Coffee and Blueberries

Preparing countertops, provisions, and the aroma of attention

So it is a man acquires cucumbers and a carafe

Stocked liquor cabinet, quiet retreat

From the city to make simple syrup available

So that a woman can have of all things options

Space of Sam Cooke and Etta James, Otis Redding and a turned page

On a coffee table for a man that does not drink it

Never wanted to feel addicted as if he had to have something

He could not say no to in order to function

The chocolate, the mint, the alien in his body he tries to live with

The first relationship is with the self; demons, demons, badass angels

Swooping in like a blood drenched Valkyrie to stand back to back

Take on the fields, born to die, root feet in flowered wings

Sail the mind maleficent and kind entwined that we are each

These beasts ripping flesh in our lovers to the line pressed

The sensations of animalistic human dearth

To walk these lives in lined Earth socialized discretion

To be appropriate to the curve of a rectangle

Reptile brain wants to feed, primate wants to burrow

Inside the consciousness of a lover’s ego

She walks in feeling underdressed, a collared shirt to glimpse

Facet of his daily tasks sans the jacket and the computing masks

Still in posture and quiet voice, slowing night from too long unending days

Stroke of the clock and the unknown hand

Choosing to share this current of what cancer is and has done

The impact he knows she is not speaking to hear a solution no one could offer

Her presence soaked in an emotive shower to push out and pull back in

As her witness she chose him to verbalize the drain

He sees her strength of her boundary of encumbrance

Like a mountain top above the clouds of where she probably has been

Imagining a world where she comes down and they might climb the next one together

Warm, schmaltzy like the way Grace Kelly looks at Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window

Broken leg and he realizes how much she is capable of and his world turns

Hope like a sharpened knife or a compass in the badlands

She makes him want to get a juicer and stock coffee creamer

Like that slice he cut floating in her cocktail; she asks him if he is going to eat his fruit

His teeth gnash the orange and she warns him of the lime’s tang

Soaked in a potion he may always associate with her name

He bites; she asked for another, obliges, she reads on the sofa

Wandering into Calvino’s fairy tales he returns with hers and a Sazerac

She asks to finish this tale and keeps her feet comfortable

Wraps his hand behind her shins and finds Springsteen’s Thunder Road

As they sit side by side quietly reading, just being like promise

Hazy head to get the cut lemons for Pimm’s cup in the fridge  

Settle nudity in the darkness, the not sleep

Wanting to devour and be devoured

Rough, tease, leg wrestling

Pulling, wrapping in heat, pressing and how

Biting, pinching, grabbing, thrust

Pulsing fingers rounding hub

Hands in playful seek, mouths hiding, peek

The moon is not quite full

The strength in her legs straddling skin to slide and pin

It may be the first time she danced for him

He saw her ballet in the darkness and felt happy drunk

Besotted body blood-flushed hung

Like a portrait of how much fun they could have

The texture of what alive is as Dali stands there melting time

Wanting night to expand so that alarm clocks and work

Demanding sleep for the roles of day may get paid

But this, oh this; his elbow is stretching in every compression of his hand

To firmly take her skin in scapula, bicep, breast, buttock, and gliding above her perineum

Circling in lines like a trace of pheromones coming home

Stretching the stamps on his passport waiting for a visa

Contemplating citizenship of where this might go

Wanting that emotional root to genuinely implant in each of them

Because he sees potential and wants a woman that believes in magic to believe in magic

So he might believe too; to say she is thinking about thinking she might begin to care about him

He can hear her smile in the charcoal; she asks him what he is looking for

A life partner, turn the corner and a warehouse that just keeps going

The boxes, words, stories, and emotions are endless

The surprise of what one thought could fit in a person obliterates paradigms

Each to be his and herself, complement

Wants a woman to want what he has to offer

And in that sentence he felt like he revealed himself like his past flipped the light switch

He quit speaking and let the air settle like tonic water

She says she is a natural blonde

And paints another living metaphor in his head

Rebellion and a fighter’s punch to claim the paint on the blade

She was stabbed with and be that badass angel slaying back

Floating through his mind on fire

“Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife baby

 Edgy and dull and cut a six-inch valley

 Through the middle of my soul

At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet

And a freight train running through the middle of my head

Only you can cool my desire, I’m on fire”

The curl of the morning of her phone going first

Elbow swollen like the joint is going to burst

Curling up slowly in the pierce of the light

Pulling the alarm he worried about in the night

Sounding off, she would have to deal with

Asked to switch bodies and he didn’t think of it

The skeleton rattles, time ticking down

Horse needs a saddle, gunfight at the corral

She rides bareback and he wants to go too

She got to go and do what she’s got to do

Seen the orange blossom special thunder through town

Mustangs running and he knows that sound

Hoofs burning fields he will never try to tame

He has his own broncos storming plains

“Hey little girl is your daddy home

  Did he go and leave you all alone

              I got a bad desire, I’m on fire

              Tell me now baby is he good to you

              Can he do to you the things that I do

               I can take you higher, I’m on fire”

