Let’s Say It’s the Moon
Let’s say it’s the moon
that brings this madness.
Let’s say the moon is a woman
hanging clothes in mid-October,
the air brushing her frost-tipped day.
Let’s say the moon is a bespectacled lover
whose sight dims in the shining.
Then again, let’s say
it is not the moon bringing madness,
but the short purple bloom of wisteria,
a fading season, the spent chase of perfume,
or the heart’s wormy bucket
pulsating along the edge of the human terrain,
soft round bodies so close to this earth,
Or let’s say this moon—
shy in its fullness
demure in its wane
and waxing madness.
Kaleidoscope
In anyone’s hand,
Prismed sky shadows,
flecked silver,
spin a world of mottled hues.
Turning the cylinder up to light
glitter, sliver, pearl, and shell—
Every purple oblong shape,
The rainbow’s enigma.
Shattered mirror of the heart–
our fractured lives
break, then fall
into symmetry
where even the splintered still looks beautiful.
Novel in the Making
The story is short, and not very novel
A man and a woman,
Both brisk as cloud breaks:
The woman is not bad, but sometimes sloppy,
The man is not bad, but sometimes sloppy
The man constantly reminds the woman of what she lacks,
Which is the same thing that he lacks,
And they are constant in constantly doing this.
Till one day the woman just tires out,
The way a clock stops ticking after a spring has rusted.
And the woman stops listening,
And the man stops talking,
The space they share is silence.
No tick, no tock,
And they learn how to feel lonely,
together.