Pronouns

Perhaps the acceptability of a pronoun presented in isolation will mirror how much difficulty we may have upon encountering her in a more realistic setting.

Or maybe pronouns, while avoiding the pitfalls of proper names, are no more than freaks of nature; sneaky critters oftentimes avoiding agreement while replacing, and before you know it the whole sentence is over and there we are heading straight for the placeholder of some vague idea rather than risk the host of associations potentially involved with what might sound fine to us but isn’t.

Astonishment

Perhaps astonishment is a fly arising from an act of my mind with little direct correspondence to what I really feel.

Maybe astonishment is the strange feeling of being referred to as a pronoun while in the presence of someone else.


Or perhaps astonishment is the green plastic stick that slips into the sipping hole of the lid to keep the hot coffee in while being transported on a bumpy road

Or maybe astonishment is my son’s pronouncement: “Why would I want to see a problem I can’t do anything about?”

My Disquiet

Perhaps my disquiet is a drumming rain which speaks to me of a trick of the nature of truth that in order to survive we must rise from the table where that child’s game of the troubled self is being played and turn our attention away from the shadow that slides across the white wall of the beautiful light we see by for no reason other than to ensure its own survival.

Or maybe my disquiet is to be found in images of fingernails bitten raw, a late night stomach’s unfurling struggle, the terrifying tic of the wind-up alarm clock voicing the darkened room into a narrow plank poised over the final moments of a blindfolded descent into a watery contempt for my own inspiration’s incommensurable value.

Happy Problems

Perhaps I write to discover the shock of clear words that best express the daily wonders, sentence by sentence, in mosaic glimpses of improvisation – playing life as it has never been played before.

Maybe each poem is a vehicle for better understanding what happens, a rearrangement of known elements of events unfolding around me, spawning a voice I don’t yet know, becoming a messenger onto myself.

Written vs. Spoken

Perhaps the written word is a stone that tells us that it has nothing at all to tell us

Whereas maybe the ever-shifting currents of the spoken word are most readily found in the disorderly commotion of a moth

Faith and Doubt

Perhaps faith brings the world to me
Maybe doubt brings me to the world

Miracles (after Whitman)

Perhaps a miracle is the story of a single seashell, outer skeleton composed of crystals squeezed from blood knit in tight rows to form a single dark line of amazing strength that spirals back to the very moment it was born.

Or maybe a miracle is the mourning dove bathing under the lawn sprinkler’s spray this hot summer’s day as the hot air balloon of my daydreaming carries me across a constellation of shining flight that washes me in to shore and out to sea countless times in a single flicker of thought.

No Pain, No Gain

Perhaps pain is a roaring ocean against the will, a whirlpool of historical burden stretching across the globe under cover of the know-it-all sky

Maybe gain is the music in its roar, and when reflected in our eyes extends its reach under the disapproving gaze of a loneliness that will never be satisfied

Here and Now

Perhaps here is the closest we ever get to sharing the distance created, no fault of our own, when morning becomes afternoon
in a whispering triumph over human isolation.

Maybe now isn’t such the unexpected burden we expected
it to be, swimming upstream amidst a myriad of miscellaneous experiential odds and ends, knee-deep in the unsaid.

Body and Soul

Perhaps the body holds its own swarm of bees
that feed daily on the sweet gaps between
words and what they mean.

Maybe the soul isn’t something we’ve stopped
depending on – a nothingness on the horizon
sinking below the surface of a conversation
that began thousands of years ago
in the rumbling of a foaming stream.

Magic and Loss

Perhaps magic
lets you survive your
own war

Maybe loss
is a maze of
what you don't want
to be happening
in your head