Morning calling points his legs in the air

Turns on NPR as he starts to shave his beard

College story coming on about budgets being cut

Fined for mishandling student’s sexual assaults

Confidentiality and having a counselor paired

Segment sponsored by a cancer researcher and his mind goes there

Universe bending in and the razor slices the mirror’s stare

Puts his business suit on and shows her his tattoo

If time goes on from the doorway’s taboo

Stairway down and the coffee is in her phone, dream baby dream all the way home

Sleepless state, head’s in a haze, walk to her car, mind is spinning days

See her again; I have got a bad desire, baby I’m on fire 

Rollick Green

The enthusiasm of the night’s breech is palpable

I can feel how much you want this

To open and be taken

As if I saw you and you are joyful for it

That we may still smile when the cloaks reveal the bones

Grinding knuckle cartilage to discomforting discussions of lubrication

Yuk, Yuk, Muck, Muck

Where fears spin the heads of focus

Into worry and self-conscious grinds of permanence and options

Is he tall enough; does he motion his tango on beat?

Are his eyes too much gutter-punk Peter Pan never in a homeland?

Where certain subjects taste like insecurity no matter how many times he eats them

So he is on edge as the leaves hit his lips

As if the whole world sees him as a fraud

Wondering why anyone would want this sludge bug maggot sack

Trying to reverse the perils of self-definition

Standing in the present, blocking the labyrinth stories

Reverberating limitations in a varied or common flavor

That his worst was not too bad enough to warrant excommunication

Racking how easily self-sabotage is accessible

At the pierced veil of contact promising isolation

And all its calming numb and assumptions that we were hated as a default

Saving the court time to arbitrate the facts and circumstances

Instead of a standard that we are not meant for partnership

We are this or that or some story of folly and crap

So damn son decide which life you will live

In these tock tick years to wallow or dance

Even poorly is better than oblivion

And yet the sun’s blade sits just outside the city’s gates

Raising the farmer’s seed into a sky of felicitous wheat

The stone gray is a world away and the green is rollick

Ah son, breathe and go adventuring 

Fetal Yoga Yolk

Crafting real out of mystery

As time passes the threshold of ignorance’s cloak

To be a maudlin pity in a wrinkled festoon of a man

Dangling there asked to be purposeful

Huffing feckless ineptitude with exasperated lungs

Contemplating a towering stairwell

Of using these legs and abdomen to ascend

Not his who was assumed to be this

In the alcoves of assumption dodging  

Waiting to be found out by the troubadours and cavaliers

Of feminine role reversal clamoring for a good show

He is a haggard mess, insular and rolled

Tight, embryotic into fetal yoga where the ego

Is a tsunami encapsulated in a yolk

Pierced, the pulp oozes meekly

Contained, the maelstrom’s gale rains unending conundrums  

For whatever one is thought to be to the blind

One never was

Such is the scour of the internal eye

Drowning wretches 

Crow and Owl

Night was a novel wrapped in a whisper

Sinking six hours to emit past two a.m.

Staring eyes to the ceiling, head to the edge of stairs

Tumbling towards the ecstasy of reverie

As if this emission never happened in but a dream

Alice floods the room and sails in sight

Through the doors blind knowing that the sheets are white

The dodo bird flies to the shore rotating counterclockwise

The cogs inside like a bank time release

Vaulted oven the baker’s scent seeps through the crease

Spoken and folding the flour to return to silence

Time to raise yeast set the gluten aside to not stretch the strands

Too quickly in the batter’s arrangement in wheat

The sugar intoxicating alcoholic seeds

Root the bar top in a column

Constructed here like an ancient

He rings the doorbell like Jason for the fleece

Knocking and the rabbit’s hound barks the gate

Hers is trained, wouldn’t be so out of control

Going out and she is in the blind

His red t shirt looks to him like a rag to wipe his face

As she looks like a 1920’s Clara in a bow wrapped and damn

Off to fly the maple’s leaf on oak to park in a church

If she knew

Only an anecdote not needing an antidote

Walking for a dance hall crash and the vibe is slowed

The old man’s bar is asking for a conversation in the haze

Of Tom Waits ghost wishing he was in New Orleans

But this is smoke-free waterhole week

The garbled haggard emphysema petri dish for the sidewalk gawkers

Is but mist like a mannequin in a street window

Busing in some garbage for hipsters to ogle on their way to Jacques Imo’s

Tonight he and her draw circles, two centers with expanding perimeters

Evaluating what to do with the areas of over and not lapping 

Thankful each it taking time to sip because the shotgun sex in the air

Might drown the roots in too much too soon

She starts to count to six from two and how she prepared for the worst

Offenders in the system, bribed in some shoes or just a guard’s mistake

Sliced down a man and she watched the reel that these

Were the men she was to deal

Preparation for the limitations of the police

Coming to enforce the priorities

Of breasts and boudoir founded in her quests

With Joplin’s lover as her dance-mother doubled over from the bayou

Trumped like every story has a twin, parallel world to another within

Mothers, fathers, sisters, selves, asking, dancing, muting, tells

As if she was doing this or that on Bourbon poking the tension

Seeing her curl her feet inward in his kitchen

The three hundred pound blues guitarist and the hyper white boy on keys

Covering funk with a sparse audience that she sees, cannot dance

With an authority that makes him want the darkness

To conceal his arms and legs, as shoe heels and accustomed angles

Are on the verge to appear halfway ridiculous and the ball of energy

For a drunken piano was just that, awkward

Because he knows by the way she stands, walks, and glides

That she just might eat him alive

And his toes feel out of practice like wizened heirlooms of folk tales

Of wanting to see that air of understated empathy that he knows is in her

But he’s wary of women pulling the rug and the rabbit hole underneath never stops falling

