Better Uses for Your Shadow

When you’re enduring quarantine in solitude, it’s best to develop new uses for your shadow:

turn it into a weedwhacker for overgrown apocalyptic thoughts.

Or a Swiss bank account, a golden chalice in wonderland.

A weighted blanket, a mattress filled with magic fingers to massage you to sleep.

Wings to fly you wherever you wish. Butterfly kisses from the eyelashes of luck.

A karaoke machine, a round-trip ticket on the peace train.

A midnight skin to wear when sweet-talking the moon, a mercy mirror always revealing your brighter side.

Your shadow as a bold, black ink pen scrawling across the walls—

MAGA: Make Affection Great Again.

Up and Out of the Six-Feet Under Kingdom of Root Shadows

When my thoughts grow littered with open graves, the birds and bell-trees I’ve melodicised into being get harder to find.

The only thing these eyes know how to read is all the news that’s fit to bleed.

In times like these, I play rock, paper, scissors with broken mirrors. I swill the muscatel of human misery and shadowbox false prophets.

But I don’t wanna spend my life writing crow melodies other crows wouldn’t sing.

I don’t wanna be buried alive by tears.

I know the way of the sun; it rises just behind your eyes.

And so I climb up and out of any grave of me to reach you.

Does the Home Away From Home Know Its Way Home?

My belly button ain’t no panic button. My entrails aren’t chemtrails. My spine ain’t constructed from the Legos of swine.

And even though my karma sometimes seems like it just got its driver’s permit, it knows well enough not to run you off the road.

All these parts of me: maybe when they yearn to be inside out, it’s more like they want you to be closer to me.

Oh, the many untraveled boulevards of us across which we seek safe passage.

Even if home is where you fake it until you make it your own,

I’ll always leave a welcome mat for you at the door of my breath.

Somewhere in You is a Glowing Strory

May earthquakes, tornadoes, and wildfires take anger-management classes.

May dogs and cats call a lasting truce. Rainbows donate their colors to the quarantined.

May there be a cross-fertilization of dreams, free speech, and almighty dollar—a new currency we can exchange through meaningful hellos.

May there be dependable road signs along the highways of our minds. Clarity and foresight dressed in easy-to-spot, polka-dot blazers placed at every entrance and exit ramp to ambivalence and obscurity.

May all our burdens, regrets, and paragraphs of scattered thoughts become far more manageable.

We’ll edit one another down until we’re radiant.

Our glowing bones, the blueprint for a better world.

My 2020 Bucket List

To play cheerleader for the doves outside my window as they gather olive branches for winter.

To try and convince nooses to untie themselves into shoelaces of graces.

To kindly teach kindness that it sometimes needs to wear a Kevlar vest when facing down the public.

To help the maddened voices within a puberty-stunted America stop cracking.

To offer my darkest thoughts an injection of optimism whenever they wade into muddy waters.

That despite the pervading insanity, I can realize there are days when my fingerprints can still be found on amazement.

To never overlook those continually innerlooking.

Sweet-Tooth Radio

The radio’s got one end of a string tied around its bad tooth; the other end is secured around my waist.

The radio tells me to slam dance so it can be free of its rotten ache and serenade me sweetly.

It’s good to have upbeat moments like these, especially when I’m continually kicked out of sleep for failing to count sheep correctly.

Or when the garden gnomes keep getting stolen from the front yard of my fortitude.

Or when the daily headlines made of deadwood leave splinters in my eyes.

My mind is an unfurnished room aching to be filled with pretty things.

Hopefully hoping despite the occasional hopelessness.

Atoms of Laughter, Atoms of Ash

You know how sometimes when you lose someone that’s not your flesh and blood, yet still connected as a kindred spirit, how their exit from this world feels like something suddenly missing from deep inside you.

And you’re left wondering who or what will fill that void—whether it’ll be a crush of gallows or a bright rush of sunflowers.

Times like these, you feel how porous you are, how all the good and bad of the world—all the atoms creating animals, flowers, and children, all the atom-bomb atoms, bullet atoms, breathable atoms—move through us.

It’s all so tragic and beautiful: like a lyrical angel locked out of heaven.

Second Thoughts in the First Person

I’m sick of the coronavirus. Sick of wildfires and hurricanes.

Sick of hate-mongers and a derailed America. I’m sick of Twitter tantrums and conspiracy rants.

Sick of days so bleak, it’s like a chapel of black cats is a safer place to pray.

Sick of flossing with barbed wire and counting the newly bloomed flowers along the boulevard of the bereft.

Sick of watching the walls close in, businesses close down, neighbors move out.

Yet despite it all, I still recall those stories written on your skin. All the stories written on my skin.

I still marvel at our shared storylines, all our mysterious twists and turns.

How they held me, how they held me.

In This House Called Body

That feeling deep inside you isn’t a world at war or another wildfire on the rage.

It’s not some rabid Lady Godiva riding Godzilla roughshod through your inner-city streets.

It’s not that feeling of being 100 miles from everywhere, and only inches away from a broken-boned nowhere.

It’s neither police sirens nor wailing dogs. Not some gallows music moaning through the cracks of an imperfect morning.

That feeling deep inside is a melody straight outta the Beethoven oven—

a glorious symphony of inner youth rioting against time.

It’s the epitaph written on an Etch-a-Sketch that you can shake off, shake out,

and start all over again.

What Monday Morning Whispered Into My Ear

Grow out your hair. Run a mile, run for political office.

Learn a foreign language. Teach your pet how to clean the carpet.

Play poker with a crow. Discuss Camus with an emu.

Go to Istanbul, or teach a bull how to behave in a china shop.

Floss with a strand of angel’s hair.

Wear clown makeup while breaking up with your inflated ego.

Allow your suntanned legs to grow white and rent them out to ghosts for pogo sticks.

Donate your toenail clippings to the guy that’s building a shrine to good hygiene habits.

Whisper in the shadows, dance in the streets, sing in the rain.

Just please don’t be mean to one another.