gardening

Let go, let go! Let
go each petal tightly curled around your hammering
heart. Unfold them
tenderly, softly pry at their
tearfully moistened cocoon
with your clumsy, eager fingers.

Dirty your hands in the soil of your open chest
as you gently harvest the fruits of eighteen years
of watching and waiting
fearful, hoping that someday this small thing inside you
would nod up from the till.

Let go, let go, quieter now but still
diligent- do not forget what those early moments felt like.
Remember what that first petal looked like in your hand,
softly translucent and wrinkled,
remember how delicate it was to hold.

together

I'm sitting in my room with the national playing and
feeling good for once. Maybe
I'm finally figuring out how to be around people
and not arm myself too heavily, to shed
my meshy links at the door
and dance happily
among the friendly spirits,
the wavering egos who desire happiness and
that's it.

I'm learning that wanting to be happy isn't such a bad thing
and that closeness is a truer form of knowledge than anything that can be written.

While I sit here alone I feel surrounded by a pulsing
yellow-radiant sphere, like the small gleams
that the sun makes on the hills over Portland. At night
when I look at the moon it tells me
that I am no longer alone
and that I never deserved to be.

hamster

My heart is racingpumping madly.
I am a small thing, true
but this is beyond the norm
for my mammalian frame.

Rather, I feel like I've been quietly fed
into a new pushbutton universe, where
everything whirrs and clickhums
mechanically. I feel my clumsy flesh straining
to replicate the metal ballet, feel
its grossness, its lumpy and imperfect solidarity,
and know that if i tried once more to
compete with the machines I would be reduced
to a sliver, a ghost, a spark
to be consumed quickly in the circuits, by the need
intense and white
for human power.

So instead I become what my heart says I am
I am the hamster on the wheel,
I am the small warm thing trapped
and helpless by the powers that be
running swiftly
never knowing where I'm going
realizing slowly that it doesn't matter

and nursing small memories, childlike
of how it felt to run on grass.

knowing

There was a time I used to know
things in my inward heart, things
that only those you read know.

I don't know how I figured them out
but I had a few good years in which the world
revealed itself to me, cracked open like a clamshell.

I knew what gods know and
it all made sense, somehow.
I guess I was alone back then, so things were
simple; I was a quiet, lonely country.

When I started to know people better,
and love, I stopped understanding many things
or at least, I forgot thinking about them so much.

An intrepid messenger in me needed
to know about the warm craftings of others, and although
much of me revolted, scared
of how our serenity might be troubled,
he was determined and brave, so eventually
I readied my ships and we set out.

I live on a massive, shifting continent now. No longer
is my home a small crystalline bubble
suspended in bright space. There is color here and
such life! But still, often

I want to return to that place of knowing
that I still reach sometimes, only at the most
heady moments of conversation with a new
friend, one whose eyes show me they knew things too,
once, and perhaps still might.

O, once
I lived in a place unlike any; it was populated
by only myself
and my great thoughts.

nakedness

Something is wrong with me, a
coldness like the longest stretch of that
last week of winter, the one
before you start to catch sight of hoping
spring, when it seems as though all
your days and nights will end with the same mundane
routine of shedding layers too mindless
to examine what your numb
fingers are fumbling with.

We undress to sleep, we
quietly take off those things that
hide our nakedness from ourselves

I feel like I am forgetting to do that
I feel like every day I am
sleeping clothed, slowly
forgetting what my naked body looks like
in all its honesty.

doors flung open

and white light

In The Dark Tent

A dust storm raged and spat
angry mouthful of bitter alkali against
the walls of the swinging tent. Outside
my family worked, hard
trying to break camp
so we could return to the world.

Inside I sat, hunched, gripping
a flashlight in my teeth madly
scribbling what I could recall of the night
my heart burst open. They entreated me
'help!' but I glared beastly at them
baring the few teeth I had left
unobscured by the light.

From then on we worked
silently, all smudged, breathing
frantic particles, they furious while I
madly
came into being.