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.