The Reflection Pool

I keep seeing my mother’s
hands whenever I look down.
And I dream about giant
sunflowers just before golden
yellow petals begin to appear
and my dream-mind calls
them dwarf sunflowers but
the heads are larger
than me from the waist up.
So my not-dreaming mind
fights the name and says
something clever and
academic like ‘dwarf implies
small and because said flowers
(which are not real anyway)
are larger than you, they
cannot be dwarves.’ And
my dream mind fights
that and I become
confused, not knowing up from
down, left from right,
I become unable to figure
any thing out, so I see
my mother’s hands and I
know they aren’t hers. The
fingers move when I tell my
fingers to move.

Do you understand why
I am confused? Why none
of this makes sense to me?

Walk in beauty, my friend,
hand in hand with your joy.
Sprinkle happiness, a corn pollen
blessing for this ceremony of life.

May your strength radiate and impassion
the world around you as the sun
animates ardor and brilliance.

Walk in beauty.
Walk in beauty.
Walk in beauty.
Walk in beauty.

I want to drive your
nowhere dirt roads.

I want to traverse your
underside, your other side
non-public side.

Become intimate with your
curves. Slide my body
over your bends.

I want this from you.

My arms up under my
face as protection from
you and me,

shelter from our elements.

The fronts of us
coming together.

I want to bear witness
to that which washes, washed
through your gullies
and my ravines
at once, together

we come

to this mixed in this
way as long as either
of us exists.

Our existence is tied up
together, on this,
these ribbons of dirt road
because there is something
more to you than your
plains and prairies.

the poets of
bathroom stalls
in all night
truckstops are
awe-inspiring after
coffee       after four
cups of sludge

under white florescent
lights        the gods of
travel have spoken
to many drivers and
their need to share
has overwhelmed
my 3 am brain

you are my failure.

the bed of unlikely attachments
sits unmade, unused as it should be.
Through all the struggles that are on our paths
that don’t cross, won’t cross.

So we will walk, just walk, side by side
laughing as we can at life,
crying at the rest.
Lost in the vagueness of feeling,
emotions that tear apart
from the inside out.

Soft tissue dissolves, leaving holes that
cannot mend no matter what modern
technologies are in our hands,
tools that destroy in the name of rebuilding
when possibly all should stay in ruins.

Mashing up the pieces to recreate the whole,
brings about a lightness that only
feels like more weight      weight upon weight,
and breathing becomes hard because
I breathe you in but
quickly breathe you out again,
knowing that with each in-breath

a poison is spreading.     It is in the
veins and moving at high speeds
to my life line.
The steadiness of my heartbeat
doesn’t change.

I have the heart of an athlete, steady on,
steady forward as I grope for
understanding and forgiveness.

I’m feeling beat up
and like I don’t know
English right now and
people keep telling me
happy birthday on Facebook
when it is not my birthday and
my dreams are filled with
the same dead bird, night
after night, in various forms
of decay and
you wonder why people are
telling me happy birthday when,
clearly, it is not, and why, do I
think, am I having that dream
and I don’t know, really, I just
saw the bird where it fell out of
the tree, dead, or else where
it fell, dead, after hitting Ed’s
truck when flying out of the
tree, a Dark-eyed Junco and
I just saw the bird laying
there, dead, and maybe I feel
some guilt over not doing
anything with its body; I
just left it on the ground where
it fell, and I wonder when I walk
by it, each time, if I ever watched
it with my binoculars but now,
maybe, with the freshly fallen
six inches of snow, I won’t see
the bird again until spring, or
maybe, only the skull and
bones which is its favorite form
in my dreams

……………
and the periods, where do
they all go?

I am the ghoul under your bed,  the ogre
in your closet. Yes, that is what I am,
your love turned into your greatest fear,
the one you tucked into unused notebooks
that are stashed under the bed. And
it grows into the behemoth that
follows you around. That’s what
I’ve become.

Because, you see, the things that
we most love turn rancid and plague
our hours, our days, our lives. The love
we fill our bodies with, our minds
contort it into caricatures, whose
fangs, horns, and claws only grow longer.
Spine-chilling as all fears are,

the wild things wait for us around
each corner, tucked into the shadows,
despite their size in our lives.
Grotesquely ballooned and swollen from
the gases that make us what we are,
one step follows the other as we
inch forward, frightened out of our wits.

The monsters did not dissipate in
their immensity as we grew into
the adults we are now. No, in direct
proportion to the depth of our fears,
our monsters have burgeoned, freakish
in their magnitude.

I have been broken hearted
because I have failed.
I have been broken hearted
because I have fully loved and lost.
Neither felt good, but both
fit this life that
I call mine.

And the valley that lays out beside
me is empty of anything visible
as fall begins its silent sneak
into the world, tip-toeing on leaves
that have already fallen, missed,
not once, by any soul. Rot already
setting in. Decay. Bitter.

There is no water to awe over,
its width, its breadth. There’s
hardly a snatch of green in view.
Its passing, is it mourned?
Not this year.
No.
There’s been a dry spell.

But it’s true, what they say about
waiting, if you wait long enough,
something is bound to happen.
It’s just not what I thought it’d
be. There is nothing more than a slight
expansion of every day, the other
side of the not so proverbial mountain.

I fear I’ve lost my ability
to find joy and blessing in
the world around me.

All I see is empty.

Profane, isn’t it?