.
Ribbons, balloons are red and rife.
Shock locks and beak ball tell of strife.
Those shoes could cruise a lake!
With covert threat upon my life,
He cuts at me his carving knife,
and says “You want some cake?”
.
~dedicated to evil clowns everywhere
If I thought about him much,
I'd have wondered if he was alive.
I thought for sure he would end up
at the bottom of some bridge,
having jumped off, or maybe asleep in a box.
He was a friend among other friends,
but the part that I saw
of myself in him, was drowning.
He was wilder, and more dangerous,
and that is saying a lot.
When he left he wasn't turning
from the razor's edge, he was cutting
his way across, one bloody step at a time
like it was the last bridge on earth
across the dark river.
It is strange the currents we choose
and the places we are taken,
thinking we are swept away
in rough tidewater,
unable to swim
or navigate the deluge.
Maybe sometimes we know,
deeply from the mud and the silt,
that the floodplain can scrub
the surface that refuses
to be anything but intolerable.
We were just hoping to come up
someplace for air.
Last night he came up
in a conversation
across The Long Bien Bridge.
He has a new life on dry land,
anchored in the floodplains of Hanoi.
I saw his photographs and I knew.
~ for an old friend who built a fantastic life on the floodplain.
“Aye lad, the evidence was on it real good”
He said with a crooked, half-toothed smile;
he said it like a fishless, fisherman would,
like a cop on a crime just brought to trial.
.
He said it with a crooked, half-toothed smile
in his way, a sweaty, short, salty sailor sort.
But like a cop on a crime, just brought to trial:
“Goin’ back out thar, soon as we’re in port”
.
He was sweaty and short, a salty sailor sort,
balancing a knife, by the point, in his hand,
“Goin’ back out thar, soon as we’re in port.”
“S’more down below than sea and the sand.”
.
Balancing a knife, by the point, in his hand,
with a tear in the eye for his love lost at sea
“S’more down below than sea and the sand.”
“I ‘spec thar’s an octopus twixt she and me.”
.
With a tear in the eye for his love lost at sea,
he said it like a fishless, fisherman would
“I ‘spec thar’s an octopus twixt she and me.”
“Aye lad, the evidence was on it real good.”
Virginia will celebrate the Confederacy!
and the brave men who died so fearlessly,
ignoring the slavery and pain
brought about by the whip and the chain,
and the tinder-box spark, Harpers Ferry.
After all we seceded so graciously,
it could have all ended so peacefully.
Let's just ignore the blame and the claim,
if only to celebrate the Confederacy.
Our Generals in war stood out peerlessly,
as men in shoddy gear died so cheerlessly
defending the slave owner’s gain.
- But don’t call the Governor insane.
It’s a political calculation, you see,
the audacity to celebrate the Confederacy.
(for Governor Bob McDonnell)
Out in our garden,
your hands and the smell of earth.
A red bird observes.
~for Becky, whose mother visits us in spring as a cardinal.
Jesus:
What have you done?
You travel a hard road.
I am blessed by your hair and tears,
Woman
