Silky

Silky, she slides side-to-side, sashaying,

Teeth bare, brazen, biting, breaking, braying,

Softly smoothing flesh with squeeze, caress,

Scraping nail-shards pierce skin, artless.

One's ways to say, to see love's art

Speaks to each pristine, broken heart.

Why I Write, Part x+107: My Legend Tells

I write to pull me up from hell,

Or so my untold legend tells,

But maybe it's to show those hells

To every unsuspecting else.

Perhaps I'm sharing ecstasy.

That's what I'd like to think of me.

On purpose? Accidentally?

I'd buy each possibility.

As to why I write these crops,

From my heart's bottom to its top,

Agreements couldn't drown pins' drops.

All I know is I can't stop.

Over Forty or Under Fourteen

It's fine over forty, or under fourteen,

But imagination best not be caught in between.

For the young, it's more than okay to pretend,

From birth 'til young manhood brings childhood's end.

Then, once you reach middle age or so,

It's 'cute' that your dreams live on, one more go.

Caught in between, and you're “one of those artist types.”

(I'm 'one of those', but I'm no artist; don't be buyin' that hype.)

Imagination, when found in young men, is called weird.

(I embrace that, as seen in the shape of my beard.)

Alone in a Maze

Alone in a maze of silence and emptiness,

A stately, monumental, civilized mess,

I wander the residues of humanity, smile on lips,

Delighted by my own custom apocalypse,

By the shadow and snowfall in a world barely lighted

By plants unattended, running on fumes, autopilot.

Utterly alone in this world, my feet long to dance,

Grateful for peace and a real second chance.

Emerald

Played on diamonds surrounded by emerald fields

Where players are given a green-light to steal,

Surrounded in walls clad in ivy or painted,

and crowds drinking beer 'til they're sick, green and fainted

Who wish they were playing, in envy's green sin,

As they covet green paper, the kind gets them in.

If I'm Counting

Seven to ten to thirteen, if I'm counting.

I have strange compulsions when tallying things.

Then from seventeen to thirty-six I bound,

So clearly there's no pattern to be found.

Forty-eight, fifty-six, sixty-nine and seventy,

Are where settings between one and a hundred ought to be,

Along with seventy-eight and eighty-six, ninety-one and ninety-eight.

If all those numbers previous are impractical or taken,

I can use the number twenty-two and not be badly shaken,

Though that number isn't mine. It's borrowed from my brother,

and given half a chance to choose, I'd sure prefer the others.

Not Very Wise

I find love at first sight to be not very wise,

Making life-heavy decisions with only your eyes,

But abandoning reason isn't the worst.

The problem is to make a person what you see first,

Is to make them a sign, or some picture-book

That a person can read more or less with a look.

Love at first sight's two dimensional, flat.

I fail to see the romantic in that.

Why I Write, Part x+106: I Don't Study

I don't study; my mind buzzes an ivory tower,
Rocks it with a moment of my rhyming power,
Which you will never see come to full flower
Since it's moving at one hundred miles an hour,

But I see beauty as I flash past, and I bag it.
If I ever want to write something that ain't true, I'll gag it,
But when I see life's untruth, then I earn stripes.  I flag it.
With so many hats to wear, my head runs ragged,

and I forget my worries, the date and my name.
I might tweak my techniques, but my whole life's the game;
Once I was quatrains and couplets, always the same,

But my new child, the tercet, it grows, and I nurse it.
Right now it's tiny.  I could keep it in a purse.  It's
Here to stay, whether you crave or curse it.

Why I Write, Part x+105: I Cannot Be Sure

I fertilize poems grown from idea-lings
Though I cannot be sure if anyone reads them,
Because one cannot write long for such as those reasons.
I'm more likely to dance when I think no one sees it.

Come Together

Your lips come together like comet and earth,

An explosion of contact, apocalypse birth,

A prelude of fire to world-ending sex.

I've been stuck for too long to move on to the next.

There's a Reason

For everyone who drinks, there's a reason for drinking.

Some are simply surrounded and sinking.

Another may swell with pride, and drink to fill the space.

For every broken vein, there's a reason for the face.

Losers and Lovers

The difference between losers and lovers

Is revealed entirely in covers –

Which losers stain, and mothers wash away;

Where lovers make (or roll in) hay.

To My Runner, In Retrospect

You let me get close, and then you'd run,
Leave me looking back on our night before my day was done.
We'd hear lots of songs, but never had one.
We were never "we."  We were only for fun.

Explained

I'm turned on by mysteries, the can't-be-explained,
Like why clean porta-johns and candy hearts smell the same,
The Voynich Manuscript, why I stopped feeling pain,
and why I always get so close and stay so far away.
Lost cities make my heart and mind impatient to play.
I fiend for theories; for answers, I'll wait.

Cut Down

Memories are ghosts of things that don't last.

They start off when you're born.  They cut down your past

Drawing-sidewalk by schoolhouse, landscape-by-tree,

There's little left of what I grew up expecting to see,

Of the places and things and the people I knew.

The future I grew up with, well that's gone now, too.

I, alone, travel time unchanged, march in one direction, ahead,

and play “The Saints Go Marching” for the ghosts in my head.

The Price

She always seems to know just when the price is right,

Probably from shopping at least every other night,

Or the three counties of newspapers she always goes through

Finding coupons that always seem to save a buck or two.

She tells me “you ought to work two jobs to save up for later.

Watching all that baseball, you're the wrong kind of waiter.

You spend too much time writing, your mind flapping wax wings

To appreciate the important, valuable, substantial things,”

But I've never found a substitute in mere financial planning

For taking the time to value what's really worth having.

The Hypocrisy of Sensitivity

We test someone's humor where there's not any give,

and tell them “stop being so dang sensitive,”

But imagine for a moment, if you can, the tables turned.

Are there jokes that would offend you?  Should this be unlearned?