July 2011


The Dark Sides of Pastel
Sky Prowlers
ReCreation
No Appetite
Sol's Invisible Tag
I'll Never Grow Old
Like the Sour on My Heart
Dawnblood
The Sweet Cheeks of May
I'm Sorry, You Were Saying?

The Dark Sides of Pastel

There is no word
for the dark sides of pastel.
Is there?
The color for smoked crimson?
Of smoldering blue?
Dark lavenders and pinks,
of deep ocean teal?
They are nurseries of dawn
and funeral shades?

These are not the breathy scratch of chalks,
but the smear of oils,
of rain washed neon,
the shadows of wildflowers at 8 AM,
of bricks through hearth-fire.
Not sunday school lemon and candy floss
but the ambers of age, of wisdom,
of autumn and harvest.

Sky Prowlers

Pipers fall like shiny albatross,
as if landing on pontoons
in this great sea of grass,
disappearing in the distance,
absorbed in the whiskered wheaten sea.

Cessna growl like prairie cats,
slinking down into a shallow Savannah,
swallowed by the rolling waves of dancing grain.
In this play of shadow and Kansas light
they are but hawks diving for pocket mice.

ReCreation

The evening sky clings to the day
like a wet yellowed wash,
oleo spilled on a tapioca dress,
raw sugared oatmeal left to congeal
in the cloying August heat.

It is a day for the dark - soothing grays and blue,
for a frosty room with warm buttery corners,
a single malt scotch and a melancholy piano,
with a deep sax crawl that could coax the dead to smile.
It is a day best replaced and redrawn.

No Appetite

You were never thirsty,
not parched to know
what lies beneath your rock,
what is hidden over the rise,
what writhes inside of me.

Never drawn as I,
ravenous for the source of riddles,
for the turn of a salty linguistic phrase,
for the root of a saying like ‘had a field day’.
not pulled by the sky or the sea.

I needed what ticks,
what whirs and curls
into the vacant sockets of my head,
in the shadows of a room.
I craved a hunger, an appetite.

Sol's Invisible Tag

Vapor scuffs -
clouds
skipping their shadows off the oceans of wheat.
Winds snapping, dervishes
twirling,
Sol’s invisible tag.

The grasses are manic,
changing mood, feigning colors,
okra one second, ochre the next,
just as the sea turns slate into tourmaline.

Distant barn-sides and gables
ride the fluid horizon
as silos gleam,
warning each combine of the rocky shores.

Some days it is just grass, just wheat.
Some days it is alive.
Some days
the land of Oz comes to call.

I'll Never Grow Old

I’ll never grow old
with your light in my veins.
It will affix me, like a dragonfly
I mounted in my youth.

I’ll never grow old
with your love in my pockets,
with our delicious sin
on the tip of my tongue,
deep in the corners of my eyes.

I’ll never grow old
with your giggle and breath in my ears.
I may look like Einstein one day,
or an orangutan put out to stud,
but I’ll never grow old,
I’ll have you inside of me,
your heart guiding my way.

Like the Sour on My Heart

I lost you in the autumn rain,
a raincoat, gray, weaving through the granite,
a blur across the marble facades,
dissolved in the rush hour mist,
the street steam,
a dismal sink water sky.

You once looked at me
with soft ember light in your eyes.
No matter how glacial now,
I wish you were here.
It’s October again.
I need you.

The sidewalks are littered with death.
Scarlet oak bloody the streets,
trampled bruises of maple and elm.
their eyes lifeless in the rain
sticking to my shoes
like the sour on my heart.