Walking My Truths

Asymmetry

One of the things that I wonder
Is why I have to be like you
Do we have to think the same
Or see the stardust just the same?

If you think the best of love
Is looking back and a shrug
Must I define it the same
Can my own perspectives remain?

When you read or gather your facts
To rational conclusions and plan of attacks
My sense of knowing who to see
Scatters and brakes, can you know me?

Things don't last, it is defined by change
Though the law says nothing is lost
You say nothing remains
There's another person, better soil

You see the waves I'm looking on shore
It doesn't matter, it's not for a score
Clever responses or better kinds of notions
Won't affect in anyway these particular devotions

On a ballad of a night without a tomorrow
You planned a farewell before 'the sorrow'
Can take away any felt pain
For as some say, no two ever the same?

One of the things that you wonder
Is why you have to be like me
Do we have to think the same
Or see the stardust just the same?



Doubt

Fills the hallways of a critical mind
It's windows get broken
The doors fall off frames
A place often missing the finish and fame.

In the house built of questions
There isn't a roof
The foundation might crumble
And sag with uncertainty, standing in flames.

Into the rooms you reluctantly
Sit in furniture left by ages of tenants
Ill fitting and moldy, grossly rather
Familiar and yet unfriendly

It creeks in the night in the
House of your doubting, and cobwebs
In corners practically shout that
The only certainty known

Is that this house doesn't feel
Quite like your old home
But it carries the past to bruise the future
Decay and deception make terrible mirrors

The house of the mind that
Questions and measures, realizes
It needs to polish and seek errors
Renovate, demolish, gut the interior

Bulldozers shatter the central
Core, to honor the concept of something is more
Built on doubting that everything made
Must be left ever standing, no permanence is laid.



Who do I know and where or why

It might happen that left to seek
Help in the world, needing shelter, and a way,
That there would be someone that found clothes
And gave space in a warm bed,
To you just because you came to the door and asked.

In a place of lovely colors and arabic decorations
With gifts of a gilt peacock, scarves
Trinkets, as if they knew your tastes
In what felt safe and was somehow good,
Things to place on the dresser and bureau
And into the tidy drawers, were given.

So that you are now newly healthfully clothed
And held without fearing warmly
Invited into the comfort of strong arms
Just feeling that this is your wakening
Another need to run is gone

In this corridor of calming, being
I walked this morning and felt it sweet burning
You didn't allow me to choose
The pants in lime green
Saying I had to have new clothes but there was no way that shade
(It was as if offensive to you)

A cultivation came into that moment
Kindness, concern, you are seen in your needs
In a place that was wood and cushions, curried
A kind of happy hope of sunny break
settled into the morning.

You wander in a dream, run, scurry
Into the day's life. Who were you there, hope holder?
Able to be so generous with time
space
The gifts of a sense of belonging?



A Mother Calls Us

To our table we are called for dinner
The evening coming and chill winds bringing
To the plain a sense of day broken into dust.

It's food for thinking we are poking
With forks of silver
It's pallitable but not delicious lacking something

Maybe it is the loss of the hunt, or thoughts
Or simply too much processing this wrapped carnage of synthetic
Groced psuedo holistic greener we munch now.

Our ability to talk over the repast has elements
Of the rush to technological connection
Some have brought their phones and devices or run mind vacuums

It intrudes into mothers garden home ideal
She is worrying of passing and sharing with one another
Her bounty apparent, but no one listens or notices the other

Some go hungry, some were not
Dressed enough or strong enough to secure a place setting here
Or lacked a way to compensate for her delights.

Come in to eat, she says, it's going to chill
The winds blew into the table the hunger
We all felt for the comfort of mothers meal.




Mom

Whenever you try to cook
clean, sweep a floor
she crowdes into the space with a body block
Or a but and takes over the task or makes
You drop or lose your concentration
Interrupting your
Doing
just the most simple of things in your home.

If you want to move to the refrigerator with a box
of leftover, you will trip over her
As she insists on the space and
Blocks with arm to the side you
Push
Moving there.

If you are sweeping the floor
Trying to feel the grace of the stroke across the tiles and
the pleasure
of gathering the crumbs
She is in the way blocking the trashcan or getting into
The places you wish to comb with brush

It is a thing in 80 plus years she
Could do
Just to take from you
the feeling of an ability to just do a task
with ease

If speaking she will change the subject or interrupt
Or throw a loud and obnoxious challenge
Or say asshole so that
You are taken with the vulgarity
Mom?

And this is just how it really
Goes by as you
Try to find the days paces and places
Smooth corners be water
Doing what needs to be done


A terrier mother that
Isn't about to contemplate her
Actions
Barks, snarles or in the
Sense of agitation and tension
It is just the way of this mom
Who is defining her doing
By undoing you a bit.


Potato ChipsThe best potato chips are large thin crunchy
Popped fresh from the brown bag at the lunch hour
From the steak subshop while the sandwiches come out in thick
Sub rolls, they are listening while we talk about
The amazing new work they hung today up on 45th in the galleries
The ones we aren't really seeing we work in a barrio, okay?
Ripe with running red forms that puckered our mouths into
The dripping juices of tuna and chili steak
Lamenting the time that it takes to turn into form
The ideas of bolder and blusher canvas to reveal the secrets of these times
Infidelities of the crunching lick of tongue touching the tip of the chip
Speaking to a dill about where to go after we finish in a run before work
To see the latest persimmon that hangs downtown, and swallow this down.
And go be ordinary workers again.





The Christmas Cactus Bloomed on Your Birthday Babe

Things outside my control again
Brought me to notice my Christmas cactus
Is blooming on the day you were brought
To the earth to bless us
With all that you are.

In this I see the beauty of both of us
The possibility of my growing one that blooms like this, never before
The possibility you will just see it as lovely.
Not ever in a lifetime
Has this happened for me, it bloomed!

It is the sweetest of treats to see
Let me try to describe it to you , it is like the
Tissue of a scarlet wing, it has jagged edges
And it is big and bold jutting into my living
Blushed from the phoenix

On the flat green segments that say
To me their desert mysteries
This blossom came to the sink.
A Christmas cactus was named I think for the season
That they once forced the blooms to market

Coral Passion Red and garden green for your birthday
We are intertwined in the color of this only
Peculiar brilliant event.
I know this is not the thing you might have wanted

A poem with the day, you do not want it
To consider, nor is it a sign to me of anything miraculous
But I see the flower
that marks your day as blessing.

(I sit in my kitchen looking
By the sink where I wash my own dishes tonight
And look out to my birds at the feeder
By the Buddha, I light up in pllastic reminder of my own birthday past.)