Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash
Cycling
On the ride to work I try to remember; did I make my bed?
—Wonder if I love myself, wonder if I care about my children’s children
Wonder where every plastic bottle went—each one I have sucked from and sent
on its journey, perhaps to landfill, and What does that pile look like, smells like
or will it float in a wave of other debris. Will it find friends, community of like numbers
Will it find love and rebirth becoming another vessel or
object holding another liquid— maybe bubble bath, maybe a cleanser, dumbing-down
to a lower level of product, a toxic brew even further from intimacy or a body
I wonder about the glass jars, how they shatter into shards & become sea glass,
or a glimmer in cement, endlessly reflecting or be swallowed by cows on the
roadside, or melted into a molten mass to be blown with lips into bottles for other lips,
feeding those to come. And I still wonder if I have made my bed.
Utter
I want to write things that don’t sound right,
to feel the words fold into and onto my hands
then fall away like sand—get caught in the hang nails
of my fingers and hurt and pinch—
I want to break the words in half like bread
sticks and watch the syllables flip into the air
like dust and get caught in my eyes—nonsense skewing my sight
and grab words that are transparent,
like blue and hyphen and stellar,
and words that are opaque, like chunk and bag and milk,
and melt them together into a hot poem,
blow it like glass, then watch it fuse and stretch
into a moment and then another until there is nothing but sound.
Glass
Amber cools to clear blue
as honey motion stills,
toggling dimensions,
concave, convex
Molecules organize and
air expands the surface
to the measure of heat.
Textures, bumps and lumps,
stringers and seeds disrupt
and temper as dust becomes form, soft and rounded
Cheques rainbow in a chromatic way
A figure of transparent mass
—meaning breath, a heartbeat—
moves as the light exhales,
Its shoulders relax
Egypt Syria Venice Prague Wisconsin,
and the Milky Way
Save us from the seas of plastic,
but gather a new fuel
Blowers and casters, jacks and sheers
and the Italian tools
Burning beeswax and cherrywood,
as the molten glow
of heat warms the marrow
and liquid magic feeds the soul