Women On The Beach

You're pretending
moments of happiness change something.

You're posing for pictures,
a smile on your face.

The beach is real, and the surf,
but we can't know for sure
if it's loving us back,

if this will save us,
this one day,
with salt crusting our hair,
stripping our studied dignities.

Your laughter
doesn't echo here.

Are you writing this down?
Wouldn't this make
a good story?

--when the day has dried, when
you're alone again,

hoping there was a reason,
hoping
you did well--


for easystreet prompts #660.

Slowly, He Turned...

I've never seen a man change.

Ask him to reconsider.
Ask a pear orchard in winter
to feed you now.

The cycles are baffling
to short-lived, hungry things
like love.

Staring upward
through the placid limbs
I waited for flowers to bloom.

By now, who knows?
He may be on a hillside
in Provence,

sharing everything, smiling at the sky.


for Totally Optional Prompts

Absence Riff

1. It's A Wonderful Presence

Yes, and what if
you had been born?

with your wheels your faces your habits

If you had been born
Space would have expanded all around you
and energy would have flooded
in waves the color of you
everywhere you went
every day

The way you moved a chair
The way you spoke to that waitress

In your wake, an ever-widening causality

How is it
with so many people in the world
that time and space are not ajumble
with the wreckage from billiions and billions
of little sullen hurricanes going on and on?

How does anything
stand?


2. Without You

Occasionally one fantasizes
about the flash fame
of suicide

or bearing children

But no one ever says the truth at a funeral
that it's the dead who are most guilty
of forgetting


3. Take-Away

Convenience
is the most natural thing

Evolution only runs downhill

We get our food
from roadside stands now
and the killers and the farmers
like underpaid puppeteers
running around behind the black curtain

When the ranchlands
are pulled back under the earth

there will be no more
exotic places

We'll all be crowded onto a mountaintop
trying to be the first
to catch the raindrops as they fall

And we will eat dust and crawl on our bellies
just like in the beginning



for Poetry Instigator

(Falling in love at my age)

is a knot
to be untangled
blindfold, submerged
in water

a lock to pick, a box
to splinter

only to climb
into a new one, and seal it
even tighter



just wanted to share this cause i thought i was really clever when i wrote it, i won't lie.