Amputation

Spinning around like a dog sitting down,

circling, waiting for just the right moment to take me

so I can drop and fold into myself.

Talking like the trained ape that I am,

jaws moving up and down, making sounds that are assigned meaning,

so I can seem to be like 'them'.

Feeling things in the center of my chest,

not physical things at first, but there is a tightening

and I miss her like a limb lopped off.

Walking, like a flesh robot, long forgotten,

left to wander, trying to remember to keep going,

(it's important)

so we can have a reason to come home.

Crying for her, the limb lost, the love now an ache, ghost nerves,

the pain that isn't felt on the flesh, but within every organ.

This, so that we can remember the whole of them.

Tracing names in wet cement, we defied the curse of failure,

circling, waiting for just the right moment to take us,

so we can drop and fold into ourselves.

Train Poem tentatively titled, Train Poem

When I'm on a train

my mind searches to find a metaphor

for itself

somewhere among the images flitting by,

broad glass squares of light streaming,

of life streaming,

by.

Next to me

she sits with hands folded,

eyes closed,

doesn't see the seagulls perched on logs

in ponds

there within the wet landscape

(with robotic tics of their heads, they watch us pass).

'Maybe it's out there,' my mind says, 'the picture of what I am. I am the pond...Or am I the seagull?'

'Be quiet,' I plead, ' I'm trying to write a poem.'

The conductor is young,

his goatee fresh, he is

trying a new look.

Hours in the mirror, posing in his flat-topped cap.

When he speaks to us on the microphone,

it feeds back, echoes.

He sounds as if he is closed into a metal room.

I suppose he is, in a way,

closed within long, metal, rolling rooms

that will hold him for years, his goatee graying...

All train memories arise, connect,

pass each other.

'There's a metaphor there,' says my mind, excitedly, 'something about trains passing...the tracks...'

'Hush,' I say.

I am flawed, it's true

but the train doesn't know this,

pulls me along, moving fast now.

Automobiles on the road appear to be stopped

like time is frozen. We slice through it

on metal strips,

it passes just a bit more slowly for us.

Maybe I will spend the rest of my life on trains,

so I can become a bit younger, day by day,

until I am a child again,

touching the glass.

Dream Alchemy

The song was wrong.

If you dream of me

don’t ‘dream a little dream’,

fill the sky.

If life is indeed a dream,

it is up to you and me.

We shape clouds into thoughts,

then into things that can be touched.

We are alchemists

dreaming sky.

A Walk (in the park)

Chalk drawings on sidewalks stamped “1912”.

Piano lessons vibrate

through old window panes in a white house.

At the park I walk across the crab grass population

that has arisen in the baseball diamond.

A little league football team is far out on the grass sea

sitting in a circle

like sprouted mushrooms in their round, white helmets.

The trees are afire with the dying light of day; God's slow fireworks, evidence of the end.

The bathroom beckons, a lonely shed for waste, waiting.

Its iron door creaks as I open it.

Soon I stand pissing, having done so only five minutes before at my apartment.

I curse God for my small bladder,

then apologize in case he or she is real.

In the corner of the field

is a pile of wood chips.

The trees tremble at it.

She Dreamed Us

(for Chelsea, with love)

Boxes growing, killing sky.

Friends walled in,
time bubble babies,
watching wireless tower trees split the green.

Among the boxes of people, I see turn of the century houses (grand old ladies) and '20s era apartment buildings (dapper male queens),
like where a dear friend lives. I was just with her there, we
sat in the courtyard in a swirl of cats on a picnic bench
that was giving up its split wood ghost, slowly.

She sits in this courtyard often, and writes, shaping the molecular and subatomic structures of novels and poems, whispering her words to herself, and sipping her tea.

Later, she told me, “I dreamed about a pile of mewing cats covering my feet.”

This is her landscape.

The bald apes who build boxes were born to steal the sky.
Boxes fucking, corners groping corners,

buttressed tectonic plates below slipping against each other, teeth grinding.

Earth sleeps, oh tired Ol’ Mother.
She dreamed us. And it's almost morning.

She Plays in a Big River

She plays in a big river,
occasionally looks back at me on the bank
as I sit
in the incredibly wind-swept grass.
When I am here I think of the Celilio Native American people;
ghosts on wooden platforms embedded in the cliffs, netting fish, clubbing them.
But the cliffs are gone, the dam sits inevitably,
the fishermen stand in air now above us. Their descendants live on thin strips of land
pinned between man-blasted cliff faces
of  I-84,
(the road leading to my birth desert,
but I don't think about that)
I look at her
in her brown skirt, brown skin
smiling so slightly, sweetly,
like she does when she is truly happy.
Trees around me shake in the unyielding wind boldly; not afraid
and I am reminded why I love them, why I love her.
She plays in a big river
and I lay on this soil-hair, gently playing with it in my fingers,
smiling back at her
trying to ignore fishermen in the air
and their blood.

Photo of FO by Wayne R. Flower 

This Blank Page

This blank page

isn't funny

This blank page

laughs at me

This blank page

aches

This blank page

hates itself

This blank page

stares

This blank page

fucking mocks me

This blank page

smiles with no mouth

This blank page

was once a forest

This blank page

is flat, lifeless

This blank page

is always on my mind

This blank page

loves to taunt

This blank page

turns in my fingers

This blank page

waits for a pen/lover

This blank page

teases

This blank page

looks out a pale window

This blank page

can be made into an instant cat toy

This blank page

ain't so tough

This blank page

is one in a million

waiting to die