I just wanted to say “Thanks,” to anyone who has read my words or even looked at this blog. It was an adventure, an incredibly scary one for me, returning this year to putting my poems and thoughts out into he world. For a year with not a ton of ups, this has been my ‘up.’ I’ve so enjoyed the adventure of putting things out on a public platform and hoping someone might read it and/or enjoy it. It helps to know that so many of you love writing, words, expressing yourself through art, and that is alive and thriving in a time when we need self-expression and art more then ever. So, as I enter into my fourth decade on this earth, my second century, and I’m not forty yet… I do so with a poem. I wish you all great 2020, and I can’t wait to see what art brings us in the new decade. Peace and love! L.
Calendar Days
The melts of spring, quietly filling up time. Mindful
Of how the crickety world is coming home with a new heart.
The idea of how ridiculous, how many second chances, new organs
The earth gets each year. Hopeful, at how many second, third,
Eightieth chances we give it, and it gives us. Migrations
And sermon like storms and power outages that dream
Of taking us offline for a few hours to listen to the music of solitude.
It is confessions, in fascinations you seek on long walks,
The syntax of wolves howling in the night. It is
Great wingspans and the many mice and tiny creatures
That will nibble at bold, noble creatures when they’ve fallen
That humble me. I like walking on rain misted afternoons,
They feel half holy to me. I love days that feel like great excuses
For nothingness. There is a part of me that attaches to these days
Because so much of life is lived in without attention.
The receipts from the burritos, the movie stubs, the poetry books
All show this. I have just noticed three months from now
It will be my birthday. Even after all these years,
Although there is no more cake, no more grandma’s cards,
No more people prepping me for weeks, I still know it is coming.
The days dance toward another flip of the calendar year of my life.
It is strange cause I give it more chances than God. This concept
That this year something will stir, some wind will change, somebody
Will show up who will be a great excuse to call into work. My pessimist
Would piss all over these ideas and he does,
But somethings you don’t forget: The time someone is born,
The time they pass, the things you wished you would have said,
The real reasons you should have played hooky. Some things
Want you to ditch them, dates that have been spilled on by loss
Or heartbreak. Moments when Polaroid was there, yet you had no idea.
Little reminders you find to remember something you say you can’t.
Still you do. Those days come and your memory always buys the ticket back.
Sometimes it’s to remember tickets you forgot to buy, sometimes
It’s to remember tickets purchased. God is certainly a gambler.
It’s ok if you want to ditch out on this poem. It’s ok
If you want to miss the fireflies prancing through the prairie grass.
My human heart has missed many things too. I am
The king of excuses as to why I missed the holiday or the party.
Sometimes it’s honest, most of the time it’s not.
Someday I will get angry at my lack of time for human intimacy.
I try not to make it today. Life is like sticking your hand in that honey bee nest,
It works best when a hand is trained in stillness.
It works best when faith is on your side and confidence is served as a side dish.
I have always been made of mice and man.
I have tried comas, and comets, and commas
To separate man from myth, faith from form,
Bad words from good. I love the word holy.
I love the word serendipity. I love the word creation.
Still when I say them, I don’t feel they’re to be owned.
I don’t know if I ever feel owed or owned.
I feel rented most of the time. The world is made of fresh ghosts
Who still do not have the vocabulary of when and where.
Who still haven’t divided time into territories.
Poetry knows this. It carries stories from our sleep
Into our daydreams into our realities so effortlessly;
It’s like it has the easy hands of the creator.
I have sat in pews on calendar days and sang praise
For events that history has told me I should celebrate,
But during the autopsy; they will open me
And find not dates or organ hymns
But poems, bold as an ox, more thankful
Then any crop facing window that feeds the world.
They will find galoshes, and grease soaked paper towels,
And hot suds on cold hands, and pajamas
And creaks, and streams, and chubby kids eating greasy burgers,
And children that never felt pretty admitting they have some beauty
In front of a mirror where they hold themselves like swans.
Yes, they will find the good, the bad, the ugly, the smooth,
And it will all smell of truth, even though it’s not what the calendar days may say.
When you want to smell truth, go to a library,
Open a book, inhale, and imagine all the hands that have held onto those words;
That’s heaven, I suppose. If I leave nothing else in this world,
I’ll leave moments in poems
Rich in fucked up shit and thick in things that say, “I miss you,”
Because I will. I told you I like the word holy and here’s why:
To me it means ‘heavenly,’ ‘sent from somewhere too beautiful to explain,”
And poets, well their job is to binge on that holy
So when the autopsy is performed,
You see what a full live they lived
Ingesting all that is –
Calendars to some
