Poem for Saturday, October 26, 2013

Message

She left with the blood-red leaves
of autumn, whirled out the door

in the same wind that took them.
Outside, the sun tears through

the naked maples with branches
outstretched like crucifixion, like

something beautifully broken and
tinged in the gray of surrender.

Inside, everything still functions.
You notice things like how loud

the wall clock ticks, how the
table has become amassed with

plates and cups. She left one last
ring of coffee there, inches away

from her napkin, as if to say
this is how it must be.

Poem for Thursday, October 17, 2013

Lessons from Stanford

I.

There are countless metaphors for death, each
more cryptic than the last;

death is indifferent towards them all


II.

There are several ways to judge a man:

the length of his string of crappie
the way he rolls his tobacco or if
he can clutch your soul and mark it
with his stories

There is one way to judge a woman:

is there fire in her eyes?


III.

There is something incredibly significant in
this image:

         a moonlit knife shining under the
         creek bed, washed clean
         of blood (on the
                              surface)
                 

IV.

We are those bloody knives, all of us
gazing up wide-eyed beneath the ripples
irradiated in moonbeams
tear-glazed and beautiful

Poem for Monday, October 14, 2013

Tumbleweed

Cutting through this mountain town--
that windblown ball of twigs
in a perpetual hurry,
rolling

        past the murder of dumpster crows
behind the Chinese restaurant,

        past the drunk native woman singing
in the little league diamond,

        past the jackhammers and chunks
of uprooted asphalt,

        past the tawny beer bottles clanking
in forgotten brick alleys,

        past the unlit Virgen de Guadalupe
candles on cluttered desks,

        past the leaves and the pine needles
dying mid-air deaths,

       past the the drunk native man flipping
the bird at a bus stop,

       past the dew-kissed grass recovering
from the morning frost,

       past the two bundled lovers sharing
cigarettes in the sun.

Godspeed, then, desert seeker--
we understand how winter
stalls for absolutely
nothing.