Sonnet 1

You thought that I'd appreciate this cat
That every morning to my doorstep brings
A new-found treasure, left upon my mat:
Some rats and toads and other murdered things.
She sits behind the carcass looking proud
And thinking I'll reward her for her skill,
And as she licks her forepaws, mewing loud,
The house begins to stink of this ripe kill.
Well, that is how you drag to me your heart
And offer tawdry love like some bright jewel.
The value of our hearts is worlds apart.
If my love's bought with yours, I am a fool.
Come get your things (and cat) out of my house.
Your love is just another moulding mouse.

Sunset

he goes down on her
she comes alive
fire in her loins
warmth crashing through her in waves
he is vibrant
draped in gold and magenta
and clouds
she reflects his energies back
they make each other beautiful
he plunges, sinks
with a slow and solid
burst!
his fire is everywhere
she groans
roars
he lights up
she
a second behind
then still
he is enveloped in her
she pulls the blinds
leaving us in the dark
to wonder what happens
between now and morn

Conquistador

A new land discovered, food and spices, wild flowers and exotic beasts and dark cultures. But so many men stay in their ships, sailing from port to port, trying to find an empire of metals and jewels. Spend your life in endless pursuit, if pursuit is the thing you love most. Sail the seas, cut through jungles and everglades, but know before you set out that you'll never drink enough from any fountain to quench the thirst for youth. Those moments are now.


There are golden cities men spend their lives in search of. El Dorado, the gilt one, El Adorado, the loved one. I will be wise, search for a while, then find my golden city in the sunrise reflected off adobe walls. I'll find my perfect lover among the imperfect people around me and love that imperfect lover with a perfect love. I'll shine the golden light of my love onto austere earthy features, change the walls of that city into mirrors and doorways and beacons of solid gold.

Live Oak

This is a first for me. I was assigned to draw a tree for class, and since I'm much more verbal than visually inclined, I wrote a poem and turned it into a tree. Let me know what you think. :) The poem is reproduced below because I doubt you'll be able to read it on many computer screens, but I wanted you to be able to see how it looks.














were I that old
clothed in moss and cobwebs
so stately
having seen men and grandsons plow these golden fields
having watched the sun set over the hills seventy thousand times
having freed children from gravity
offered myself as a memorial to lovers
comfort for the aged
had i gained the wisdom of the years
and the seasons and the storms
had i been singular in the eye of god for an eon
i too would send my roots deep into the hillside
embrace the land
let the earth whirl around me a thousand times more
as i hold still
motionlessly watching these curious young creatures all around
as they bustle about in their town in their cars
i'd send my branches out at solid gnarled angles
never moving
ever reaching toward the light

The Love of God

Alone he waits behind aged stained glass
Back and forth and back
He likes it here
Like church
In his earthen apartment
Under the cobblestone stairs of an old delicatessen
The world, when he would look out,
Was always warbly, bubbly, indigo and maroon and lavender
The world, if it were to look in, would see him the same

He has so much Love
Here is a cricket crossing his floor
And there it goes again,
Uninterrupted,
Between stacks of vinyls,
Barriers of inventions and wires and wheels
Invented barriers
Darkness,
And that bright purple square in the south wall
The dimmer purple parallelogram on the floor beneath

The muffled ding of a bell means order up
Another order of meat to go, up above
There's a contraption in the corner,
Hooked to the telephone
so that any time it rings,
LED lights will put on a dazzling show
Fireflies and fireworks and angels
He's set up incense to cover the smell and calm his nerves

The man himself is a tattered and lonely man-
Nearing, fearing forty
Facing this world all alone
Facing away from the world, now, really
You can look at the back of him
His Gene Wilder hair, patches in his suitcoat to make him feel more scholarly
Socks that only ever match if it's a coincidence

Look at him working,
Over the past nine years,
Cutting holes in his pockets in defiance of ownership
In defiance of change
Building his dream machines out of old lampshades and a record player
Childproofing the outlets and asking them to be his portals to a tiny land of love and magic (the same?)
Leaving the doors unlocked at night, just in case.
Is it warm in here, or just dark?

