Man on the Seine

You can't let fear 

drive your life

is why I still walk 

on bridges and 

wear scarves

when it's cold

but now I tuck

the edges in :

ungrabbable.

UNSTAINED SHE STAINS THE WORLD

Creation has gifted me 

crying smiling coffee face

smirk of a stain 

new emblem for the real real
I made the face myself, first 
in the spring of my 

great heart leaking
I’d go to get the coffee
then hide with the coffee
then cry out the coffee
straight into my notebook
along with so many
unreadable words
now that I have the emblem 
and once I have learned to make 
the coffee consistent 
we will name our standby children
Earnest and Bashful
show them how to decorate 
windows with paper bags 
so the walker-bys
know how happy we are

inside

Clarity

Years are biennial, for now, the calendar looks deeply wrong,

my patina is less of a gradually acquired thing

and presents more like crust since I only I revisit it every two years, 

two years which were the old one year,

it was easier to seem dispassionate about

what the body is less likely to do when you could

explore it year by year.

And this has seeped in again, months after the boldest

moment of clarity -

I vowed I’d have no need for my body again,

would ask nothing of the vessel or even for one,

if the pair of you could just continue.

I didn’t climb up to that, and it came on so quickly,

I carry doubt anyone would. 

The actual moment of the decent thing done

inhabiting the body, showing it to the spirits,

saying it’s quite alright if thoughts don’t

seem to feel like their own.

That it’s been a long slow climb down is to be expected, 

you have to ease yourself back into the world, be open to

surprise, pick up ordinary gripes, be poured into,

all the while pouring.