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A Cargo of Green Hearts
~POEMS~

4/23/2016

4/23/2016

 
waking in a strange place
for a moment it's as if
the last 50 years were a dream
violence itself a dream
a distant thunder of night
and the first morning sound
the sunrise song of birds
is my real name.
​

Home

4/16/2016

 
The orange cat returned two years after having vanished forever we imagined
so had got two new cats


we barely recognized him transformed by disappearance as if time had taken his tail
in one hand 
neck in the other and stretched him across months scruffier now

torn ear a pugilist's nose 
but still we knew him and he rubbed and scented us with the corner of his mouth nearly hard enough to knock us over.

we fed him went to bed and were glad and afraid less of everything children fear for if one beloved thing 
returns then why not everything?

the next morning we found him long across the picnic table toe to toe as if leaping 
from one place to another but his eyes were shut not needing them and he seemed

to belong there beneath the also 
orange sun but stiff my grandfather carried him to the garden. 
and now nearly forty years later I who have careened


through this world so often through shipwreck fire self fulfilling all of it and have grown exhausted too as only something lost can be exhausted

and wonder how I will find my way back to where the hands of life 
know me rise to meet the casualty of my sad face without the homing sense

of an old cat and so perhaps maybe 
I will please ask your forgiveness if I stretch myself under you toe to bruised toe like a spent spring and preemptively

for forgiveness if in the morning I do not wake after having mistook 
your arms for home.
​


Flying Lessons

4/7/2016

 
of the azure I dreamed
of flying lessons of the silver
stars of the sky I dreamed them
and again I dreamed them.
over. over. 

one time I even placed a 
star on my forehead
like so. so surprisingly frail a thing
for a great aviator. 

if I am old now, battered by 
park benches and bus tickets
it is not because I have fallen
and again fallen. even the zipping
comets will crash even the never-landing
albatross someday greets 
the waves and a swallowing kiss. 

don't listen to the liars. gravity is 
not the enemy. 

what makes me old, what crinkles
my hollow bones: 

so many empty windows with
no jumpers. 
​
so many angels bound to 
graveyard stone.

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    Poems  are posted here when I'm ready to share them. I often don't title my poems. The date you see above the poem may be the date it was posted here and not necessarily the date it was created.  To see more, click on the Archives below. 

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