The Cat's Tail
When I was very young,
my grandmother had two cats.
I didn't pull their tails.
But I liked to feel them
contort softly as they
slipped through my palm;
their muscles and their fur
waving languidly in my hands
and twisting 'round my wrists.
I realize now that a tail
is just a finger—
and I wanted to be
wrapped around one;
to feel a cat's disinterest—
not a lack of affection,
but passive connection;
animal perfection.
Cats make love
look so easy.
Anyone
Someone is not anyone.
Now I'm grasping at straws,
grasping at sand,
grasping at dust,
grasping my hands in fists,
because I can't grasp you.
My hands are all I have,
until someone cuts them off
for all the things I've stolen—
the things I have stolen,
because they were within reach,
and you were not.
Spoils, spoiled and spent.
And for them, even if
I had anything to show,
it wouldn't be anyone;
not someone I want.
It wouldn't be someone,
because you are more;
someone
I need.
Shines
You are as The Wave,
whose sublime mantle and shines
warms dark shores by night.
And slakes the bristles
of the marshes and tall dunes
in eventide's wax.
Dappled and dewey,
in the balm of silver hours,
taking leave in ebbs.
Drowning me in flow;
rapture supernatural
to savor gravely.
Churning in my heart,
your sweet pillow of seafoam
I'll drink in my dreams.
To My Hope
In the gray, cold morn,
when our solar disc is hid,
there, you send a Sun.
And I'm reminded,
despite—or due to—dolor,
there, you hold a Hope.
These burdens of life,
the chagrin and tight tension,
vanquished by your Voice.
Each day rolls in warmth,
and the blaze behind my gaze,
I send back to you.
Hearts of Terror
Never underestimate
the terror of a turning,
churning,
errant heart.
To be convinced otherwise
is a terrific gift;
this is how terrible enemies
become the best of friends.
With half-glimpsed dreams
and tear-tinted glasses,
the pallid mirror cannot prevail—
lest you become
the pale reflection.
When changes of the mind are few,
let changes of the heart make do.
More Winter
Winter's wry;
calls to mind
the will of wheat
against the scythe;
a sheaf
of Gaia's flaxen locks
thus shorn
gives way—
jade and gem of jaded night,
and smoke of smog-steam morn.
The Beaches
The beaches beget the best metaphors,
as do most bodies of water,
and the communities they quench;
where people fish, swim, surf, skate.
They are frontiers; borders between worlds.
Not walls, but liminality-realities
for people to talk economics
with the cormorants and crabs.
Confounding, comforting,
contradictory by nature,
because nature is a series
of contradictions
waltzing in order to be.
The ocean waves, the shore waves back;
does the dance with the sun and the moon
and the seasons.
To be banal, they ebb and flow.
Like all good Heraclitans know;
things are always changing.
Water, itself, is fire.
But was this always the case?
"No man ever steps in the same river twice..."
This was never the case.
Rather,
no man ever steps in the same river once.
No man, in the river, ever steps in
the same.
No man, no river,
except the riverman, who is,
but is, only because, and because, and because...
The Fire Flitters
It's cold out, and you can't
wait for twilight to give
way to the moon.
That way, your sacred breath
can warm the New Gods.
You haven't earned any mercy;
the bridges you haven't burned
have frozen over—
salted, dried, or smoked.
Your atavistic humors flow still,
or feigning stillness in the flesh.
Remember the flesh; the flesh
is what crawls.
But who remembers crawling?
The crib? The days you played
the convalescent?
The days you taught yourself
to remember,
but don't?
What filaments of freakishness
mock your mawkish mimesis of
whatever maze you've
convinced yourself you're
walking through?
Let them light your way;
lift the hedges
and darken the writings
on the garden wall
in this, the sleep of
wicked wits;
a pallid perimeter, brick
by brick
by brick
of blank slates
all bent from
the very beginning.
You were always asleep,
it dreams; it dreams it
supposes it desires it dreams.
It's all in this together,
the dreaming and the dream-dreaming.
The posthumous litters,
the necrophage critters,
and fire-flitters—
all.