Love Is

     Mismatched socks, too big T-shirts
     old worn jeans with no make up
     Half smiles, the ones at just the corner
     of the mouth
     Ribs that ache with laughing
     A mind challenged and vindicated
     Dreams, set free from gossamer prisons
     to float in the world of edges
     Without eyes to see,
     or ears to hear
     or lips to touch
     If never again would the world
     be tangible,
     it could continue on

Wilderness

The place where earth and sky are not seperate
bound together by cerulean blue and
feather soft emerald needles
Where the seasons turn the land first to green,
freckled with flowers,
then to brown, beckoning with smoke
to red and yellow and gold
under a quilt of fallen leaves
Where water is cold and clear,
running ten thousand ways
over hills, rocks, trees and in between
mountain peaks
This place, where it is not just air we breathe
but sun, sky, water and earth

Fire Season

The sky at last has paid the price
or nature's anger at our action
for now it cannot show the blue
of rinsed clean linen and
hope born anew
No, it is dingy with residue
from the death of earth
so filthy we can look directly
into the sun

Under Bloodred Sun

       Sharp pain that brings with it breath
Itching eyes that
  strain to see
beyond this shroud,

                      this acrid shroud

to that which will blind us
                           but now burns red,
painted with nature's fury

Listen Now

Listen now, for the drums
they are very faint, murmurs
on a windless day
We strain for their notes,
yearn to feel their pulse
We want, we need,
for them to thunder in our ears,
so that they replace all
thought
We will hear the fights,
the drama, the lectures,
see the changing faces of
the pictures, the ever changing leaves
those we fear to forget
all of what is past
For when those drums thunder
in our ears, they will herald visions
Of what we could be,
what we could do,
who we will become
Listen now
for the drums of change

Pieces of You

Today, I picked up a piece of red,
   fluttering just at the edge of my eye
like the color of the shirt you wore the first
       time we danced

I caught the strain of your voice,
    the way it's always a little bit hoarse,
  but never harsh
I tucked it into my pocket

     I keep finding all these pieces
of you, of us,
      I expect each to slice me open,
scatter blood on the grass

                         They don't.

Not anymore.

Friend

Of all that is done
    and said between and of
friends

     It is not the daggers
         made of words
that cut to the quick
  or the whip crack of
actions

But rather the bullets
    forged in the silence
 and the lack of action

that wounds the place
    where eyes cannot see