RECLAIMING

Today, I reclaim myself.

With my front removed, you see your own surrender.

With my eyes as tunnels, you lose your own way.

With my tongue and cheeks reassigned, you hear your own irony asking if you can breathe through your helmet, if you like what you feed yourself, and if your stores of ammunition help you sleep.

PUNCTURING

Today, your ratio-hum founders in some must-be plasma, and the plaque of your heart stuffs someone else's shirt.

Whose plaster hides the beauty of you? Whose fostering of counts and costs and futures of cake mete out slabs in time to a mechanical arm?

From under your mantle - your skin of cream - you wretch a force-fed ballast - a spouting of rock to sink all melodies.

DRAMATIZING

Today, you levitate as emotional balcony in the dark-dark of man-made surround.

You swell in absorbed pause.

Your crowded sense of things kicks only a little, with no room in a space full of asking.

BREATHING

Today, you notice an old string.

It's wound 'round your throat, and tied to something in the distance.

You grimace, trying to see a full form at the other end.

The leash constricts your throat; your ears swell; you slobber.

You would like to breathe freely. You wouldn't mind eating.

You cut the string.

MUTATING

Today, you mutate.

Once, you plucked volumes; once, you harvested notes; once, you hedged. Now, you engage; you bare your arms, and volunteer probings and wrenchings.

You aim for a furrow's base. With a multi-mechanical in your arms - at your chest - you leap.

You fall.

You implant.

You unself yourself. Your roots connect off-center. You heat colors.

CAUSING

Today, you welcome Memory. Instead of the usual argument - you sit together as friends.

Side by side, with a light meeting of frames, the two of you turn the leaves in your single, landscape lap. One of you calls the recent past; the other opens to the distant.

In a meeting - now heavily populated - all are allowed to speak.

In the end, you all agree: causes and effects have shaped the present; therefore, the future will be a more lively affair.

SOUNDING

Today, your organ-electric rustles for a hearing. Your single arch hollows half.

Conveyances slip up the sides of your amplitudes, and peak for release. Treble's sounding calls for bass's drum.

To a Listening, you promise a rhythmic kiss - a whispering - a humming in the dark.

DYING

Today, you notice your ingrown irony
- living tissue epitomized by matter of death.

...It goldens, then silvers your head;
it pearls your fingers;
it points your toes.

Death crowns all ends of you.

STORYTELLING

Today, you throw stories
- slice landscapes,
puncture silhouettes,
wire the whole giant in script.

A dawn jog fires your wheel
- splattering black-red paint,
incinerating the grey you forsake and grind into a path you abandon, repeatedly, in a rhythm,
thumping.
   
Today, you stamp a heat, caressed in your palms;
tomorrow, you let a cold, baked husk fall and crack on contact.

HUMANIZING

Today, across a fault, our two sides link.

We recognize one as our song and, in applause, send palms for the artist to cross.

Out of silent anonymity, you emerge - an eight-fingered baritone - resonating with the nudity of your steel string.

Heard by some, first-hand, and, by others, through the crevicing crowd, you continue your work.

 ...Now caught in the canyon light,
and mirrored by our river below,
you continue
to carve windows in the sky,
to manifest shadow,
to prey on oblivion,
to seal accident in silk,
and to fuel these orchestrations with the meat of life.

FEELING

Today, you come closer to shore -
warm surf still embracing your feet.

Silent emotion rises from behind,
grasps you,
folds you into its churning and pounding.

Now, as polished spiral,
submerged in liquid crystal,
you believe you bear wisdom.

But light's glint finds your eyes;
its directness dries you -
unfolded, standing,
facing emotion
as it rolls in
and breaks at your feet.

RUPTURING

Today, yesterday, and tomorrow, you break your heart to learn.

Naked and cool,
you rush through its beating, serrated rupture.

Bleeding rouses you;
fresh scars tattoo your new mind.

You emerge at an edge -
one made especially for jumping -
inspiration at its height -
lessons written in your shatter-pattern in the riches of its depths.

FLYING

Today, you let go of something. Feather-painting? Mating-dance? Premeditated alchemy?

Do you thank Anonymity - its silent, sound reflection of your archaism?

Or do you thank yourself - that primal force inside that speaks in unflappable attempts, then shuts its mouth when it's time to jump, and flies in time to change?

CHOOSING

Today, you grow up; you fill out; your eyes inflate.

The uncertainties that frazzled you, now sparkle in space.

...Confidence means everything when a mind is human. 

...Awareness can’t illuminate an earthbound heart.

Today, you mature to a tall, pointed beginning - jointed by long-bearing No's - fired by a spontaneous Yes.

SEEING

Today, you see you're blind.

From inside mountains, you press for escape.

Elbows, knees, and thrusting shoulders readily puncture rocky debris, plentiful after storms.

But inside your mind, your eyes - soft, coddled babes, soaked in haze - struggle to see the walls masquerading as your core - early-erected behind your eyelids.

Your thoughtless hands - having breached the mold long ago - grasp another's - someone not unselected - someone with eyes outside his mind.

