What Is In Riddles.

You said words are hard, they wrap around things unseen-
That distance lies in riddles, and things in between.
Nothing else will work out, quite well in the end.
This is the world we’ve been trying to mend.
I don’t know about the other ones, only we play pretend-
The flowers in the garden don’t want to grow,
Nothing is a seed that will be forced to overthrow.
I don’t understand the negativity or what we comprehend,
Why books have to have middles, or antiques are what we send-
Through the shadows, and the lies, and the hurt and goodbyes,
You tried to make me see something in a mystery.
I don’t want to go where you will go, except in time it will show,
And tomorrows are sorrows wrapped in a vine wrapped in misery.
You went to the ocean, and the ocean sent you home,
Your life was like something we weren’t even shown.
We fly like a flock of birds, and speak in sad rhymes,
The lion uses its wings to hear of unheard things.

The Nature and Nothing Else.

The long drawn out marches,
bridges on solid grounds.
A black cat in white mounds.
A tree on blue birches.

A finch sits on a warm rock,
and tweets to the wind-
the sound of the rhythm,
is in each crack and bend.

The grass waves in the wind.
It weaves around the trees.
Everything we seek, is sheltered in the breeze.
Nothing else is what we seek, and in what we find.

A finch warms itself on a rock.
Everything around it is empty and lonely,
and the houses at night are botched-
everything in the dark is a phony.

A sparrow flies and sits on a rock.
It dances and moves in a graceful arch.
He is a brother to the finch; you don't want to pick up the block,
and put it down and on you march.

I sing chorus to the wind.
And in your naked eyes.
You weave and you bend,
and tell permanent lies.

Nothing else is broken; nothing else is the same.
We took the lies out of distant cries,
and in the end its in the name-
we say our last goodbyes.
The wind moans its own name.

You told me you wouldn't find the trail
of the sparrow-
that you wouldn't let on, you wouldn't wail,
and you would see me again, tomorrow.
I guess I tried to let it fail.
You hear the naked demons wail.

That's what they call finches and sparrows.

i pick myself up

I pick myself up and dust myself off.
The poem is in the oven.
It is about to be taken out.

You tell me the bow looks pretty in
My hair; you tell me you are here for me.

The ghost snakes around closed doors and
Old windows,
The flower blooms bright on the windowsill.
The silence is in it all.
The way you walk. Your heart moves in

And out, painstakingly slow;
I look at you and time slows to a
Screeching halt,
I look at you and I can’t speak any words.
The words are not my words.
They are the words of the wind;
The light and the dark,
The sunrise and sunset;
The last man did not appreciate me,
Would not tell me I was beautiful;
I don’t like to speak in past tense.

I didn’t want to speak to him at all.
The worlds in old houses say goodbye

And transcend upon, up on slow mountains.
The hills and goldenrods are made pretty.
The doorway to heaven reaches up the stairs.

The beat of my heart heats up the
Night,
Achingly slow and the moon shines down.
His face is smiling like a penny;
His heart swells like a balloon.
I don’t want to make you breakfast.

The Sky Speaks. Speaks.

I read the works of sauerkraut, mundane, penchance.
Dusk enters the darkening doorway and the flowers bloom in some man’s
Garden, and she wears the funny brown hat and sings songs about the Cold War.
I ain’t never been in no war.
I recite the works of Shakespeare, meadow, cowdung, the smell clings
To my skin and the snow melts in the Himalayas and otherwhen,
The cattle drone out the sound of the rain. Distance swallows me. I live in Kentucky.
My English teacher, the yellow rose from seventh grade, sits on his porch step,
Drinking whiskey, beer, red wine, anger fills his entire being. He wants to paint,
Write, sing in a Broadway musical. He is stuck on the porch, spinning stories in
His mind, unable to get up, up, up. His wife is in a Book Club, they are reading The Iliad.
His students aren’t mature enough to read it yet, it’s ninth grade material,
The tenth grade meter on the metronome shakes, shivers, whispers.
I can’t bear to let you go.
The pain lances through my heart like an arrow. I am moved by your very being
It flocks the pages of time, the pages of time have been worn, faded, are old and misused.
You told me you were neglected and a tear drops from my eye, we make brown bread
And sing sad Christmas carols. You are not Jewish, Christian, Catholic. The sadness
In your eyes moves mountains.
In and out, you breathe, the metallic breathing of you fills deep inside of me, I have no
Recollection of the soul and what it means, what it feels, how it is to me. I told you
I couldn’t tell time. I got a concussion from a baseball bat that fell upon my head,
Egg yolk spewing onto the grass.
Summer and I am on the john, reading a newspaper. You are gone. You are at work.
I call you on my cell phone and you praise Hitler, Johnson, Stalin, Poe. I ask why you’re
Talking about Poe at work and you say you are bored. You are climbing mountains.
They are also called flowers.
Darkness protrudes from the sky. It is God’s mathematical equation, this sky, this darkness,
This old hand that keeps me awake and dreaming, drawing the hand of the three.
A tree bends low over my bedroom window. The night is not sound. I wake up from a dream and read the works of sauerkraut, mundane, penchance.
You tell me nothing will ever change. The sorrow is in your words. I keep my feelings out of it.
I haven’t a chance to speak. You are blue-collared, working from nine to five,
You tell me you’ll do anything for me and you speak to the blue-eyed gravel instead,
Speak of egg shells and peonies in gardens.
Sadness is enchanting. The color of rose, pissed off, heartworm, flits through my mind.
The sky is broken! Broken.
We are walking on egg shells tonight.
You told me I broke things. I said I hadn’t never.
The sky.

The History of Histograms.

The information is a body of stalwart images.
Old crones beat on banjos and false stories flit in
The news.

Tigers crowd in jungle alleys, weaving
Their tails, darkness flocks the moon. My eyes are
Full of pollen. My lips are rosy red and lock in struggle

Between manbear and bargirl. My mother tells me
Histograms are the finest art; she is polite to the man in
The green truck. He wanders by, fresh as daisies.

His mood changes from sea to sky. The Indians melt in
The snow. Tales of lost laundry and broken dreams
In the sky.

A blue-tailed crane is in flight.

Shadows
Float the moon.

The wind whispers sad, lonely things.
The crying of ghosts meets the whisper of words
And images fade in my memories.

Crawl Into Bed.

Some days I just want to crawl into bed and not
wake up. My mind is a sieve. I am steady.

I work as a missionary, going from country to country,
asking for forgiveness for something that was not
my fault, it was my mother's fault, the fault of

my grandfather, his great-uncle, his friend, Maurice,
he owned a coffee shop on the west side of Brooklyn,
remember in school, the students liked West better
than East, and white bread better than yeast.

I never know what I'm putting in my mouth. If it's full
of starch, macaroni and butter, dripping on the stove.
My drawers are full. My name is Melanie. I don't remember

anything about school. My brother asked to be in my wedding,
I told him maybe, if we had enough money to add a third person.
The sun came out on the morning of
December 1st,
it awakens the world, and the deer came out, looking for
peanuts and not finding what they wanted, they headed north,
hoping to find something better.