A little deeper rub to season the meat of ourselves,
A rising totem of insolence or is it reverence that makes the heart strong and the enemies fear.
Such compromises along the way, a little of this and some of that until we are nothing,
Again as we began.

Begat, beheld, nothing but a soap bubble catching sun or trying to rise in a gust of wind
And the rain fall pops her beauty.
The moisture slackens our resolve and toward the wet earth of mother
We turn contemplative and do nothing.

Everything is not done
And be it why we hear and see and feel and miss the days,
Run up like smoke at the sky,
Miss each other,
Lined up like a wall.

Who wants to live that way?
To live one hand behind our back,
What are we saving it for?
Is it superstition, like crossing one’s fingers hoping
That going away will bring us back together.

Soft tug, turning its engine in the water
Bumping up against the bigger hulls,
The sedentary moments to consider her face and hands
And the number to hope for is two or more.

Rocks and scissors lose.
Paper spreads like a flitter of trashy butterflies
Taking their messages skyward
Ahead of the ash that is also light and grey and rising
To blot or land as the snow knows,
To cover what it can, so delicate, be it hot or cold or
Asking absent questions of the lovers who passed and
Decided that return is not worth the effort upward, out,
Dissipating what we knew
As chaos makes faces of us all,

Terra cotta urns and carved beaks one on top of the other
With turtles all the way down to Atlas and his groundless shoulder,
His piquant stance quaint as a bed and breakfast statuette.
Pray here be told, left money, send some,
Be sold as the river gives what came from upstream
To those down who may be more deserving, in fact.

Hard nose, grapple, gun,
Laborer of possums born and Sundays mourned for blush not,
Feel sweet saying,
Monday and cream and blessings hot as ingots,
Crushed as man in the hell of the starlets mold.
What I want to be is held, not made.
Want to crush by the internal weight,
The gravity and density,
Cupiditas collapsing in as the ton or coal or ship,
Or ship to port anticipating the dissolution of all things,
The disgorging of cargo, climax, ecstasy-
Please come again.

By Rolf Stavig
7/02/2023