Poems without homes

Uncertainty’s kin

Rot in your silence

In Time’s roaring open mouth

I feel on this fall night to share a memory

both old and warm

Of the young, worn

Away in revelry

An arrhythmic dance between lovers

With nothing but their hands wrapped ’round the others’.

Cigarettes- his loosely hung, hers pinched between teeth in between drags

A mystic asked in the glow of the restaurant’s fluorescent lights

Why the half-lover looked like she was in pain when she inhaled

And laughing the same exhaled again to shrug.

Off the couple went to sleep in the cold and mutter soft dreams into eager ears as they shivered into one another-

two desert’s sands blending at that frequency-

until even now in the lowlight of evening where her heart

lined with worry and loss

Is his heart

Is my heart again

Is his heart still

Entanglement of souls

Neither can undo nor outrun nor misremember

Is it writing every day

Blocking in that special way

Words into flitting lines and stanzas

Or because you are so good

At metaphor or would

You consider rhyming and frame

The fit that tames

The name

That withstands the passage of time

Or a thought made concrete

By your hands or by your feet

Is it Seuss or Byron

Typewriter or Handwritten

Subject matter

Or the torture of the mind

What is it that makes a poet

Their birthplace

Their face

Their temperament

Time

Or

Is it simply defining worlds

Creating more

And not calling it mine

Heart’s troubled rhythm keeps me awake

I would sleep

When world’s crust goes black

When sunsets rest –

-I ask when did you do it?

When, brother, did those fragments of doubt pry open your brain into splinters

I slept

Through your infidelity to Life

As your dalliance with Death took the wheels of your car over the edge

No, let’s be truthful

I slept through your late night’s gaming

Through your life with your wife

I slept through you –

– As if there was another you.

As the toast burns

And the smoke alarm goes off

I scraped the plate into the trash

Just another sunset put to death

I would sleep

As you did sleep through me

An excuse to all the waste

I never knew you

The heart beats

I never knew you.

There is strangeness

In the cat

In the sunrise

In the visitor

There is strangeness

In their eyes, their colors, their newness

And I wonder

How they survive the strangeness

When I cannot survive the sameness of community, of whiteness, of greeting

And how we dance about the similarities

Lie

By saying they are strange to me

It’s said people cannot be broken

But we know better

With our blackened ballerina toes

And fine-tipped pens bent by too much pressure;

We sweep up the contents of a kitchen

Betting on kintsugi.

While the experienced accept the jagged edges

The parts of whole

The novice ignores the imbalance

Believes twisting lines cannot make a man

Again.

We, weak

We, fragile

We, caught by the cat and edged to hole

Believe anew,

Experts once more

In the building of a new animal

Starling-driven wind

Turns the hawk, Whales sing good-night

by star-speckled sea

The Shot was a warning to the grazed man bleeding under his bodyguards

And to all American people

That our rights can be taken away in a breath

Of choice

Even as he now stands and pumps his arm

Americans are still under threat

We have choices still to make so

That our rights will stand

As we stand

For we carry on our shoulders those who cannot

I used to dance intelligence

But a lid has been placed

I boil in my own opinions

The long wings of ballet grown soft and gamey

At night I calculate an escape

But alas! The rolling waters

which bounce me in grace

Have dried up

The echoes consolidate

I am what I am

The heart beats –

A domestic abuser –

Pounding on life’s cage

When we all know if he would just settle

If he would just quiet down

We’d all know some peace