poems made of rainwater
collected in rain barrels
spare part poems
that squeak like a bicycle
Sunday poems
when nature is in worship
poems like rolling carp
eclipsing gold in shallow water
well-groomed poems
like the sons of barbers
poems like mirrors
hiding in plain sight
poems like floodlit fields
with empty soccer nets
sadly smiling poems
for having won and lost
imperfect poems
for being all too human
poems like children
laughing and crying
poems like vessels
in which the wine ages

After browsing the wretched news
I go out and see chalk flowers
adorning my driveway.
Starting today the children of the world
will be spared from our brutality.
Starting today all hate
will wash away like chalk rain.
Starting today all guns
will be drawn in chalk.

Ancient echoes of ancestry
sound waves in the bloodline
like a river of origins
mysterious avowals of place
like stone steps to nowhere
and what reechoes there
brings you back to thought
accepts you back to naught
rejects who you are not
withholds what you were taught
the murmurs of a trace
vestiges in headspace
requests without a you
all antecedents to a who

You must amass currency for eternity
and be parent of your best memories
and adopt the child inside you
and guide the sick and the blind
as you’d wish to be guided
by the kindness of a blind hand
and to never lose what you love
you must love loss
not only the promise of freedom
but the wealth of it all

Today I remember my mother’s bread,
the smell rises like yeast into my head,
waking my senses to baking dough
and the flower of my mother’s glow.

Today I remember I was born
out of my mother’s bread
and that the hands of her love
shaped the limbs of my body.

Today I know that bread is love,
that its memory is the bread I eat,
that even with a working father
bread was made of hope and water.

What Else Matters

From the hotel window of our bel epoch
Paris will never again be this Paris, our Paris,
So we embraced time in each other. What else matters?

Newlyweds

You stood at the window and I said look
the plants have dressed the sheers
like a wedding arch between floating worlds
and you came back to bed
wearing a wreath of shadows
as though we were newlyweds

Love on the Nile

Waking next to you on the Nile
sunrise lays a desert across my thoughts
of never loving you again.

The night my mother died I didn’t cry,
it was like dimethyltryptamine
flooded my brain with magnetic rain.

It was as though her death triggered a rush
of shrooms to flower in my mind,
and time and space had gone to kush.

It was as though I could hear her voice
like the voices of peyote shamans
singing their song of spirit into smoke.

It was as though every trip I’d known
was a road map to this sacred place
where I’d be motherless and stoned.