1/30 – Ketchup

In a hurry on the highway,
(and late, if I had it my way, wouldn’t be venturing at all,
answering a call for clarity,)
speed approaching “harrowing,”
down the pavement barrelling,
passing a pristine off-brown brand-new Nissan Maxima with vanity plates that read,
“666-S4T4N”.

Children

Even before,

Before the rains of

Mortars and rockets

It was pertinent to ask

What “good God” would

Make children suffer

With war and hunger and dehydration?

And worse,

So called “God -fearing” folk

Concerned only of their own kin

Only calling out for sympathy for their own dead –

If we listed the names

It would encircle the earth.

So tired of seeing

The names of dead babes

As though atrocity were only one sided –

Perhaps this is how

We were made in Its image

Our unfathomable ability

To justify horror

Because they did it first.

What just God

Made us warlike in the first place?

Every one of us

Is someone’s

Child.

Between Thirst and Slake

There’s no good thing to say to you. I love you and that drives me crazy. I love you because you deserve it, but maybe not from me.

Because you love tempting tides to change with your lifeblood effigy,
you love so deeply, it aches like a cavity, a gaping hole of harrowing,
harbored, heartache.

You take the gravity of the situation to the corners of Broke and Break, torn between thirst and slake when you could drink the lake of the love I feel.

But you make melancholy less malady, more maelstrom,
Melt at malapropisms and defy marginalization,
except when it suits you.

You shook the walls of Jericho with a meek plea,
break every porcelain particle at the heart of me,
seized serendipity by the horns and shook it off,
you want for love, but for mine you scoff.

Doff a cap and raise a drink and
mourn remembrance laid to rest,
for she has space for all distaste,
except upon my hollow chest.

Calico

She is painted protrusion jutting skyward,

feet planted firmly in silica substrate,

her kaleidoscope cacophony a constant companion to carnies,

purples melding with browns, the streaking symphony of her breasts rising with her breathing beneath the sunlight as she pokes up her head,
half-slumbering in some half-recollected riposte that ravages savages and stings so sweetly,

as honeysuckle burdened bees building bastion for their queen, quivering in quatrain formations, fully finessing fulcrum to swing in metronome, pulverizing poems into powder and insufflating them.

We fell in love the way vistas crest the horizon while you’re doing 80 on 34, threw caution to the wind to live with the consequence of opulence, spreading contemplations upon each others’ skins like coconut oil in sequestrations steeped in the spinning of tales in the limelight of our elocution.

But in the darkness of midnight, in melancholy reposes that paint passions poisonous, imposing wolves’ clothing on sheep, as she dispossesses every ecstasy cast in the moonless nights after my misplaced ardor spun in silken strands of stimulating dream stuff, made manifest at hand, fracturing reality on impact.

Reshift, reframe, rewire for a new page, regauged, mountain range so close yet out of reach, left with nothing but to be precious with poetry, yearning for this surcease, mired in the grief of unconscious cause of her indignation, waking to a poorer shift in paradigm, tasked with merely being patient but still I pine.

30/30 – burn

Running away to join the circus,

the biggest one, the dustiest,

looking back in retrospect to see

how easily it all fell into place,

marvelling at the little idiosyncrasies,

the small synchronicities wondered at,

but in hindsight, obvious,

the Playa calling my name and drawing me across 3,000 miles,

milestones littered along the way and in awe at,

“Hmm, well that’s interesting….”

Curiosity curling in my gut,

wondering why I am so sought,

that such a place would lay steps before me that all I need to do is walk forward,

the things I have sought for so long,

suddenly revealed and difficult yet so easy.

29/30 – a’rye

The best lei’d plans of

mousse and mensch

often go a’rye.

The animus magnanimous

Is trapping us,

Banter broad as a blunderbuss,

In disuse and left to rust,

gusts in the gantry,

pantries ’bout to bust yet empty,

warbling like a rumbling storm,

maladroit evades the norm.

28/30 – brides

In the lobby, loitering,

Waves of them, brides and their parties,

Pouring out the door to catch their rides to the chapel,

I wonder,

Is it more special or less

seeing all these brides?

Do they compete, internally,

comparing bustles and ornamentation on their gowns,

or do they revel in the fact

that they are all sharing in this experiment in fidelity

together?

27/30 – catch up

Break pace,

words flying by without

consequence or

comprehension,

word salad symposium,

impressing passages in advantage,

for some sense of pride and accomplishment,

trippy tripping soliloquy that speaks

of sound and fury

signifying

no thing like clocks in the

bathtub bourbon burgeoning,

begonias be gone like snow in August,

so many clipping catchphrase festooning in this frazzled fulcrum fundamentally fastidious,

dropped ballads that barter for a Bastille barricade,

before the brilliance is diminished and I

stop.

26/30 – sacrifice

Little burning bundle,

hungry flames lapping at the offering,

smells of cinders sloping skyward,

the breeze carrying vestiges of it, embers, away,

little tornado touching down,

dispensing a simulacrum of symmetry

to a service both celebratory and austere,

we gather here today

as a remembrance and restitution

because we were born

with a clean conscious to a dirty world,

where the soot of past sacrifices stick to our skin,

and we, unknowing calves,

walk to sacrifice ourselves for the sins of our forebears,

similarly stained

to us.

25/30 – numbers

Guarding digits jumping to-and-fro,

little devious, dodgy digits,

elusive, effusive numbers

rattling up and down,

a delusion of dedication,

maths making work harder,

matter-of-factly imploding on themselves,

irrational in their rationality,

all falling to

zero.

24/30 – Practical Imposter

Someone else’s life on the tip of my tongue,

Pretending with a purpose,

Not for fame or fortune,

But to train medical students in empathy,

Practical tasks at hand,

An imposter in a white hat,

Lungs deceiving with every drawn breath but thanked for turns,

Technicalities and testimony turned outward,

A flowery skill made sacrosanct,

Bond between false patient and the practice of learners,

Recalled in cacophony of meshed together meetings,

Distinct yet blurring,

Brilliance and battery all rolled into one.