Sing Down the Mountain

All you misfits and singers, street sweepers and wisdom seekers,

I hear the tickings of your hearts; passion’s steady pulse reverberating through time’s ageless body.

All you expatriated and alienated, Kung fu warriors and perpetual worriers,

I have witnessed our many histories along the human timeline; where we first learned trust, where we first learned fear; and how those experiences have come to enslave and enliven us.

All you nurses and numismatists, rock collectors and rock guitarists, shake off your chains. Strip out of doubts. Open your doors, your hearts.

Come down off mountains, out of closets. Fill your pockets with love’s many syllables so we may discover brighter, more beautiful ways to say, Hello.

She’s out there on the highway

Somewhere between New York and North Carolina.

She’s got her eyes on the road and her head in a radio song.

The sun is high; her window’s down. She feels the wind in her hair, feels the freedom of roaming highways where no one knows her name.

She’s heard a blue song bleed from a broken mirror. In her rearview, a piano tuned to the key of hurt is fading.

There’s a wishing coin under her tongue; all her kisses taste of dreams.

Come evening, she’ll pull off the road, maybe somewhere in Virginia where love and death play double or nothing with the moon’s rent money.

The way the night’s black dogs tell it, there’s a little bit of wild in everyone and everything. 

The Original Social Network

Mailboxes are sick of dealing with the emotional baggage of bills and bad news.

Fed up with those committing postal fraud.

Tired of delivering huge egos packed in boxes labeled FRAGILE.

Exhausted and defaced mailboxes have hired Gloria Allred to defend them in a class-action lawsuit against all mail thieves and junk mail.

Wanna spend time with the sweet ladies at the dead letter office. Sit around drinking red wine, reminiscing about the days when they were the original social network.

Abused mailboxes are tired of needing to remain quiet and display good posture.

They wanna sing and shout. Write raucous and honey-tongued ballads to love letters still written by hand.

In a Vehicle of New Beginnings

To ride shotgun in a vehicle of new beginnings from one side of the country to the other—

from swamp-mad Florida, through mystic-jeweled New Orleans, and odometer ache of forever flatland Texas and beyond.

Through forests, valleys, alongside rivers and streams.

Wide-awake rock intermixed with faraway radio stations where a different country song bursts into staticky bloom every few minutes.

Oracle of New Mexico piñon smoke. Miracle of sunset mountains painted amber and blood-red gospel.

Eventually comes California:

cactus and angel-choir, desert-hearted dream machine. Solace and suffering. Bounty and boom.

Amidst the loved and lawless, halo and home.

Come Nightfall

I’ll wander the dive bars of the moon’s alter ego.

I’ll jack into the electricity of the cosmos to power my stereo.

I’ll pray through poetry, howl with dogs in unmetered verse.

Come nightfall,

I’ll marvel at my city’s neon apostles.

I’ll spitshine embittered alleyways and icons of cacophony.

I’ll bring beads and noise, brevity and joy.

Come nightfall,

I’ll throw monkey wrenches into the dark machinery of the oncoming regime.

I’ll talk politics with fire hydrants. Turn fists into open-palmed hit songs.

I’ll shake, rattle, and roll the alphabetical dice to invent new words to speak.

Come nightfall,

I’ll oboe the rainfall. Pom-pom the atom bombs.

I’ll offer up my secondhand books and records as compost for a new garden of artful Eden. 

Where the Fireflies Lead You

What happens when my seven-year-old daughter is older?

Will this gun-headed, hate flag-waving America be little more than oblivion and dust?

Unemancipated dreams and auguries of awfulness?

Trojan horses stuffed with hoarse promises?

Over the sounds of traffic and cries of the suffering, I listen for the song of playing cards in bicycle spokes, the clickety-clack of childhood velocity speeding through streets of uninterrupted joy.

I don’t know what the future holds for my daughter.

But for now, we run and play outside.

When darkness calls, I do my best to remind my daughter of that inner light of fireflies around her heart. 

This Beat Within a Birdcage

Fashioned from blizzard and steel, rupture and rain, carnal desire and Corvette engine parts.

Shaped by overtures and acrobatics, adagios and ghosts, a downspout of dark-water slang and rarefied light.

This human heart:

a wishing star, a compass rose, a roadside diner jukebox.

Its intricacies and ecstasies, its lovingness and liabilities.

Chaos and choir. Fortune and fire.

Locked within our chest’s birdcage, we pray this heart can sing us to flight.

At the high school prom in the high above

stars shuffle across the great, dark dance floor as the cosmos vibrates rhythms of spinning spiral galaxies.

Unnamed planets huddle in a corner, passing around a flask of otherworldly alcohol.

Comet Lovejoy wants to sign everyone’s yearbook.

Jupiter’s many moons crowd around the spiked punch bowl.

Shooting stars get shivers as the iconic sounds of glockenspiel, guitar, and roaring drums open “Born to Run.”

Holmberg 15A and other black holes lament over being unable to find any prom attire that fits them.

Across the vast space, a shadowy hand pins a radiant flower moon to night‘s lapel.

Lunch of Hunch

Sometimes it’s better not to stew on it, mull it over, agonize about it.

No gathering of too much information, believing haste makes waste.

No chewing it over, mulling it over, turning it over and over in your mind.

Don’t fret, grieve, mope, ruminate.

Don’t weigh, debate, kick about, beat one’s brains out.

Sometimes it’s better to go at something unconsciously.

Have a hunch. A leap of faith. A feeling in the gut.

To know without knowing why we know what we know can ultimately leave us in the know. 

If within me is the totality of humankind

I am broken and beautiful, magical and malignant.

I am the cruel vertigo of never grow and glow balanced with wanderlust strutting its best slant rhymes across double-headed nickel time.

Loving and lethal, gobsmacked and ghost.

Listen to the loose change of hope in my pocket, its bright jingle singing counterpoint to these chaotic and crumbling city streets.