teacher learns

the days in spring start to sing
they find me always busy
spider web work is their logic
the evenings are often just the same

summer shines relentlessly
an air conditioner in my office
grinds me to a gooey mass
nights test a solitary sweaty wrestler

winter in caps of sheep’s curls
fur lined waterproof boots
home and tired - how to spend the evening
cold covers and pillow are dark whispers waiting

you swam through waves of solitary tea cups
you showed me what the night was all about

rock star

the light was hiding behind
dark espresso
adjective clouds

it was the rougher form
of tag we were playing –
evening exercises
for overactive thoughts

confident doubts
of a calm mirage
floating nervously –
hovering over couches and chairs
knowing the electric moment was coming

cat tail
under the rocker

spring

green grow the tree tops
parts and spaces away
from killing shadow
smelling good is
dead or alive

dreams are the darkness you don’t see
when you close your eyes
smelling is good
whether fresh leaf
or broken branch

green is a color with a hole in it
that’s filled when light
is eaten
with delicate bud like teeth

music for katy

that the sky was light
was an illusion
bent armed and bedraggled
behind the veil
where there are only confidants
and just a few of them
after all

secrets are told there
but secrets are hard to keep
he wears a smile
to hide his passion
it trickles through
disguised as a good natured jest
he wears a frown
hard as a soda can
rattling empty

the sky looms
an invisible spider web
in which we are trapped
it is the disfigurement of day
built of secret tons
of crumble and rust
the grand skyscraper of our civilization
over which the wet dark
giant wave of night
pours like a flood
and introspection starts too late

huge cup of night

I am the husband of the dusk
I am the pimp of Peter Pan illusions
(because they remain childish forever)
forty days and forty nights
we sailed the dark ocean
we drank the huge cup of night
and only the dregs were bitter
sometimes you just must
drink deeply the blackness
the hours are like stars
shining on the surface
of the huge cup of night
you see what you cannot
when you stare into your drink
of the huge cup of night
you smell and feel
like a blind gardener
when you drink deeply -
I feel you as if you were a breath of mine

prison

I can’t see my prison
of a young atom bomb child
but I am looking for the bars
and walls that float around me –
flowers and trees that strangle
to hide the things that bind me
grabbing poems like bars to shake with rage
I must slip free of the balls without chains
and learn how to take them apart –
find a tunnel under solitary confinement
peek through a peephole in the glass wall
that floats around me
to the door that also floats
that opens onto a dream of freedom