Monday, September 24, 2007

Sweet Mountain Pie

I love your sweet potatoes
fresh dug earth smell
condensed milk
and red Carnation label:

The danger of your warm cinnamon
your too unflinching eyes
round as your breasts,
your mountain pies
adventuring into my senses

Unchanneled
you defy reality
and so define your own:
make mother sweeter
make gray skies blue
etc

Where are you my love?
Where is my brown skin girl?
My Southern Belle lost
No longer ringing?

No Skype
no urgent cell phone
no sound of San Francisco buses
in the querulous warmth and
straight-ahead light of
only San Francisco

I miss your troubles
and concerns;
long unburdenings
of your little girl
over the echoing line
our two-city cyber-room half green
half log cabin

You packed, I know
You left and are on your Great Journey;
I hope you're safe!
It is a wild world out there.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Is that you
Sue?
Can't believe the easy
like you never left
just yesterday,
now sun-bleached and pound-less;
Third World girl,
complaining that your man
won't go fishing!
That there's nothing here
your missing,
Not in THIS nostalgic space!

I hear you girl!
Your free spirit makes me ache
warms me celebrate
That you still you
And not a heartbeat's worth of bravery
is missing between you and heaven.

Now two minutes later,
I wish I had saved our AIM-full
conversation and the way that proesy
dropped from the misspellings and urgency with which
we typed our exchanges
jumbling the sequence of the lines
into novel stanzas
and humorous allusions.
You made me realise how much
our journeys since we last met
were similar,
you made me realise how much I was free--
not that cliche hippy irresponsible freedom
But the freedom that comes from taking responsibility for the
world AS YOU SEE IT!

If you and I had not in our separate ways braved grief, pain
and separation
there would be no world out there today
I am sure.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Early, Sunny Spring - Pike Street Market.

How are the afternoons?
What news of sunlit, streaming
Cafes.
What the white people like so much,
Are they still intact?

It is saying goodbye to another day
As absolutely gracefully as possible.
Enjoy a beer-- a $3 reward
For clawing back the $26 I mis-spent yesterday,
On tea.

It's welcome spring again.
I'm thankfully over-dressed
Ready to shed my sleazebag armour
And join a new army this month.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Shaving Ruminations

Yes, good morning dear!
You know, I think of you every morning:
Everytime I consider whether I need a shave I remember when you said
with so much absolutness:
"You should shave every day!"

But my beard is a tropical plant:
A walla full of December rice.
It needs sunshine and high temperatures
to rise beyond a stubble.
Shaving in these northern climes
is like gleaning.

Friday, April 13, 2007

T. Rex Soup for the Soul

T. Rex: They finally did it!
Pulled collagens from some ancient bones
(All 65 million years of them in Montana)
Boiled them up, and hey presto!
Chicken soup!
Dinosaurs are, after all, like birds.
And frogs.
A hypothesis becomes a theory
For all brave scientists.
And for T. Macbeth
Eye of newt and tongue of frog
To keep the virulence at bay,
Fight the seasonal flus and coughs
On the molecular battleground
Thundering across Gondwanaland:
Today no virus can manifest its presence with THAT roar!

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

You remove me from the experience of the moment;
Into the past.
Doused like dirty laundry in a soup of sudsy water
We deny each other our lives.