A love poem to Blue

Yesterday I
Fell in love with the sky
I didn't intend to
But it was so blue

The sky drew me in with her musical call
The problem with flying is fear of the fall
But with you it's a joy to fell gravity pull
I gladly relinquish my hold on control

I'm in love with the way your hair's always a mess
And how you always manage to spill on your dress
I always want more, always more, never less
How euphoric to dive into the sky helpless

Today I
Fell into the sky
I don't know how to land
And I don't think I can

When you work on a flower farm . . .

Fuck your roses, give me snapdragons
Sunshine petals glow from graceful bends
Remember the rain, remember every
Time you said "I love you" and it was true.

I have always loved the summertime
Though I will never underestimate
The stark beauty of winter, the painful
Reminder of the rose's thorns, I see
No reason why my joy should come tempered
By winter's stings. I want only sunshine
Only honey sweetness and velvet
Softness. I want only bright yellows
Without any browns to muddy this
Glorious water color that we call truth.

Fuck roses, I'll give you snapdragons.
And when I say "I love you", know it's true.

--for Kim

sense of place

In my childhood neighborhood there was leg of sidewalk under which tree roots grew, tearing the sidewalk apart through years of hard work.

In that tree was a limb that if you squinted, looked like the approximation of a woman. We named her Persephone and in the spring her strange long brach of a nose burst into glorious blossom.

We said to each other that Persephone had trapped herself in a tree after Hades, lord of the dead refused to marry her.

They fell deeply in love back when the Haudanausaunee people walked the land. They promised to marry each other in a year from the day they fell in love, after Persephone dug a channel for the Hudson river through the Hudson Highlands and Hades went to Lake Tear of the Cloud and pulled the water from the most intimate part of the earth.

After a year apart, Persephone returned to where they had fallen in love to be married but Hades did not. He had fallen into the deepest part of the lake and met the most intimate face of the earth. He had completely forgotten Persephone in his infatuation with this tender and fertile place.

Persephone, in her grief reached down to the earth and up to the sky in a plea for relief. And the earth and heavens herd her and in a show of mercy turned her into an oak tree. There she stands at the corner of my neighborhood to protect other lovers and skin the knees of children who ride their bikes too recklessly. 

Independence day

Snapdragon, fire cracker, lights in the sky
Fractured patterns flicker, shimmer, thunder and cry
Fire ruins, embers smolder,  smoke in your eye
Think of water, think of winter, try not to die.

Childhood past

Asphalt: there's no way around the word:
It's flat, black and hot
No ulterior motives, no hidden meaning

Synonyms for asphalt (as per dictionary.com) run as follows:
pavement, road, concrete
sidewalk, path, blacktop

Asphalt is black and hot
It drives the temperature of manhattan two dreadful degrees hotter in the summer
Asphalt is human made
Crushed, heated, and spread across the earth by huge gas-burning machines
Asphalt is ubiquitous
Think about the last road trip, the last time you went to the grocery store, the last time you walked to   the corner store

Do you remember the road you grew up on?
Did you walk barefoot in the summer? Remember the feeling of the heat on the tender skin on the bottom of your feet.
You played games on the asphalt: hopscotch and four square
And when you couldn't find chalk you used sticks and shoes to mark boundaries.

The asphalt would shimmer in the summer heat
You later learned mirage to mean an illusion looking like a sheet of water
But you were never fooled by the asphalt
There was no way to dress it up as anything other than the black road it was.

Lunes about home

Tell me of your home
What smells live
There? Who welcomes you back?

I love the wild children
Who run underfoot
Knowing they are welcome here.

Come in and be fed.
Bring what you
Have, take what you need.