On Metaphors.

The metaphor is spying on me,
In the classroom, outside of the classroom.
Mr. Cortez is in the living room of his house,
He is afraid to go out-
He teaches Spanish to ninth graders, to college
Students, and gets a lot of money.
All he cares about is the money,
The feeling of money in his hands, the feeling
Of the wind through the mountain.
He knows about destruction; the destruction of
The rain forest, he knows about the peace,
And the beginning and end of it.
He has given the land to the man in the black
Hat, who looks like Abe Lincoln, but is not;
The metaphor is spying on me, and is jealous
Of my accomplishments, but accomplishments
I have none, and so she is after the fruit
I harvest in the winter.
Without food, the human race will perish,
Dissolve into the big nothing because it cannot
Love, cannot die; is forced to wonder why.
Old men walk around old coffee shops;
They are only old because of the telling of it,
The teller of tales, the redemptions of things.
Everyone is a bully, they like to bully and be reminded
Of a time when bulls and deer and the antelope were
Free, and not chained as they are now;
That they are not chained to film, that they are not guilty,
That they do not wonder lonely down barren
Marshes in the summer, and the summer is not wet
With dew, and that goodness is nothing, means nothing;
Everything is a language, spun of spider webs.

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.

I Told You Once.

I told you once I told you before,
I'm not something I don't know about.
I am nothing I know nothing about,
words creep slowly up the wall like a cat.
I couldn't take the worried crease of your mother's brow,
the insistent drilling of your father's favorite sports into my head,
the french onion soup that never came out right during
our winter holiday up north to your mother's.
She told me she used to work as a car salesman,
that she used to dream of the day when she could get fired,
and actually work where she wanted to work-as a hostess
at a four star gourmet restaurant, a window cleaner,
a volunteer at the fire department.
She wanted all those things, she said, and more, writing them
all down in her notebook, making promises with herself to
try to fulfill her dreams. She didn't know which way she was going.
Or why she wanted to go there. She didn't know what she wanted,
what she could be, and summer came swiftly.

Note to self.

Note to self: Submissions for the "Thirty-First Bird Review" starts on June 1st.

I have five poems ready.