Wish

The quiet hits, all at once,
   the way it does high in the mountains,
away from the bustle of humanity

Brought about by the appearance of the first star,
                  Look up, find the tiny pinprick of
     ghostly light, its long journey to this particular sky
          on this given night finally ended

Shut your eyes, wish upon its brilliance
      wish for what once seemed impossible
  what was once little more than a dream

And when your eyes open, smile
   knowing that wish is now nothing more
than a memory

Play The Fool

Forget the hero and play the fool
   Do not be Prince Charming, dressed in 
flawless blue and virtuous white
     Nor the knight in shining armor
Whose words are slick and sweet as warm honey
           No, do not be the hero.
Be the fool.
         The one whose words run together,
Stumble, trip, and fall down in a graceless heap
   Let words fail you all together so that you
Try instead to win by fitting three dozen lilies
     In the space designed for one
Or better yet, be foolish enough to knock on her door
   and ask her
       to be a fool with you

Garden

One day, the sky broke open and spilled
          lost souls into her garden
When she stepped outside
  they brushed against her ankles,
       tendrils of gossamer web on her skin
She did not know why she left
  them there
But she guessed it had something to do
        with the soul she knew was there,
   hidden among the rest
Between blooming irises and curling ivy
   The soul that knew her own,
   its mottled, battered shape
It was the soul that looked like a broken palm frond
     Vibrant green
Which forever colored the film of her dreams

December 14

People love to speak for God. They claim to know his will, sense his presence, even hear his voice. I am not one, nor will I ever be. God to me is just a name, an idea to which I do not subscribe.
But I do think this. If there is a God, he has far bigger problems than who people choose to love and how often they do not give him thanks.
The world, if you have not noticed, is hardly a happy, loving place right now. Religions are at war with each other, as they always are, but they have dragged secular issues into battle this time. Women's rights, to name one. People are closing themselves off from each other, preferring to read the words on screens like this one than to hear them from one another. They hide behind these screens to spout off the most atrocious garbage on Earth and their words are no longer limited to the people they know. These screens reach out to everywhere and the world can see the narrow mindedness of the people writing on them.
Do not say I am one of them. I am writing on a screen very few people will see, simply because very few people care about what I have to say. I write poetry about the autumn, about the snow, things so pointedly not like this few people bother to read. I do not want them to read it. I want to say it somewhere.
God has enormous problems. Religions fighting each other is one thing but a man shooting up an elementary school, killing children, that is something else. What has this world come to, if that is what can happen when we send our children off to school?
I will not pretend I know best or I have experienced the worst. But this I truly know: something must change and because God has not interceded, we, the people here on Earth, must do something.

You Are Ours

I can't count the ways you made us smile
Can't remake the way your tail wagged
the way you caught a tennis ball
or the way you ran round and round
I can't remember a time you made us mad
Can't remake the way you always looked
up at us, dark eyes so nervous,
all you wanted was to please us
and the way you were always happy
when we came home, no matter how badly
I screwed up, or how much I wished I was different
And I can't believe you're gone
just this morning you were here
and you looked at me, dark eyes clouded over
each breath rough and dragging
your legs shaking
You were an old man and you drooled
and begged and farted and everyone
would have loved for you to be theirs
But you were ours

Time Bomb

My anger at you should not exist
I lost that right, gave it away
long ago, back when life was simple
and we did our best to complicate it,
make it tangle
But it is not you with shrapnel
buried in your heart, your lungs
It is I
You slipped it in between my ribs,
left it there to languish
without me ever seeing it
Ticking time bomb
You gave her the trigger
and pointed to the carnival house
mirror

When Armor Fails

Glint of silver,
                    caught in sliver of a mirror,
  a blur across features,

hide and protect the most important,
     the heart      the soul
Still blood seeps

                    through fissures
even when there
     is no pain