everyday sustenance allows you to bypass
expenses, lessons and stats
in favor of happy and excited and tired

mysterious gurgling to the left
patience to the right
you at the center

another attempt at cleanliness
side by side
we scrub

instead of waiting to be fed
smell the grass or nap
in the delicious sun

your heart beats the skins
through the open door
I hear your beautiful cacophony

You Shall Further Instruct: Epigram

“An Epigram is a short, witty poem or saying that is easy to remember and is written to be remembered. …Epigrams have no particular form except their brevity (two, four or six lines) and their way of getting right to the point.”
-Handbook of Poetic Forms, 67


My Lord, I thank you for the honor
of anointing me and my sons
but we’d rather not smear warm blood
on our ears, toes and thumbs
 

Sent Away: Couplet

“The couplet is a couple, or pair, of lines of poetry, usually rhymed. Basically, by having two equal parts, the couplet is a simple and fundamental structure that reflects so many other basic structures in and around us, such as the human body’s two eyes, two ears, two hands, and so on, as well as our thought patterns of yes/no, up/down, and good/bad.”
-Handbook of Poetic Forms, 57,58


The Lord hurled the Pharoah into the sea
Both to gain glory and so I could be free

In thanks, I sing praises and work as I’m called.
True glory for God: joyful freedom for all

good news in the night
energizes and calms
like steaming green tea

Mild Dysplasia

Belly full of gratitude held tightly
to your chest, you will be brought, strapped to a board,
to an expectant place by an as yet unknown wind.
Toothless, you poke at my heart
every three hours in a dreamstate, your lips
pursed to kiss the cherubim that are an unshared secret;
I fancy myself a secret-sharer though I am, in truth,
simply a receptacle akin to a plastic bottle or a casket.
(You too will become a simple light bulb, abandoning
these days of neon waves without understanding. It is a fruit-bearing cycle.)
You live in a fortified moment
while I, joyfully, pump myself dry.

Renewing Poetry

This first true tear in a page
is my freedom to be more brutal and more liberal.
Bitter flow, foaming shouts, flowers on a darkening street.

The way words work between chubby fingers,
the work words do in the world,

words work on the world like lipstick,
chicken soup, nausea, and unexplained explosions,
often all at once.

I imagine myself dancing in black hot pants and boots,
wild and uninhibited. I also imagine myself as aloof
as everyone else. Somewhere in between is my song.

Time is a dwarf, a cut flower.
I will lose myself in the matching and choosing.

I will enter and be entered, and my face
will glow. Sweet smells will rise
from my fingers because it is no sin to uncover nakedness
before the beloved and I am here
to love you.