A sense of it.

Love lies in the eye
first sight, long lines of grace
but grief is tactile
a punctuated blast of friction
the stunning blow.
It strokes the temples
with sticky heat
and numbs the fingertips.
Grief shakes the spine
clenches the lips
locks the jaw.
Love may lift the heart
but grief bruises the soul.

The last rites of the sacred stilettos.

We held a funeral

for your Jimmy Choos

scripted after the ceremonies

we performed for the goldfish

who survived long enough to be named.

Already your feet have flattened

and you move through the days 

in perpetual company.

We raise our glasses

to stilettos

and the rush of city streets.

Still flats are no bad fate

with your feet firm on the earth

and the future waiting with you.

Food for thought

Before biology, I believed
the brain grew ripe and heavy
like a pomegranate
with leather stiff skin
for protection
but if you once broke through
it would spill out
a thousand juicy sections
red slick kernels
swollen taut with tartness
and inside each fleshy nub
a seed
from which could grow most anything
a thought, a dream, a right hook,
even love
if planted in the right soil.

Fear of Heights

The stairs had been my terror
too many in the house
steep polished spirals
each ledge high as his hip.
When he crawled, I transformed:
a sheepdog harrying a lamb
shutting gates, doors, a traveling citadel.
The doorbell was my downfall.
Scrambling to sign and return
I turned, too late.
The little hands stretched, overbalanced
tumbling forward and--
not down.
He drifted above the bannister
giggling, reaching for the chandelier
until I screamed
snatching the corner of his shirt
a squirming helium child
till the cloth tore loose
and he soared upwards
the red fabric floating behind him:
his first cape.

Snap shot.

A discrete shadow
to the feather weight and meat heft
precise
a thousand geese strung out across the sky
as a solitary bird flies south

The time elapse
between a motion and reaction
becomes an ellipse
suggesting transition

A thousand wing beats
thrust up and down
no progress
teleportation

a single solitary bird
a streak across the sky
reality stitched tight and bound hard
printed and displayed.

Winter Migration.

Those Blues Again

I've got the singing dreams again
can't break loose of the tune
mmm I wake up humming
I got the three note blues again

If lady love has a home
I ain't been by to visit
If she's got a love of her own
I ain't shook his hand
If she's got her own baby doll
I aint been the one to hold it
but when she hums I sing along.

I've got the dancing aches again
can't break loose of the beat
Mmm my feet keep on tapping
I got the two step blues again

If lady love has her roses
I ain't seen them grow
If she's got her own supposes
I'm not the one to know
If she's got her grand parties
I aint been invited to go
but when she hums I dance along.

I've got the hurting heart again
can't break loose of this game
mmm I wake up praying
I got the lone heart blues again.

Confessions

You know me
always looking for the perfect
metaphor.
I would have said analogy
but when the lines line up
too neatly I get small frissions
on my teeth and feel as though
some frame of truth has fit itself
around my mouth
instead of the other way around.
Analogy is still better.
I want you to become
something that I understand.
Some thing. Of course, that's
the key.
Or in this case the answer.
There is no lock and therefore no key
to turn in such fictions as relationships.
The best I can stretch for is a guess,
a conceptual leap, intuition.
In tuition. The process of teaching.
 In two it shuns
the idea of self and selves.
either one or the other. Not both.
You learn and I teach, or the other
and we are same and unchanged
and transformed.
The words are what I pay with,
pray for, play in when it comes to this
us.
Definition and description.
I want you to become like this thing,
or more directly- this thing.

Things after all,
can be owned.