SPRING

Such commotion 
it can only be
first love

I don't recall ever seeing
so fresh a green


SUMMER

To say that your smile
lights up the whole garden
is of course an exaggeration

but I did indeed see
a flower bloom
at your approach


AUTUMN

Harvest season
not all flowers
need to bear 
fruit


WINTER

If not for the night's snow
how are the venturous feet to find
knee-deep shouts and laughter

or to look beyond
the vast white 

Footprints in the snow, fresh.
Will your divorce lawyers talk
to Jesus this night—
set me chain-free.
Set you on your traveling ways.
Searching, we'll both be curiously searching.
Even hell has its standards burn with grace—
jukebox baby, we'll meet again
in the end, in that big black box.
Jesus suffers with the poor and the lost.
Jesus is the lead tempo rubato
4 both of us now bounce around
robbed of our stolen time.
Let me drive you home for the last time.
Coming home to go on separate paths.
Footprints fresh in the snow, 2 paths
forked off in different directions.
Hear diverse sounds —
on the FM radio, our favorite tune,
with age, it will become a classic
'Sympathy For the Devil,' The Stones,
jukebox, baby, put another quarter in.

Stars thicken the night.
Earth teaming with insects.
Breathe in the midst of might.
You have been taking in rejects.

Battered and bruised the fight.
Was it worth our rotten neighbor?
Those insects dance in delight.
Was the leper worth the labor?

Unless you accept it all.
Weaving in the puke.
You deserve to slip and fall
from the slightest rebuke.

For I gave you so much land
and an open sky to breathe.
Yet you choose to rant with your band.
Instead of bellowing conceive!

What if I took you away
from all your goods and sorrow?
Would you still hold true and demand I pay
more for yesterday, today and tomorrow?

I've given you too much to distinguish:
fiery stars, cars, the Milky Way.
Why can't you extinguish
heat from your feet of clay?  

We sit together
on a wooden bench,
watch seed pods from the maple
in their slow dance
with the breeze
and listen to cardinal song.

We walk for miles
together carrying
a basket of silence,
knowing it is not
an empty basket.
 
We have never learned
boredom.

 
(First published in Rockford Review, 2015.

I'm trying to speak
like breathing under water
it terrifies me

dreams filled with ancient colors
unknown words I understand
places I've not travelled to
perhaps I've gone mad

I know I've been there
but don't know how to return
risk scratching at scabs
what have you and I destroyed
how do I begin to trust

It seems cruel to smile
At you as you hang your head,
Your heart hollowed out

Straining to the top,
it twists and spins
in a chain link fence.
Not a lily,
a rose,
or majestic flower
but a thin, resilient, ever persistent
orchestra schematic.
Not a palindrome,
a prime number
in no particular order.
No questions asked in real life.
A flower of survival.
My birth is a reluctant mirror.
It sees what I should be
but I know where I'm at.
Time, a bootleg animal,
Is laughing its ass off
with a big, evil grin.