my first love was a honey bee...
but my second love was poetry.
enjoy. - uncaged
sometimes I just want to sit alone in the dark
by firelight.
late teenage summers I fulfilled that need
outdoors - driving up into the snowies high enough
on a new moon and rounding up kindling.
all I did one trip is find the
right-sized log for the perfect chair stump
because I knew you would appreciate it
the next time you came here,
alone.
our one thing - this inconvenient place -
off telephone road just on the fringe.
an inconsistent border – a smattering
of trees – cushioning the dense lodgepole forest
being tickled with persistent aspen.
we were born there.
but the beetles and wind-swept fire
have killed the pine; the aspen now feel
like a weed.
they aren’t thick enough or
dense enough to block out the light from the
inescapable horizon.
after you left I couldn’t bear to go to
happy jack and follow the
road-you-can’t-see-until-you’re-on-it
and wind down to a beaver pond
with a boulder creating a cascade
of icy water current
to carry your dry fly downstream.
it’s just too hard now, to go where we were.
now I sit indoors with all the lights out
in front of a gas flame
and stare at the smokeless illusion
of man’s ability to control fire.
a cleansing (post-expulsion of fetus)
before the rise and fall of summerland
I wanted escape to rockaway beach,
but you told me the truth about misleading lyrics.
instead, you spent the warmth in healing me unwittingly
(with six-o-clock mornings at high altitude
and fruity home brew)
your refusal to allow me to fixate
on anything but summerland
allowed plenty of brookies for the fire,
(but never rainbow with their translucent,
tricky shimmer - you knew that gutting one
could make me cry)
you spoke slowly about youthful summers with
nothing to eat but cold tortillas and ketchup,
your cross-dressing father, and trying
crank for the first and only time.
I listened, tied wooly buggers, drank your overly
hoppy beer, and told you nothing.
you laid down the seat in the back of jimmy
to make a place to sleep off the rocky ground
and when our morning came for the last time
I woke to my leg asleep under the weight of
yours (your flesh and bones innocent of my
self-imposed incarceration, I kept motionless
inhaling your sweat
and pine until I was completely numb)
jimmy’s back seat was haunted, dripping
and peeling with my violation,
but your salt was a scrub
with which you exfoliated me
slowly, unknowingly,
as I bathed in summerland.
I couldn’t sleep.
I got up to see if the clouds had parted
enough to let me see Orion,
but the entire sky was
blanketed in an even, dull grey-white;
the light from
celestial long-ago explosions dispersed evenly
through the muted veil of clouds
reflecting the brilliant white of
snow and the flecks of fire
in ice.
at two am, I could see all the way to the horizon,
rimmed with the faintest aura of far-away ocean-hope.
but here, the layers of multiple blizzards
keep piling on.
the temperature rises just a notch
and combined with a burst from the
unfaithful sun, the surface
snowflakes melt
enough to let light enter and refract.
for a few hours, the whole world shines and sparkles.
but molecules tire and slow down to a freeze again
just in time for a new
layer of powder to coat, matte, and seal
the cracks.
I’ve always wondered why humans prefer snow over ice.
it’s prettier, maybe.
and ice makes capitalism grind to a halt -
punctuated by semi-trucks forced to idle
and wait
for black ice to be covered with salt
and melted away.
but all we’ve done is forced a change of state.
water is water.
and I often forget
that every year for at least three months
happiness goes into hibernation.
the sun might not come out today,
but I’ve just seen the brightest night.
if natural selection
where did this gene arise
melancholy swells with sips
of red wine and temporary singleness
evolution and protraction cannot
explain why
I want you to read me.
education and monogamy cannot
relieve the urge
to vomit my innards
onto the floor where you
will be waiting, craving to
consume and be satisfied.
if I thought you could hold me intestinally, resist
regurgitation, digest my nutrients
I wouldn’t
vacillate
between warm truth slippers in friendship
and primal urges which feel so
necessary, too.
without a savior, I
must cram life into the narrow
edges around the musts. (mustn’t I?)
since the only consequences
are here, toe-stepping today
and inevitable loss of comfort tomorrow
can I risk recollection
should I bother you for
more than you are
can’t fathom forever with you, and without
you seems impossible and viscerally,
erroneously perverse – but is it
habit threatened by turbulence causing
my gut to drop, or the protein sequence
concerned with only survival?
less complicated laziness, perhaps.
I’m not ruling out
eating my cake expeditiously while
baking another.
when I'm in darkness
except for the rectangle of light from an outer room leaking in the doorway,
I remember a child that was put to bed
when things were still going on upstairs.
sliver of light transports me back to where I began -
the only one in a basement,
imprisoned and nonessential.
I belly-crawled across the concrete floor
to the bottom of the stairs like a soldier.
but then it got tricky.
testing my balance against warped boards, I eased
into just the right spot
so those old farmhouse planks didn't rat me out.
I investigated where the wood was sensitive, and discovered the still-sturdy sides.
mental notes of distances and spaces and ways of building stairs were considered, and I rebuilt them in my head as a map of just where my feet belonged.
the night I got up to the top of the stairs, without the tiniest creak, I stood up on my knees on the landing
to see what I had earned.
I learned that
nobody was even listening.