friends made fancy pizzas at last week’s dinner party. when the oven was finally shut off, we’d created and destroyed enough doughy goodness to feed ten times the people gathered ’round the wooden table. there were carpenter bees, which apparently don’t sting but are the biggest buzzing bullies, bumbling, bumping in to anything they can find. there were weeds in glass bottles with heart shaped leaves.

i nearly cried when i saw them.

for all my toiling, tilling, trying, i struggle to see the bloom. and now i have this picture right in my face. these heart-leaved weeds.

today, they get me.
if you need me, i’ll be planting weeds.

justwrite

i am convinced that poetry lives,
in this witched hour.
that the clock cannot know it for fear of ruin,
so it’s moved about daily -
with the moon, or the wind, or an army of verse-starved vermin.

i know it by the air,
a crisp carrier of electric potential.

i spend half of each day in search of the scent,
and when the clock strikes,
wind changes,
senses awaken,
there best be a pen within reach.

for the hour will pass and the fog will return,
the current cut off till tomorrow.

on the eve of a century, quartered.
an even twenty-five.
i am equal parts wobbly legs, creaking bones,
time taking body and heart for entirely different rides.

i lately choose paper over plastic keys,
the long, slow scratch over instant pitch and publish,
and sometimes, even then, i come up dry.

i start a million stories,
poems spring fresh from soggy ground,
but all grow tired, roots shrivel just inches from the spring,
seeds fall on sand, quick and swallowed whole.

i see maps in the strands left on wet shower walls.
i see depth beyond the puddle’s mud bottom.

i was driving last night, when the lights turned to flashing,
no one worth bossing left awake in this town.
i let the blinking yellow light me up,
recharge what’s drained,
ignite what’s ready
or not . . .

all’s set to unfurl,
for the next quarter century begins at dawn.