our forehead
and wake up.

Wisp dreams

their dreams were wisps of smoke
            they prayed for rain
                   through the understated mahogany of the trees

the dotted stars faded in the morning 
           but the wisp prayers still hung in the air
                   unable to be blown away  in new gusts of wind

only the softly falling drops that finally came three months later
          finally washed away the answered prayers
                   like salt being washed from a wound

the cleansing rain awoke a new dream
    this time reflected in puddles that would last until the rain stopped
          and the new dreams echoed into the sky
                  with the rays of the sun.

stillness

stillness halts and lingers
ignoring the fantasy of truth
ignoring the framework of deception
and puts me on my guard

I cancel the stillness with an obscene amount of mental motion
my stillness feels like boredom
so I break its bonds 
and think I’ve found freedom

but until stillness can be still
fleeing it only leads to an illusion of freedom
a sticky web of the subconscious
that knows what it wants but keeps forgetting 
simple steps

be still everywhere
except your breath
be still-breath-be free

Be free of ugliness 
 of never ending cyclical motion

let stillness linger
find freedom

Wink

I stood in the dark and winked at myself
twice
I called to you from beyond a brick wall
whispering
Laughing underwater, smelling plastic flowers, and chewing on paper tasteless meat are all common things

Sometimes the truth is there
but we hide from it
and instead 
we stand
winking in the dark

Shrapnel 2

On paper and in person she was as small as a mouse
and still she tried to make herself smaller

She wished to shrink to a speck of stardust
infinitely small
but also imbued with powers contained
in the nascent universe inside her

One day she went into her mind
and did not come back out again

Instead she became stardust.
Her dream of becoming a speck came true

But that was not the end of her story…..

She became a seed planted in a new place
and all that there was left to do
was to expand.

She sang the body electric
She became the stars
and her own new multiverse under her own terms

Like shrapnel exploding
she exploded into the biggest planet 
anyone had ever seen

Her power was compassion
and no one could ever make her feel small again

We are all made of stars.

shrapnel number 1

The strength of weighted words
measured for resonance
and chosen for impact
hit their mark

the armor did not hold
and the sting became a wound
where these words pierced her

It wasn’t so much that she was called a name
it was whose voice was used as the weapon
to deliver this name that became the bullet

now she spends the wee hours 
picking out shrapnel
which she is forming into bullets of her own

the map

my heavy heart
is swift of foot
but somehow lies dormant

under red sands
and marbled skies
for many many sunsets

fried over 
it’s hard to recognize 
the scars
after they bake
in the sun
for years and years

one scar bleeds 
into the next
until they form
a picture 

if you examine
the picture 
at different angles
it’s both a secret symbol


and 
a 
map

a map 
back down
to where
the sources
of scars
lie buried
in the sand