Pond

The pond is a billowing spittoon of churning sediment

First three months winter into spring
Upheaval, the agitating pollen

Forcing one to grow

Car wreck totaled, shivering after midnight

Driver ran a red light back mangled tightness

Dental implants failing, surgeon will not return calls

Not covered by insurance, memories of childhood

Lumber to face, a bicycle, movement, quiet 

Lost job; blindsided in corporate restructuring

Apologies and letters, severance and mortgage

Owner thinks he can make more money

Rewriting resume for the seventh position in fifteen years

Lover pushed away because one is not sure how to be a person

Or if one can be what one wishes to feel and does not

Trying to lay a pillow down the way others never afforded

Bill for solar panels coming due in September

State is broken oil prices down

Not sure if the promised credit will come  

Payments, dancing voltaic arrays of wonder sun

Brother’s family from out of country invited to live for two months

See a toddler niece turn two, a couple navigate the waters

Tempting an introvert to find balance as the tumultuous undulation

Rocks the bow to center a buzzing cauldron of identity’s uncertain tattoo

Daughter verbalized her extrication

Eleven years and she would rather us share dinner over in the town she knows better

Than to spend an entire weekend in the city where her father lives

Squishing ego and love and time and proportions into a capsule of sublimation

Former spouse arranges black-op cell-phone grandparent pickup

Child is gone, no returned phone calls, texts, letter, emails

Daughter like her mother will not respond

Mangled mouth attempting discussion with ears

So long ago took to the pen and keyboard

Echoing into the pond to at least be self interpreted

A mirror image of empathy on the ceiling of the lake

Words coming back as if this was a conversation

Dirt flares in pinched nerves and a scattered budget of time

The mind’s attention between varied exercises in survival

Biological vehicle to drive, currency to finance sustenance and shelter

Love of adult partnership; love of genetic continuation

Filaments and drivel scud floating in a lukewarm bath

Tepid as anxiety and the formality of survival

Of wanting to be alive, to untangle this fishing line

Wrapping logs and car tires

Murk blood the wanting and not wanting

The proactive war of volition to choose, to be, to say

This is what one wants; this is who I am and wish to be

With time, with love, within the auspices of what one can control

Praying to the universe and practicing yoga of love, yoga of body

Yoga of freeing the labyrinth of the mind from rat pellet fixations

Of what if or the scale of relative heaviness from Sudan’s Lost Boys

To this roux of aborted fetuses, breathing children who have no Emoji to offer

Of first world privilege imbibing an atheist’s yolk

To swallow this is it; the taste, the hollow menu

Of alone for decades ciphering language and pheromones

In an equilibrium of alien under this surface quagmire

Hoping this sediment will settle in an hour glass of awakening

That signals conduct, “Let go, release want in all forms and with it suffering”

To be incapable of argument, of request for the love of a wife or daughter or friend

Or a predictable foundation of sustainability; strip the lot to the moment

Be in this now and focus in the darkness, in the wallow quiet hum

Be in the swirl murk, attention to the array of the tempest not the settled aftermath

For this is death, the truncation of the vehicle, the ordered apocalypse of story written

Be in the author’s process, be in the act of creation, be art

Love is only alive in motion; there is not past or future tense or the vivacious instant act

The scum is beautiful ugliness smearing cheeks and puffing lips to breathe under pageant waters 

Grime is purpose and so it is eviscerate this idea of need, cull the wicked requirement

In such nudity time is unleashed from shackles… and yet love, oh love

One cannot help but be love, so it is the nature of need of understanding in all epiphanies

The interconnection of all things, so it is I miss my child and

A tender to my heart and a garden to till, so it is I yet plant, I yet plant.