Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
Tonight you will dream yourself into a highwire act
free of goblins prowling the edges
unraveling the net.
You will wake to winter’s striped sky
last seen when the world was still green.
You will robe your fingers
in silver
gloss your lips
with greeting
free a trickle of light
from the rusted tap
you have to use a wrench
to turn on.
But lies were for people who didn’t believe in the future. Who saw only an endless stretch of present without consequences or change.
– Yoojin Grace Wuertz, Everything Belongs to Us
One day the ground begins its thaw.
The blind things just below the surface shift
in their sleep.
4.5 billion years and nothing has jarred the rock
from its grinding rotation.
We know this much: even if we hold it to us,
even if we drive the stakes to pin it in place,
what’s old will slough off.
Continue reading “Truth Or”
Bright smile and thick glasses. He slips the frames into a pocket while striding over to claim proximity.
Bigger than I’ve been since pregnancy. Stripped of makeup, wrinkled and pimpled and rank with sweat.
Side planks face to face.
I’ve known his name exactly three days.
Here we are grinning like teenagers and losing count.
Not done yet.
Dedication to each small climb, each tiny triumph. Here an apex.
A falling away.
Even on Skyline Drive, you’ve got to pull over and step out. Otherwise it’s just another commute.
Then and this. Now and here.
A pause.
Cool air shivers skin. The bus engine grumbles below plastic seats molded to cup a human’s soft places. Thighs of meat padding bone. Outside, women in a pack bustle down the sidewalk in jeans stretched taut.
The days grow shorter.
Even so, I forget. Forget to stop and touch the zinnia with its five shades of orange tethered to a center like chocolate. Forget to let the crepe myrtle dip across my cheek. Barely notice a fat bee chugging past me towards what bursts from the hedges. A body that should be too weighty for the tissue of wings somehow stays airborne.
I forget that eventually, everything falls. I forget to catch drift.
We are the compulsives. The chameleons. The deluded. The wounded.
Addicts. Bigots. Enablers. Aggressors.
Gossips. Accommodaters. Over-sharers. Fixers.
We are the guarded. And the stuck.
We are passive. People-pleasers. Avoiders. Myopic.
We envy. We compete. We keep secrets. We give up.
Liars. Caretakers. Impulsives. Fanatics.
Re-enactors of traumatic events.
Prisoners of mindsets we refuse to reject.
Continue reading “CrazyTown and the Ambassadors of Acceptance”
When you can’t have what you want,
then want what you have.
That’s what They say anyway.
To me Their Zen feels too close to defeat,
and also, what about expanding?
Horizons, after all –
They have opinions on those too.
Walking the dog, it comes. Out of nowhere, or somewhere almost forgotten.
If my words did glow
With the gold of sunshine
A song.
Out loud. Into this ordinary day, I sing.
This is the first time in months my voice has opened like this. It is not the first song, no – there’s always the radio, always mugging for neighborhood kids.
But like this? Just the day, the dog, and me? I am new all over again.
They call it urge surfing.
I call it swimming against the Gulf Stream
Naked
In the dead of night.
Two months, no tears.
Drought or deluge?
Touch the earth.
Watch the sky.
Image: Yoel Tordjman, “i will go by fire and water”
Shannon E. Williams 