UN-THINKING

Today - through your thoughts - you see a tree - its ground rooted, its width trunked, its windows framed in every direction, its green tongues blown, but silent - lapping at the light.

DESIRING

Today, you desire stripes circling - angling to the left, tightening to a blind center.

An outer hem lines the wider stain of your angst; the pivot-pointed eye holds the other's gaze, as if you both fossilized together long ago.

Perhaps a volcano's violence suffocated you in ash before its lava made a cast of you. Perhaps the ash fell as down from a pillow - slit to ease the blow of your end together at the very beginning.

You desire a pretended necessity - a unity you darn from an absence - when land masses and knotted threads, alone, define you. 

SEABEARING

Today, you identify your origin....

...as seaborn.

...as wind-flyer and current-fighter.

...You can't pull your arms in. You can't act your size.

-Because, at birth, you were watered with blue awe.

-Because, from birth, you ocean-dove.

-Because you smell death in the bays.

-Because swimming repays your debt to life.

-Because you know how to play in the waves.

VIRTUING

Today, you carriage.

Riding goggles, gloves, a cigar to stopper your "ah". Suited for avoidance, you venture into time - a constant threat to your sense of virtue.

With a worn trunk strapped to your back, you begin a day's collection of peace - one salve for each completed task; emptiness accelerating as accomplishment slows.

Some pedantic driver sees all except what you choose to contain behind a curtain - willful secrets - remonstrances against a chassis you know to be manufactured but designed to hold everything together.

Measurement begins at the end, after you've sacrificed your limbs for your engine, and rewarded yourself with an imagined forward roll.

WINDOWING

Today, your training delivers you.

Today, you give yourself what you know.

Today, you fill out with arrivals from your locomoting.

Today, you window.

THRIVING

Today, you fly. You hear peace. You lift the ground to eye-level.

Today is the day after birth - birth of a long-developing offspring that found itself in front of you just as you were leaving.

Bearing is what you do - cycloning, precipitating, and then delivering the accidents of your findings.

Today, you see yourself in the landscape; you know you'll always be the storm.

CONTAMINATING

Today, you contaminate light.

Entering transparency, you scrape yourself on a twig, and become infested by a black-red blood that purges knotting, leafless vines.

Now, on your back - suffocating in a pile - you look up at the blue drops burning your eyes.

KNOWING

Today, you wake up. Sleep has muffled all but a shout that snaps open your eyes when it sparks the junction bridging thought and emotion - animating recognition - now swollen in an engorged knowing - now certain when yanked to the light.

HUMANIZING

Today, you wonder what I want from you.  --Nothing but your nakedness.

I want to see how your face consumes the sun. I want to see the particular thrust of your arms when they stretch toward the horizon.

I want to see the symbols you fire at the effect-end of electric charges, the spikes scratched by your conceiving machine, the stories you believe, and the action you etch because of them.

DOUBTING

Today, you grasp your felty pen - some baby magic settled between your ears like the plastic lightning bolt you once wore on your head as a joke.

And, you have papers - stacked, glued together at the edges, coffined by two boards, though still open on two ends - bound yet breathing, with leaky black thoughts nestled in the whiteness of whole color.

And, you want fixity. You say you don't, but you do - seeking a single pursuit you hope will hold you in a reverberating pool in cupped hands. Inside, you'd swim 100 laps, work at the crevices, and peer over tips dipped in flesh until night came just when you needed a float.

But, instead, you climb the mountains of your mind - holding tight to your dangling doubt - the only thing you trust.

And, you know what happens when the trusted is defined by its own treachery....  Winning loses, and, yes, you trust that, too.

SHYING

Today, self-awareness pulls you out of blood, onto banks of reflective flesh.

    

Observed love stakes claim to cliche, and dredges a heart-shaped path - hoping you won't notice, but you do, and distractedly fill its ditches with purple stock.

How does authenticity speak in a crowd? Must transmutation occur in solitude? Why not shape clouds in the city from the water you carry in your mouth?

Because you don't yet know how.

You only know how to return to the wood, away from the field where we count your seeds and align your production.

Hidden by folios, you apprentice the sun - growing mostly inedible fungi and weeds, but a few unique flowers - some that smell of blood, some that reflect the sky.

MANIFESTING

Today, you resume your world of thunder - mind-soundings set to wordlessness.

In gas trails and mounds of rock, you embed yourself - extending wide your arms - pulling the pattern toward you - urging the story to your ear where it enters your form. Its origin, you embody, mirroring its progeny with the designs of your hands.

Inlaid, the cog of you sees. An aware gromit, you spoon with your destiny.

Turning - the wheels of your mind iterate bodily shifts in the spell of a machine you inhabit and revere.

WORKING

Today, you work.  You forge a clearing.

You've planted your prospect - a nudity that persuades - leading explorers from outside in, from border to center, from straight directly into twist.

This creation has cost you in exquisite ways. What remains of you settles in a somewhat out-of-body exhaustion, like the post-orgasmic waste that follows a rendering from inside and outside your mechanism.