There sits his bible, under the light. A magnificent tome
It's the kind with the words of Jesus in martyr's blood red
Leather binding
And pages and pages for genealogy in the front, with some brightly colored saints
(No pages for progeny)

He reads of the love of God. Pure.
To possess charity is to have love FOR god, love LIKE god for his fellow men, love FROM god, he understands
He has so much Love
Jesus loves me, reads a scrawling script on a note that will be discovered much later by some stranger whom he also loves.
Up up up goes the handwriting, and then a sharp ragged down, telltale down

In a final experiment (thanks be to god for his unspeakable gift)
He uses some wire
The effects of gravity and sharp, sudden pressure
The details are meaning less

He really couldn't help himself
It's just that god loved him so much
And nobody nearer ever seemed to...
In all of this setup, years that led to this test of a hypothesis,
The phone never rang. Still no fireworks, no fireflies, no saving angels.
And now silence,
Same as before,
Save for another muffled ding from a bell up above.

He has so much Love

I Before E

My brother asked me to "ghost pimp this poem" for him. Pretty neat little idea he had, and it was fun to work with it and add some more words and jokes and stick it in anapestic tetrameter with a cohesive rhyme structure. The final result (which earned me 50 bucks):

I Before E

English has rules that are tough, I confess.

But they can be mastered with regular discipline.

Just follow these rules and you'll find your success,

And know that at least it's not Swedish or Mandarin.

We'll start with the easy ones: mischief and field,

Or pierce, believe, diesel, and even Marie,

There's priest, and belief, and grief, thief, and yield,

The rule, you can see, is it's I before E.

And then we've conceited, perceive, and deceit,

These words beak the mold; I think you'll agree.

With ceiling, receipt, and receive–ain't this neat?
It's I before E, except after C.

The rule’s also broken when sounding like “A,”

'Least that's what I found in heir, reindeer, and feign,

And neighborhood, weightlifter, terreplein, sleigh,

As eight weighty geishas surveil my chow mein.

Society, deity, science, sobeit,

It sounds like our language is digging for laughs.

But there's still a rule that works here, if you see it:

Seems "I before E" only works for digraphs.

There's Geiger and eiderdown, seismic, and gneiss

I think of these words, and I ask with a sigh,

If Einstein's a genius, how'd he miss it twice?

Unless the rule stops when E I just says I.

Remember: forget all the rules if you please.

Regarding the plurals of words with -C Y,

In fallacies, agencies, and frequencies.

It's always I E, and It's never E I.

Now Dreidl is foreign, and so's edelweiss,

So they're off the hook. Oh, and what of Beijing?

To answer your questions, this rule should suffice:

We tend to let proper nouns do their own thing.

There's counterfeit, heifer. die, neither, weird, seize,

friend, reveille, protein–our rules are now wrecked.

So memorize rules all day long if you please,

But when you're all done, have your papers spell-checked!

Mata Amritanandamayi

She set a goal to hug all of us
Everyone
All god's children
Three million down
Crisscrossing the globe and
Whoops
A slip
Four thousand more dead in Africa while she waited
For her fancy airplane
But here she is, villagers!
To hug the orphans of the deceased then
Off
To Quebec or Denver or Pittsburgh
She'll sit on her dais and hug all who approach her
And to the hospitals and the jails and the foster homes!
Here, Have a hug and an apple and a rose petal and a Hershey's Kiss™
And a blessing from god and the fortitude and faith to deal with another day of abuse and cancer and rape.
They say she's a saint
She hears
She hugs
The gays and the abortion doctors and the beef eaters
ALL the dear sinners
She is so damn full of love
She could explode from hugs unhugged

How pissed I'ma be
To turn around one of these days
And there's a little shriveled raisin of a swami
Clamped onto my leg in holy huglock
Pressing her lined face against my hip and anointing me with the tears of the saints
Then leaving me,
Another tally mark,
Three million and one
Another notch in her belt,
A bead on her rosary.
A brick in her tower to heaven.