I long to be close to
where your beating heart
was among its last beats.
I sit on the couch where
we spent your last night —
but cannot bring myself
to be on the cushion where
life was fading from you
and you lay against me.
I didn’t sleep, for vigilance
you didn’t sleep, for pain —
so tired, so dazed, so lucid
so knowing, so loved —
so gone.
dried crackling leaves
though dead
are never quite still
Nature and wildlife
are gradually vanishing
like in the photograph
from Back to the Future —
our future is vanishing too
but we have no hundred
and thirty horsepower
gas-fired time machine
to go back and fix it.
I tried – to marry Happiness –
but he Dumped me – at the Vows –
he sought – a Sadder Heart to lift –
and Left me – for someone Else –
so I Hitched up – with Solitude –
and Honeymooned – by Myself –
the autopsy will find —
coloured flowers in my grey matter
still-beating poetry in my heart
unspent ink in every organ
blood saturated with love
bones mineral’d by life’s rough days
muscles fiber’d by courage and fear intertwined
and a slightly crushed but glittering soul
Please someone tell me—
am I actually demented,
or just well-fermented?
all my poems are starts
they begin but never end
yet do they abandon me
or do i abandon them?
Winter is the slow-down
Winter is the search for self
Winter gives the silence we need to listen
Winter goes gray so we can see our own colors
black eyes and broken bones
rainbows and sugared donuts
overthinking and over-loving
have gotten me to this point
and still I’ve never yet made
a five-year freaking plan —
and even if I did — nothing
ever actually goes
according
to
plan
anyway
midlife changes curled-up
forties are fiddlehead ferns
it doesn’t look like much
until it becomes unfurled
and once we get it open
things may break apart —
eventually nests unwind
but will we bear fortitude
to turn that new life into
something just as beautiful
and yet even more free
spiraling towards fifty?
i bleed words,
ink drops, and
poetry merges —
blackish-crimson
autobiography
for the harsh heat wave
wet apologetic gift
from clouds to tree roots
When you were a child, on a summer afternoon,
Did you lie in tall grass, listening to the crickets
Foreshadowing autumn, listening to the small
Infinite sounds of earth? Did you press your cheek
And your short brown body furiously down
Into the grass, so loving the narrow roots,
So loving the hard wild flanks of hills, and summer,
That when your slight strength broke at last, you cried…
Then rising in the slow wind, cried no more
But stood and gazed with grave young eyes upon
The brief, unburdened hours lived and gone,
Yourself, the child, abandoned in the grass,
Yourself, the man, earth’s lover, who would follow
The strong years deathward, aching and possessed?
—Frances Frost, “Year of Earth,” These Acres, 1932