Toilet Paper And...

Toilet Paper and Palm Trees

I sit on the palm of my hand. My mother said that
Days and nights are like forgetting-that we are afraid of
Being who we have become. I haven’t becoming anything
Other than a lighthouse on the ocean,
And the waves bend with the veils of time-
Time is translucent, and coverts over itself and everyone
Seems to think they are forgetting, forgotten.

Sometimes, my young collie dog looks at me as if to say,
“I wish you could speak to me, I wish you could say hello
In doggy talk.” The writer down the street says he can
Speak in Doggytalk, that is the language of men-
The rhythm is the bowing of the trees, and the young man,
My lover, plays drums on Saturday nights in the depths of
The night, the depths of everything…

I am more afraid of losing my poetry. The words in which
I speak to the sky, the ground, the trees, the wind.
The wind moans my name-
I call to it and it will not answer me.
I sing to it and it will not speak.
I am wasting paper. I am wasting the flowers of the paper.

Quiet Mind.

I am the quiet mind.

I am the heart that can't breathe.
I am the broken. The dark destiny.
The friend without a friend.

In the last light of the full moon,
my mind bears the burden of you.
Bears the burden of what I am.

A human. A ghost. A liar.
Excuses drift across the ocean like flowers.
I surround myself with petty pennies.
A shadow that settles on a rock.

I keep myself steady, my hand on my belly,
mother calls to me from the other room and asks

if I need something to eat. I haven't eaten
well in weeks.
The quiet mind within a well. I don't have-anything-
trees, twigs, tears.

My eyes smart. I see visions of ghosts.
My loneliness breaks me. I am bent over rocks.
My hunger is not a problem. I am not a problem.

Darkness will not break me.
Never the quiet mind within the quiet heart.
Never the quiet.