How much gardening, how much coffee,
How much traffic for each of us,
Ten thousand strong, how far the old dread had to crawl to reach the green earth.
How the sails spread,
How the lips curve
Just up to smile or down
With the frown or a bit of teeth
Just to show and eat and preserve
This our moment alive with the food we need.

It all comes to some level
In the sand washed in the rock cycle,
The ambush of our feelings with moments,
With the snickering tower of each other
Numbering up and counting backwards by threes.
A gift for self-promotion.
Study hard
Same as ever and ever and ever.

Everybody there with a body and care of emotion.
Tangle up the dawn with our shoes and shirts and lawn,
Coming over,
Convincing argument, telomere
Our neurons shedding light,
Going up at night
As the drakes and drones migrate,
They play over the Campos and irrigation channels
That shine in the gurgles of moon light.

We are all tired of asking if it is any good or bad
Or what it might mean for us,
Dark and silent as a cloud.
We are all tired of staying in and
Wearing our masks with our loved ones
Who hold candles of questions,
Gifts from the dead on the far shore,
Early arrivers with their questions and lines
About how much and how far we can go if we wait.

A long long time we wait
As the school kids with hands in our laps, guns cocked,
Loaded drunk on a Saturday night,
The tomb stones wobbling like stop lights
The bright night inside each of us,
A loaner, a bridge, one hand held like a suspension cable
To another and everyone sings, “Hands Across America”.

Bat crazy sonar droning on about the radio and the war and deals available.
Communist rat bastards.
A tell tale of the times running through our minds.
How shape the story for the stage?

How bleed us to sleep hungry for the cure of dreams
To constitute Aladdin and his pure slippers of blue.
Make it so,
Kind blessing, ending every meal with a prayer, just so.
Every dance a serenade,
Every day to start with dawn and end with dusk,
Sleep eyed spent and full,
Each broad hipped girl and sharp wits on the boy,
The flowers, the fields, the sun each day on the artists shining down.
On the poverty drying up
Or in thirst finding the river
A clean, swollen flood
The crops after a rain, respiring
As the lightning would have it with the cloud.
Each quiet to her time
Or loud as bees in the honey,
Queens to her many ova true.

Shaggy pup in the grass of Spring.
Warm fire in Winter’s wood
Secure as a heavy down on a low flat bed,
Pedestrian, democratic, open for all alike,
Different, ambitious of dreams
Worm of the apple
Bird of the worm
Buds woven of light and dirt
And the elbow that lifted the shovel
Lifts ideas as sure and full
As all of earth’s dirt
And her splendid retinue of the dead.

Quiet as the end of a song.
Loud as the church pipes steaming,
Crowded as a fair
And the pews, carved straight,
Fitted as by the ultimate joiner
The handsome arm of sacrifice yet to come.

Of days yet left open,
Rides, carols, rounds, tinsel, tendril
Good things as fruits hanging from tree boughs
As laughter
As grandeur
As left over and plenty.

Potted plant, hay
Barn weighted
Thighs, knees, joints limber and able to carry
As the rick load with her pitch fork
And a barrel full of apples
And a season full of work
In bright, tan sun on the land
Resting its top soil,
Its blow and chuff
Like steam engines making money.
Nobody cares, and really in self construction
We barely care for ourselves
In some absent minded reaction
Against the cruelty of all Universes conspired to ignore.
Pity has no place.
Largess is corrupt at the core
Of consumption. Ambition is a child’s pipe dream and
How high can we go on cynicism?
How much, how far, how high.

Dead, dead and gone.
Say it might be so.
I might be so.
Get up and go.

The holy sanctity all askew
In line, shape and color,
All asking Spring for their things back.
All talking about all everywhere
For all time and on and on about it.

Ten to one of it leaned against a shed
Like pieces, pisces, fish out of the water.
Breathe in and outside the clouds go rusty
The yellow says bird but this time of day the sky goes to shaded gray
Moon sickle purple at the edge of a dejected field.

A mouse house takes nothing away
Never seems quite to give it back complete
Or whole.
Unbent and alive like a prism become a prison.

Put together vase and flower,
Container and all contained,
Cooperative in a partnership of space or
Imposed outside of us
As the force of empty space- never truly empty they say,
But a field thinner than smoke in a vacume,
Not a hint of its potential, only its presence,
Worse than empty space tending to its dimensions.

Dog in the yard,
Birds on the sky,
Me sleeping.

Peel us back.
I open me up
As the mind loose in skull
Not in therapy but in tracing a lineage of understanding,
A neuro dance with time tattling,
Songs in a grove of foot prints on the ground.
Photo realism in rorschach blots and smears of oil in water for color.
For uplift, the hot air drawn,
Warmed by touch for a balloon
Slowly
We gather pieces together,
Our Old English and the Dutch and Irish money
Thin as a hole for the toe in old socks,
Damp from rain.
Say it there as good, yet
Good enough and more.