Your design, so well planted, you thought, was bequeathed to you by a perennial world.

UNDIVIDING

Today, needles hold you - your Buddhahood tested by the smallest flies - your legs tired from living - your voice tired from throwing - your treetops crowded again.

Today, an exotic beetle scales the mundane. You follow it to its open hiding place.

Today, a vista of orange mud floods paradise, and you consume the view - nourishing your dry wings, and reclaiming the root system you had forsaken for ground.

THRESHOLDING

Today, you lie between. --Half-drawn lids, half-hungry bin, half-seeing somnambulance.

Today, a bright heat melts the angles of you - brings you to your suddenly self.

Today, pounding sounds wake you in rhythms of troughs.

Today, I graze your outgrowths, and I seek a resting place for my wide-awake hands.

Today, life passes as you notice at its tail. You're too comfortable to hunt, and too wise to say, "goodbye."

EMBODYING

Today, you hear me. I speak to you from the earth; you listen from the sky. We come together in a simple kiss - a dry consummation of many rains - running, running, river-making, creek-bed-upraking, mother-slaking.

And where is your mother? --Standing as the hills? Holding forth as she straddles two mountains, licking her lips from the pain? Is your mother embedded in the stomach of a heart with a mind for feasting?

--Something like that, yes.

And, you are your mother's mountains - mimicking mounds with your fingertips, emptying skies with a single inhalation, surrounding lakes with the arms you've borrowed, the arms you've made, and the arms you propagate in waves.

IMAGINING

Today, it accompanies you, again - all of what you imagine it to be, and some of what it is.

It's here, now - sitting next to you - sometimes against your work, sometimes against your eyes.

You wish to speak with it, but you must wait. It isn't ready; the planet isn't prepared.

Collapse occurs on both sides if either of you bend in the wind. All is leading breeze; all rustles as what might be.

All is imagined.

But imagination occurs; imagination contaminates the raw - the unimagined.

It's your imagining; it's everything in your biome, because infatuation is an invasive species; once transported, it grows everywhere; it creates a landscape that pretends a best fit; it spreads as far as your mind can see.

UNDERGOING

Today, you're walled in. Assumptions surround - force you to slotted. Breathing is difficult. Emotion won't fit. You're sandwiched, packed, packaged, surrounded by distorting mirrors.

Where might your eyes rest without slapping? How can you do anything but smile without your eyes? All good intentions deserve what when they're misguided?

You grow a shell; you slow your pulse; your mind morphs with the willfulness of a babe; you wait for escape. 

MISSING

Today, I miss you. I don't know you, but I do. I remember you, but I don't.

You've returned to me; I've returned to you. But we're apart.

I miss you.

I miss your outlook. I miss your impact - the forcefields with which you upend me - the spontaneity with which you school me.

I miss your sensual mystery - the intensity that builds, as it does, behind your skin.

I miss your beauty - half made by you, half by me.

I don't miss your absence; it's here - a present severing.

You teach me what I knew at the beginning. You draw me out of abstraction into something for which I have no words - something earthed from flesh and reverberations.

YAWNING

Today - ambivalence. You fall into a yawn, and wander its cavities. You're lost, and seek nothing.

THANKING

Sometimes, you give me today. Sometimes, I bow - in a dive - to your gifts. Sometimes, your flood is younger than birth.

Because, now you lean into the bend; now you laugh in reflection; now you do as an animal rounded and flowing, like an old river inside new rain.

Sometimes, I want to thank you so much, my tongue turns to tadpole, and my mouth to well.

Pour into my skin, and I'll know something of life. Surround my spill, and you'll know something of love.

SHADOWING

Today, you kiss me, again. It's been a while. You're tentative. Slow to touch. A wisp, and your brush is gone.

(I had let you go; I had dried on all sides; I had accepted a partially-developed state. You could have stayed away; I would have forgotten your touch - the root that grew me back to life.)

(Would you have returned to my form - drawn, again, by my strokes of contrast?)

...But you're here, again.  You're engaging with the grey - the way it knows how to land a kiss that causes our lights to blossom, and our shadows to fade.

BEING

Today, you lie vapid.  -Flopping in the marshy sheets, slopping albumen and lard.  You slink and yawn and laugh at the funny folds.

Today, you are bed-ridden, sock-tied, humps of lumpy toes and crumbs.  You hear all the sounds forbidden and mundane; you know all the secrets of sleep.

Today, you cry, "Master, I!"  Today, you fall from the sky, and land on your belly, perfect as a whale, solid-sounding as a certainty in the flesh.

Today, you rise at the fill of a bladder, and fall at the finish.

Today, you are grand animal, king of the library sea.

AILING

Today, illness embodies you.

It lies alone.

Its breathing tires.

It listens to distant shutting doors, and speaks in wheezes.

It seeks sleep.

LOVING

Today you fall in love with love.

Still wet from jumping in, you walk in a spiral.

Wind stirs you clockwise; you laugh, then step out of the spin.

Your wet footprints leave a purple vortex; your dry eyes absorb the life you've paved.