Kindness showed herself today;
Her form was you incarnate,
Her presence kept my fears at bay,
With bravery of garnet.

She spoke to me with gilded voice
And explained to me the world
"In living we must all rejoice"
Her wisdom thus unfurled.

Beauty showed herself today,
And would you know- she was you!
She smiled and then the sky of grey
Changed swiftly into blue.

I asked her what she thought of me
And thought, too, of my kin
Her eyes then crinkled wistfully
She chuckled, 'Where do I begin?'

"Onto this Earth I bore you all;
The noise you made was frightful!
And every day I've loved you since
Has grown more and more delightful."

Music played so clear today
An artful composition!
Not Mozart, Korngold or Bizet;
No– this was your cognition.

The magnitude, of this, your song
Brought flowers to bloom around us.
The springtime breeze did play along,
Invoking melody susurrus.

You sang Golden Finch on Silver Birch,
Rosey-breasted Grosbeak,
Tiny Long-tailed Tit on perch
all dancing cheek to cheek.

You're joy and motion,
Love and silence,
Kindness, quelling news of violence.
You're everything admiring;
To you I am aspiring.

I love seeing myself destroyed–
After I've cried for the second or third time in a row
I sit cross-legged in front of a full length mirror.

Two eyelashes, exhausted from their firm rooting, drifted to the soft of my cheek.
My lips jut out, raw as if kissed into submission, shadowing chin below.
The fascination comes from the way age seems to have settled nicely
Between the tectonic planes of my brow, cheeks, nose, and forehead.
Why is this the face I love most?

Perhaps the deep shadows, concealed and brightened by hand before leaving home,
Whisper to me that, although sadness can hollow and stain,
So, too, will joy make one full and fresh.

This face is not a gimmick.
It does not call for pomp or flash– only gentle kindness
And a tender brush of the hand.

This face, in all its forms, will I love
Still when those brush strokes of worry do not iron out by sleep and sunlight alone.
Even when the flush of youth is replaced by old-age's ground frost.
Even when all my life's memories are stored
In folds and pockets, pores and hollows
For everyone to see.
I will love this face.

Arizona

Tread on the comet's tail
And slip on the ice.
No traction to be found in space,
Where salt grain stars flash a firefly song
In a vacuous lawn of pitch.
Pitchfork prongs stab skyward with
Gramophone flowers by needlepoint leaves:
Open bar for bats and bees.
A kick of dust, a mountain tall, looms-
Majestic above the city flats.
Tiles of copper shavings coat the land;
They glisten with mica brightness and mosaic.
This clay pot land, sparse of tree,
Finds ample way to shade and home.

Dionysus

***

Dionysus: Now then, don’t be silly

Your attitude so chilly

Right from the start,

I knew your heart

That you have poisoned--

Scarlet: Your riddles to none pertaining

Have just got me complaining

Now go to bed

And bump your head

Don’t speak until it’s raining

Dionysus: I won’t speak. Your etiquette when you banquet is not for me to judge. Just know this. I govern who dies and who lives. Your guilt is not for you to give.

Scarlet: ‘Tis madness, what you’re doing here,

Wild ecstasy amasking fear

The dancing ones who hence would flee

Do twist and burn within your glee

This wine saturation conflagration

Intoxication of a nation

Community without filtration

‘Tis madness, don’t you see?

Dionysus: And madness, He is me

Scarlet: Society without its bounds

Makes Slaves unto that Bacchic Clown

Dionysus: The hardest heart is first to drown

And most stubborn crown first underground.

So gone you’ll be

And take you she

[points to Miss Peacock]

Lest this end in tragedy

***

Heimat der Reisenden

Wie oft im Sommer habe ich dem grünen Land verlassen?

Ich hörte einmal dass ich könnte etwas besseres haben.

Die Wörter machen mich immerkrank im Kopf und auch im Herz,

Ich wanderte einsam hin und her und fand mich im Herbst.

Die Bäume waren gestern schön und tanzet in dem Wind,

Heute langsam, nur ein Bild von alles die grausam sind.

Ruhe sprach mir stimmeloß und fragt mich wie ich heiß,

Die Name, die war mit mir geboren, wurde hier nur Geheimnis.

Sie fragte nochmal und lud mich ein, ihre Stimme nur die Luft,

Ich lief schnell weg, diese Ruhe eine musikalische Sucht.

Darüber gab es ein unbekanntes Lindenbaum

Menschen die ihn finden könnten waren heute ziemlich kaum.

Darunter, saß ich still und dacht ich auf mein ganze Welt.

Wo war ich jetzt? Wen kannt ich hier in diese breite Feld?

Seit viele Jahren saß ich da wie ein Stamm unter dem Stein,

Das Land vor mich meinte dass ich würde nimmer mehr allein. 

To You

There is poetry in your eyes;

A wild music that cascades like a cliff-bound cataract,

Catching me easily in its surf.

I imagine us, in our silent moments, in watercolour,

Our soft colours blend together,

Bleed together

Swift as rain rushing from road to gutter,

Never static, ever dancing,

The languid morning's star glinting gently off our forms.

Galleries with Van Gogh wallpaper may stand on every continent,

But how can mere painting

Encapsulate what we have?

Turner’s ships don’t sway in the same way

I do in your arms.

The night before, your face was pained in moonlight.

I traced the curved shadows of your profile

With an unsuppressable smile at my willing lips.

You breathed- a soft breeze across my skin:

A comforting chill that reminds me

I am no longer alone.

I think you might be waking.

The orchestra in my breast begins its tremolo.

To think of your kind, dark eyes!

To read the words behind the obsidian glass:

Water under a frozen river.

How in this great world have I been so fortunate as to be his?

But how changed you’ve been

Since disillusion descended and bound

Those most beautiful of gates.

Your mind, now iron and frosted,

Restricts the heart’s aimless stampede.

The wild music, now uniform,

In line with the entrapping wall,

Dulls to desert hues.

And the watercolour fades– blank.

Lines, too, on your arms:

A figure skater’s work.

In time, you may return to me,

But until then I must lay alone.

I will remain until you bid me leave

For, like a solitary wave on the sand,

So must I always return to the comfort of the sea.

The Hour

There comes an hour now and then–
Your thoughts scrape at the inside of your scull:
Rusty, restless.
All skin constricts and binds your body,
Forcing every blemish to scream and claw its way 
To the forefront of your mind
And nothing can be peace.
Like the feeling that springs up in your throat
When your eye finds a malformed beast,
Weary and bloodied from a needless hardship,
So do you react at the mention of your body.
And your mind:
An emptiness where echoes of past happiness
Rattle unconvincingly like the tail of a dying snake. 
Every new person who encounters you in this hour
Sows seeds of unimaginable hate under your skin
With their well-meaning smiles and hollow words.
Loathing in a lather that grinds dryly on your skin,
Rubbing raw the endless layers of your ancient, frail pages.
What a beautiful thing it would be
To yield the self
To safe, still silence.
It is not, however, the depression that concerns
But the fullness and the bulge,
The fatness and the absolute convexity
That is my abhorrent form.
It is repulsive to me. 
I am repulsive to me.