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.

To the Girl in the Back of the Room with the Dark Eyes and Warm Smile

You may think poems have never been writ about you,
That pen never met ink never met paper to do no justice to the radiance of you,
That you have never inspired a divine word from the altar of lips sacrificed on a tongue that could not help but be turned to you, sweet smelling syllogisms burning half as brilliant as you,
And you’d be wrong.

There are a hundred million punctuation points, the pauses in epics, in sonnets, in every cento every cobbled together piecemeal,
you are present in them,
You have been written into code in odes.

Because You Are Missed

Where have you gone?
Our hearts and minds are separated,
Reticent, reluctant to
Do this again to
Spread our
Passion
Like my
Altogether sloppy marmalade on
Your perfectly browned toast.

My mistakes are legion
If a demon could express more than the
Surface I have scratched,
Sorrow that sticks
Explicitly to the
Space between your marrow and blood.

Do you think this can be
Repaired? Our
Serenity together was paramount, the
Expressions of our love tingling like a
Xylophone, sweet and subtle,
Portending
Our
Tribute to each other.

Gallows Wind

There is a breeze likening more and more as to a gale
battering against these gallows I have wrought for myself.

dreaming

last night i dreamt, aided by 18mg of melatonin,
that you were an owl, wide-eyed and wise,
flying beside a car that i was passenger in,
and when the window rolled down
you flew in and perched away from me,
all aloof and ornithactary in the front passenger seat
beside the driver, who was your lover-pilot,
and you cooed in throes of safety and satisfaction.

Auto Correct

This poem was written utilizing auto correct. Any mistake the function made in writing the poem was kept in: rhymes were attempted to be maintained with the mangled thoughts. Enjoy.

Blue Sky Rain

The clouds are falling,
Blue sky rain,
I am riding through it on my bicycle on the way to work,
It drizzles and the subtle way it touches my skin reminds me of the way you caress my hair, love.
It is quiet, a calm clarity that cuts through the Saturday afternoon,
Every drop on my skin is a second that has elapsed since you left
To sojourn for a week,
Why have I felt so still why you were expanding?
Why is there less of me when there’s less of you around me?
The streets are still busy, but they’re subtle,
Like they’re waiting
To spring to life again
When you return to these streets.

Blue Sky

There is a blue sky today, with gray clouds and white ones,
The promise of rain hanging in the air,
It is on the precipice of precipitation,
As your return to me in but a night,
You are water from the heavens on my dry crop,
So parched ever since you ventured
To float
In the blue sky.

Moon Too?

I am staring at the moon,
it is full and orange, round,
its face seems inquisitive, wondering,
it makes me wonder what you’re doing.

I Miss You

You have gone up the mountain again,
To frolic and fight with fun and feisty teenagers,
To a co-counselor who is uninvolved,
And I miss you.

I miss you like Swiss Miss, it’s just hot milk without you;
Miss you like Saigon, pho has lost its flavor;
I miss you like William Tell missed his son’s head in splitting the apple, there is not enough time in the arrow whizzing by and that’s exacerbated by the minute temporal discrepancy between you at 10,000 feet and I at 5;
I miss you like your tresses, lover, we were in bed just the other day, bargaining with the sunrise for just another hour, my fingers tangling in hair like it was its atmosphere, as if they have always pined for purchase, to be locked and tied, to be knots you don’t want to brush out;
Miss you like baseball, swing and a, this bat is just driftwood swatting at the air;
Miss you like the moon misses her husband, the mountains, and her lover, the clouds;
Miss you like Charleston misses her trees.

You have gone up to make a difference and
I miss you.