While soldiers of misfortune march in death’s lockstep, while daily destructions dare to overtake civility, while endless rounds of ammo build ever-growing machines of hostility—we manage to escape those dark doldrums, and dance to a different drum. Over the airwaves, beneath the skin, love is our beat machine.
Month: October 2021
If I told you the tale of my life in reverse
if I tattooed my most significant memories on my skin,
you’d see the engine that drives me forward is an imperfect machine—
gleaming and well-tuned most times but prone to occasional breakdowns.
This human journey involves not only breathing but being.
Daily, we are tested to cruise beyond the fray with grace.
To not get unsprung, wound down, or dragged down into this mortal coil.
In other words, to dwell amongst the living with our wheels good to the road;
our own version of a St. Christopher medal swinging from the rearview,
ensuring our safety as we travel highways, admiring all the strange shadows
graffitied on the walls of night.
Morning Finds Children
Morning finds children gathering feathers, placing one or two of the finest beneath their tongues.
This is how we get through our day, they tell me—light of voice, a birdsong salve for our wounds.
They ask me what my memories are like.
I tell them no better or worse than theirs. I only have more because I have lived longer.
They smile like the sun is balanced on their lips.
Before I can ask them what kind of feathers their voices wear, they are gone.
Off to make new memories of their own.
Joy Is the Currency
Joy is the currency we work for daily.
Sometimes it comes at once, and our palms are greased with an ease far easier than expected.
Sometimes joy comes to us in other ways:
Some can write their way to joy. Scribe brass-knuckled poems all teeth and slant-rhyme savvy, words kicking consciousness into high gear, transforming lag-time into fuel injected ragtime.
Sometimes joy is found when we’re able to dodge ghost-hearted clocks and cold-boned machine gun runners, steer clear of tenements of cutthroats and overdose;
find our way to nights whose clenched fists release into caress,
and we witness the jeweled sky sing its own version of the star-spangled banner.
It’s a Rip Off
I sometimes wonder why people steal.
People ransack elections, medications, and identities.
Boosting, filching, pillage, plunder.
Some people steal to fill emotional holes lifetimes deep. Others plunder because they have no other means to provide for their families.
Pickpocket, purloin, swindle, sticky fingers.
I went through a shoplifting phase in high school, not out of need but troubles at home.
All the little things we take: office supplies, hotel amenities, a spot in line.
I once had a brand new drum-set ripped off when I first moved to SF. That broke my heart.
But I do so love the times when someone stole my heart.
Mirror Me Moon
Over time, the moon has grown so big, pregnant with all the joys she’s offered us,
all the lovers whose hearts are filled to brimming with lunar serotonin.
Waxing moon, waning moon, new and full moon.
For countless calendars, the moon has expanded beyond her borders,
pride beaming from all the poems inspired by her presence, yearning to share her borrowed light with ours.
Hunter’s moon, blue moon, supermoon.
The moon swells with elation, a luminous gestation expanding and contracting with time.
All her stretch marks, birthmarks, wrinkles and scars—the moon wears them well.
She knows this because we are her mirror.
The Growth and Going
Plant troubled memories and griefs. Water them. When they grow flesh and bone, uproot them from the dark places in your mind.
Allow them to sit at your dinner table. Teach them not to swallow fire while you’re saying grace.
Forgive them should they be covered in bad auras, or are sun-starved and slim of sleep.
Feed them a diet of love and forgiveness. Sing lullaby light so their pickpocketed eyes may shine new magic.
Hold them close, or let them go. Should they move on, offer them feathers and fearlessness.
Help them soar high above the vast blue of this heavy world.
you say catechism, i say cataclysm
i’m earlobe to your earhart. i’m astroturf to your astrophysics.
jack o’ lantern to your geranium, chthonic to your tonic.
i’m bray to your brie. knurl to your nureyev.
i’m squeegee to your tuileries, caw to your kalimba.
i’m dishcloth to your dish antenna. baywatch to your beethoven.
i’m dog-tired to your catalyst. i’m small time to your bigfoot.
The storylines of my sleeping dreams
continually out Tarantino themselves with shelves upon shelves of reconfigured narrations,
figments of the imagination reconstructed and deconstructed into pigments of aberration.
One moment I’m googling my name, reading about a famous magician, a master army navigator, and a retired Provo police chief hymning my eponym.
Jumpcut to me atop a Tibetan mountaintop, meditating upon how saffron can make a face glow more naturally.
These dreams: a cavalcade of pyrotechnics and mythlomaniacs; a Technicolor super cut of blood and skin scrapings beneath restless sleep’s fingernails.
Come morning, when the alarm clock rings its wideawake bebop of gimme all you got, I’m left wondering how to conquer the week.
And then I remember, it’s only a rat race if you feel like you’re running against rats.
Sweetness Follows
Turbocharge flowers, turn mums into muscle cars. Race the streets of beauty offering free rides to the infirm and elderly.
Just as pleasure comes our way, so does pain. Best to always bear a smile and a first-aid kit.
Instead of walking hunched like a question mark, stand tall like an exclamation mark, a proud affirmation with a thunderclap backbone.
Don’t just have casual sex with the truth; develop a strong relationship with it.
Never allow your heart to become an untied shoe, no need for love to stumble through life.
Adopt a hive of honeybees. Know that wherever you are, sweetness follows.
RichRant 