Poems Recited And Enhanced With Original Music

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Small Pieces

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There once was a man

Who left small pieces of himself

Everywhere he went.

In shadows, echoes, traces of laughter

In promises broken and promises kept

He left bits and pieces

Of who he was and who he meant to be.

Though they never told him

And though he never knew

His friends picked up those pieces

And without a word

Placed them for safekeeping

In cedar chests and quiet chambers

Within the certain shelter of their hearts.

When the day came

That there were no more pieces to drop

And the man looked down

Only to find he had disappeared

One by one they came to him

Returning the pieces they had saved

And made him whole again.

What they didn’t know

Was that with those fragments

Came small pieces of their own

Distant echoes and traces of laughter

Held in cedar chests and quiet chambers

Filling the gaps that still remained

From the gold hoards of their hearts.

Afterimage

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I wake to hot coffee poured on my grave

At a sidewalk café, light golden, falling.

Life tossed and weary you’ve conjured me here

To find what I’ve learned from the arc of my life.

Before risking an answer I ask in my quiet,

“What’s the worst that can happen at this street side café?

Soft gazes and coffee, one luminous evening

Reflecting on the seasons I wasted

Each singing with meanings I could never unravel

Days better spent sailing straight into my madness

Than attending to storms and distractions

So long did I take on my own crabbled way.”

But here, now, you offer me time in the dappling dun light

In exchange for what little I know

Then it’s back to my somber dark habits alone.

After a moment’s reflection, blinking dust and days from my eyes

So little to lose, so willing to share,

I stammer this answer;

“For even a moment above the slant ground

I’d bronze, if I could, an unerring compass

Provide soundings and charts you’d take on your travels.

Though given a choice I’d stall and stay longer

Catch the Sun rising, buff the waxing Moon.”

So we sip coffee outside this café, light fading, falling

Share stories and laughter, compare scars.

‘Til you rise, angle sideways, lean into the long fetch of sidewalk

That strides to the corner

Your image a nimbus backlit by the Sun.

Then, our bargain concluded, Earth rises around me

And my blistered tongue wanders in search of your name

Pushing poems and teeth this way and that.

And I’m left here to wonder,

Why am I trembling as you slip by the table?

Is it the final rush of black coffee?

The pitch dropping prayers of distancing sirens unsettling?

My eyes losing sense in the dying sunlight?

Or is it you, your smile leaking sadness

The autumn splash of your eyes

Your afterimage elbowing tables, chairs, street lights,

Everything else out of my sight

That leaves me here reeling as you find your way home?

Vows For Another Day

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To walk the metes and bounds of things

Resetting every toppled stone

On this side us

On that side them.

To bite with your teeth

Cry with your eyes

Wake each morning to the kisses of your mouth.

To ripple and bend with you

Like blades of grass in the rain.

To keep each lacerating sidelong glance

Secure in its eyelid sheath.

To map desire in your direction

Trace hills, flatlands, the hollows of your cheeks,

Cup your hips in my hands.

To refrain from solving puzzles uninvited.

Acknowledge your mastery of spices.

Swim with you across sunless pools.

To keep the sacraments of our faith

The rituals of vacuums and folded linen

Affirming the binding grace of shared daily tasks.

To coin a language of hints,

Allusion, arcane references,

A private code for a too public world.

To neither profane nor preach

The Gospel of Us in the marketplace

But leave our good news unshared

A tongue we take to our graves.

Backhoe

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Have you ever noticed a working backhoe

Is a nightmare?

That nothing in nature moves like that

All squares, insistencies, and jerking angles?

That it draws everything to itself?

That men tend it with shovels

Ride it like parasites

Astride only when aroused

To move what’s already in place

Somewhere else?

Comes Paint On A Pony

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Comes paint on a pony.

Comes bowfin refracting light in the morning.

Comes ore to iron

And iron to rust.

Comes together, apart, with instructions,

Assembled, clean, to my attention.

Comes the raven that worries not carrion

Who has no worries

Who comes to pieces

Who cannot contain herself

Under raven’s ardent shearing caress.

Comes something aflame

From the lacquer red Sun

Turning clouds nacreous, bottle flies green,

Stone irritations to iridescent pearl sheen.

The Book She Writes As She Walks

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I’ll never turn a page of the book she writes as she walks.

I’m writing my own as she passes in which I’m the protagonist,

Though she plays a prominent role in this chapter

With her long brown legs and unbound book.

I wonder if I appear in hers,

A non-descript man on a bench with his dog

Watching a woman whose book he’ll never read

Whose long brown legs and searching heart he’ll never touch

Except in blank verse penned in his head

Certain even one word would burn him to the ground

If only she’d ask him to read the book she writes as she walks.

Who Cut the Flower Cut My Heart

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Who cut the flower cut my heart

And placed it in the waiting room

Among her many gathered things

While she still lived, was young,

And we were dancing to her desperate whims

And thought she all alone could sing

The one world to its sleep.

Who wouldn’t swim

Wished to drown

And told us in her thousand ways

That we were meant for greater things

But not so great as she.