#11 mirror ease

I soothe many souls but never my own

how I wish I could feel that ease

oh someone's going to take care of me

soothe and bathe my body with delights

stimulate and challenge my mind,

always with a resolution that feels

somehow peaceful, even in

the middle of absolute contradiction

someone's going to ease up to me through the nights

and hold me just how I love,

whose every touch will be perfectly soft

and fierce, both together, at the right moment

I will be at ease because this person gets me

and when the telepathy's off,

she will rise gracefully to a recovery

of our merging

and I will meet her

and so we can just be

and so may I meet me beyond the mirror

my self that I project on my vision of a perfect lover

is already here

#10

dammit i'm tired

thank goddess haikus exist

or what would i do?

#9

Could you really know how much I love you

in the ways that poets and philosophers comb 

out this deep high divine love,

articulating the nuance, essence, idiosyncrasy

of this merging, growing, beautiful heart

that binds us so freely

In your moments of doubt, when the world is dark

do you really wonder if the love that surrounds you 

is within you, for you, kissing 

your footsteps, whispering for you to grow,

do you really wonder if it exists,

is it possible, or is the reassurance that thing, 

maybe that one thing, that brings you back

to yourself, so to hear it spoken

is to remember

one soul comically separated into two bodies

magnetized to lean into one another

soften into wrapped arms

breath into breath

and even the hardened skeptical

perhaps even literary souls

wincing at another tiresome love poem

will be moved to hear 

softly, ethereally, gutturally

whispered, through cries of

sorrowful joy of reconnection of what was once

spiritually but also physically one,

"I love you mommy."

#8

RAGE against the machine that gave a man reason to hate parts of himself

and those parts again when he sees them outside him

Rage against the machine that says find a babysitter when your child is sick

Rage against working all day and all lifelong

to try to buy your health back when you lose it

you may still be young

Rage against the machine that finds derivative justification

for seemingly endless cycles of violence

against humans, animals, all beings and our mama earth

Gives us reason to scream 

Fuck that I won't do what you told me!

And then we see that we're screaming 

at another human being who

has chosen to be the machine

Rage against the machine in myself 

the part I chewed up and took in,

festering inside like a man I never wanted there

A violent cancer

The pill we swallowed in the desperate hope it would make us better

When all along, the love inside is there

And shines, sometimes more brightly, through the rage

the poem a day pressure is getting to me

"Behind again,"

that bitch with the stopwatch says.

I wonder how she'd feel if I picked her up

and punched her down into a tiny little ball

and stuffed her into something really small

besides my head.

PAD #6 a lil late

Whiskey stole my poem last night

The hummingbird's thirst endless 

Forget nodding heads like you was too cool

My fella Jersey-spirited girls 

nodded booties and shook walls

over the waft of North Carolina barbeque 

Conversations ranging from 

the philosophical foundations of the American military

to parenting with the airplane oxygen mask theory

to declaratives negating some man's chance with some woman

to what small town gossip has been ripping up
our ideas of what we do

and some revealing tidbits about
what makes us quiet

and what makes us wiggle

This poem was not brought to you courtesy of Maker's Mark

#5 Aunt Teddy and Villa

Aunt Teddy was here before the twenties roared,

before voices leapt off the screen

Just after New Mexico and Arizona became states of the union

she passed through one of them

an ingenue not yet twenty

to make a film forever gone

that helped fund Villa's revolución

The history books will never find aunt Teddy

to be Villa's hermana verdadera,

will never really tell the story of northern Chihuahua 

in the mid-teens of the last century, a hundred years ago

Imagination declares that Villa was fierce and abrupt

Teddy bold and observant

and they worked together

oh yes 

trabajaron juntos