Cicadas drone their sun-drunk, tireless hymn
as July swelters, gold and overfull.
the driveway steams, the plastic buckets brim,
and heat, like dye, won't sit still or stay dull.
We cinch the cotton tight in twisted rings,
as if a knot could hold the blazing tide.
but sweat and color are unruly things:
both spread, both stain, both won't be denied.
Cerulean and crimson breach their line,
seep into one another, slow, unplanned,
and thicken into a hue with no design,
no name the rubber bands prepared it for.
The soda ash unlatches what was sealed;
the color doesn't sit, it moves in deep,
past cotton's threshold, till it's not revealed
but lived in, permanent as things we keep.
So heat unstitches winter's careful fold,
loosens what was buttoned, cinched, and pressed,
and turns the plain, repeated days to gold
the way a fever turns a body's rest.
Unwind the bands. Let August find the proof:
a swirl no ruler's hand could have designed,
the driveway's stain, the sun-bleached, faded roof
of summer, fixed now in the changed mind.
The roller left a wet
Textured topography
On the drywall
A fresh
Continent
Of liquid chalk
Under a steady
Unblinking gaze
The gloss begins to warp
The fumes carry
A quiet hum, a frequency
That unlatches the deadbolt of the mind
My eyes
Track
A single, rebellious drip
A slow-motion comet
Cutting through
A matte sky
In the five seconds
It takes
To drop an inch
I have built
A city
In my head
Lived a lifetime
Inside a song
I forgot the title of
And wondered
If the sky
Feels this heavy right before it rains
The perimeter is curing now
Turning dull
At the edges
By the time
This surface
Loses its shine
I will have traveled
Lightyears
And forgotten my way back
We feel before we understand—
a reflex jolt to a flame
not predicted nor planned.
Feelings are weather in the mind—
drifting on wind and tide,
popping up unsigned.
What we feel is a sign,
an inward emotional clue—
to a puzzle seeking design.
What the soul does not know,
rears up bearing borrowed masks,
from the deep, dark place below.
Read the pulses with care,
for feelings are rebellious
with truth laid bare there.
We call feelings fate,
when the shadowy hand within
unlatches the gate.
Weathering a feeling
welling up from heart and soul
requires re-shuffling, re-dealing.
By noon, the halls throb with static, a low thrum like teeth grinding in sleep. The school, half-submerged in memory, holds its breath. Beneath a cracked skylight, a locker peels open by itself, slow as a yawn. Inside: a paper crown, soaked in ink, and a polaroid of a girl with mirrors for eyes.
In the boiler room, the janitor sketches circles on the concrete with the burnt end of a matchstick. Each loop traps a sound—laughter, crying, chalk squeaks, the metallic gasp of a vending machine dying. He hums again, off-key. The candle’s flame dances, nodding in rhythm.
Outside, the sky bruises. Rain falls sideways, stinging like questions. A new child, coat too big and eyes too sharp, stands at the school’s rusted gate. He doesn’t knock. The gate unlatches itself. The wind pushes him forward.
Inside, the crow watches from the rafters, its feathers slick with ink. It cocks its head, listening. The boy who vanished left his lunch behind—beneath desk 32B, scratched into the wood: “Don’t let it slip who you were before the dreaming.”
The monkfish, now wearing a teacher’s badge, clicks its pen and begins attendance. One name is circled in red.
In the language of Spirit
it is said: “that we must die before we die.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the language of Sprit
it is said: “that we must die before we die.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It kills me,
a lot of things kill me.
I mean the kind of ‘killing’
that blinks you out for a moment,
that kind of little death.
Such instances can be exquisite,
like when your life unlatches,
you stop in mid-throttle,
halted upon a careening mania.
There are no increments,
no gradients,
you just jump out of yourself.
A powerful ****** can kill you
with one thrust of bliss.
Holding your baby for the first time,
a sudden inexplicable gnosis
obliterates your present,
past and future.
Writing a killer line in a poem -
that can kill the reader
for a bitty twitch of time.
Those quiescent extinctions happen,
in a single tick of abeyance,
transient wipe-outs
(too abrupt to me measured),
when we forget
to be both happy or sad,
in nothing-flat
we have ceased to be, we succumb,
only to return.
Between each taken breath,
these little deaths may, at any time,
undo time,
revealing much more than we,
the living,
might care to admit.
If the sun shines
Vicious that the hands could hold its heat
If the wind whirls and wails
Turbulent, with fierceness of rushing water
If it becomes icy cold
That it could freeze the mind
If the sky, sullen and sly
Suddenly wear, without a tear
And the heaven unlatches its showers
Unceasing regardless of the reigning season
If cold and heat engaged
In a no conquest duel
If there are mown meadow mountains
More than human habitat
With hills spreading and sprawling
Sparingly shares expanse of space
If the valleys are fast and vast
Height-locked by conniving hills and mounts
And the plains, plain and plane
Laid bare of thickets and thorns
If you keep ascending and descending
In rhythmical crescendo and decrescendo
If the landscape is strewn
With mingling lily white egrets and sheepish African cows
If summer, winter, spring and autumn
Rolls, in seconds, minutes and hours
If all faces reflect Mandela
And most voices resonate his accent
Then, it is Alice, another wonderland!
The little Xhosa town; the University town of Fort Hare!!
Eastern Cape of the South of Africa
When worlds collide
Life will listlessly slip away from us
When the universe unlatches
Our whole world will spill out
When Earth explodes
The human race will smash into oblivion
When weapons become us
Peace will be a thing of folk lore
When we do die
Our love will live on forever
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