a ritual to start the work week
Early summer weighs heavy
in this May daze; the sense
that there’s no escape constricts
fist-like in our chests. Rest slips
through our fingers: rain fizzling
as it hits hot concrete. Nothing left
for it but to soak, snake coil
on midday mountaintop outcrop,
eat up the heat and let it egg
lump through our gullets, hatching
it within to feed our own
fragile futures, a nest
to find winter respite.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
Seek freedom like the dishes,
like laundry and dusting and mowing
the lawn. Notice all the links
in the chains that hang heavy
on your shoulders, rooting you to
the stone wall you built yourself,
should by should, a private hell
of cold dependencies. Name them.
Make a list and drive your pen
through each one as you see it
for what it is. They come
and they come, every day another
remnant of what could have been
hardening into an iron loop
to hold you tighter. But these
brittle rings crumble under scrutiny,
snap and fade with just
a little care, a regular tending.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
Open the book to break
the spine, to break the mind
of fretful habits and downcast
eyes, the doom that spirals deep
inside; unwind malaise; unknit
to rise; unmake the bed
where nightmares lie, where
tired rhymes just multiply;
defy the order; decry the law
that strikes imbalance, that spits
and saws a body in two
and calls it art, lights a world
on fire and calls it war; open
the book and crease the page;
unfold before it; behold its rage.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
I've got no love today. No
bananas or watermelons either,
all nourish and sweetness sucked
dry by this feeling of rind
and peel, scraped empty of flesh,
squeezed and juiceless, made useless
save to feed the worms. No love
note then, today, for I can not give
what I do not have, not for this
world, not in this world, where want
and wish pick us clean of the muscle
and fat we need to work and withstand
its horrors and all the ways
we forget each other and that
we could fix each other too if only
we really want to.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
Feel how we push, firm
shouldered into the sun, all
bask and quench. Hear
how we echo and harmonize,
petal dishes gathering up
each other’s wobbling
waves. Taste this rain
that douses us, how we drink
and reach and drink and
see how we shine
in each other, gain
and grow within our plots
whether shared or not, how
each pot holds root stem bloom
apart and yet as one.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
Bring me lawn spark;
bring me glimmer from the far
end of winter’s gullet; bring me
sky shot and sun reach;
bring me fresh
blanket; bring me
air that spikes and sparkles,
lights up my insides and makes me fight
for clarity and ease; bring
me trees; bring me
flora font overflow and
unfurl; bring me sternum
and toe and palm; bring me pond
scum and duck
weed; bring me green.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
+ note us, our breath, rise and fall
+ hold their water howsoever you can
+ unfold your soggy scribbled love notes
+ dance under thunder, under star
+ walk open-handed and open-eyed on and on
+ pull the flame closer, spark and pinch
+ grasp for hidden gems just underfoot
love notes
a ritual to start the week
The bulbs scraping skyward
to bud lopsided chartreuse
after blanketed months
spent revving in idle may freeze
next week if the forecast holds
and winter slips as promised
a single gloved hand between
the post-show curtains to shimmy
and snap once more, but for now
it’s spring and the windows refuse
to close and the breeze can’t stop
skipping across our desktops and
our chins lift defiant sunward,
unable to sink back into our chests.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
Blood
reveals what the body hides,
stitches up and binds behind
marble white wrappings, builds
reflexive with so many reps, push
days and pull days, bear and bull
days, to pare and cull and find ways
to legitimize and ameliorate
all the evil acts that stack
like vertebrae inside this spineless husk
that seeks our hesitant allegiance,
pledges to weary us, tire
our aching backs and burdened
shoulders, ask more
of our parched hands, let
them bleed. Let them
flood.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
leather straps flap
in the wind buck
and burn skin red
as the moon painted
black again back
arched sending rider
tumbling weeds dried
and sparked stones pick
up speed kicked up
by flaming hooves set
a new path ablaze
love notes
a ritual to start the week
We
long to live. Long
to stretch feline across
windowsills and mountaintops,
range spine-like through continents, span
oceanic over planets, orbit shared
suns and expand ever outward
as one. We long
and arduous folk, yearning
and burning ones, burst
momentary on our own, but
glimmer endless ember
together. We,
longing and living and loving and laughing,
grateful and gleeful
equally of invention and cliché, wish
for little but to last
long enough to pass
our ache for on-and-on-ing onto
another.
love notes
a ritual to start the week