For arms up above, mind gone into the blackness    

Pausing confident like that column knowing she does not have to be a writer

He does not need to be dancer for the world to make sense

He smiles like an early bird meeting a night owl like his lady hawk

A wolf in the dark howling for Ginsberg, Howl! Howl! Howl!

She’s a living-dare, walking-muse and she knows it

From the way she’s been used

He’s a living poem taking her home with a transparent window

He set the old fashioned glass two nights ago to simplify

Where his priorities lie

As if even words in context look like potential cutthroats

In plain sight

So he accelerates on the interstate in a quiet pulse hand on her leg

That he knows she knows the line where this night will not go

Because he set it, because she needs it too, doesn’t want to say the words

But appreciates his terms, so she can have the freedom and vulnerability

To be of all things, female

Pulling in the collages begin

Of dirty laundry on the wall and roaches scurrying

With nutrients and recipes like an alphabet

The turtle’s shell and circumstantial evidence

She soaks in that non-feedback way like a professional

For the football and the magic, the father leading the baseball alumni

To the music of black and white, jazz and stained gray carpet midnights

She retreats to the intersection of shadowed corners under the stairs

Like a lure for that moment where he will let the waters settle in non-speech

To pounce in the pull of a tiger to a tigress in the glade about the voyeur pane

Where she can look out and see it all coming

Finding intimacy sequestered

So that he will never look at that alcove of his home the same again

Below where something use to hang on the wall tumbling into forget

The cool darkness swallows him in like delightful madness in the maw

Of the universe crafting felicity in the bite of the vampire

Away to be something else

Like a clown fish pulled into the anemone he was built to take her sting

He asks if she wants to take the secret mystery stairs

She sees his novel like a beating heart behind glass open for surgery

Depending on the sentences where her eyes rest

Poems from 2010, the paint in blue lines and thirty-three colors

The symbols and words pair like Jungian archetypes

Above a weight bench, a computer and quotes from captains

She sinks to read, he points out his father’s favorite Nietzsche

Not upset for the lie, but that I can no longer believe you

E.E. Cummings sets her head to that hard pillow at the stair

He rambles in the slow shadow of how like an animal she finds her spots

Like a vagabond on the move finding fresh shelter each eve

In the torpid pace she breathes, “I am going to be vulnerable now.”

Childhood there were moments, but it was hard, pretty bad

Sure he had his, others, but she had hers

Maybe in love once, after that no

Dated men and women, they always wanted things

To change her or pull her like an interesting creature

Jean Grey like the Phoenix always in other people’s minds

Fire in her own, a burst, light the inferno to ashes

Because these tethers feel like immolation

When someone tries to wander in, unprepared, uninvited,

The house burns and she does not do well in the domestic, residential stereotype

Suburbia and its Jesus left for a spirt and a magic in the night

He thinks of thunder road and a graduation dress in rags at her feet

Of a girl wanting to be stripper like just what she was built to be

Beautiful and others want her, but she does not want them

That second part is segregated, emotions in a capsule like a split cache blunt

Callus staring at the world like a straight shot of whiskey

Burning gut, not cutting the liquid, full, the way life is

Prison cell or bar room, stage or patient’s face

Some people are lost causes can’t save them 

She wonders if she’s harsh; he just tells her empathetically

Some people can see the darkness like an aura on everything mixed with the light

Other can’t, when you see it, you can never go back to not seeing it

Real responses, pragmatism, truth: the best dirty words

Flooded in sunlight, some go blind, others stare into the star & say, “Is that all you got?”

Enough, pausing reveal, tired and a look to the watch

Marshmallow sheets and a pillow reprieve

She sinks the ivory and mingles with the blur of portraits

A lot of Picasso and art history feels like one of her pheromones

Buzzing his olfactory at how real a moment Frida Kahlo could have

Grown from the Earth in a full body cast

Where has she come from; relinquishing herself to stay over

Like permission that this might not end in a bus wreck

Texting sure her roommate knows, the way women do and men do not

Worries vary with what’s exposed just for walking down the damn street

He thinks, my God her body, but wants her to hear it in his eyes

In some foreign tongue 

He readies the blanket of night’s shroud; pulls the lamp

Nakedly endowed for a moment that she does not want him to see

Like a most beautiful un-dare it be conscious compliment

An audience may look, but that is not her, this is

A bareness maybe she has not felt in a while

Like the scent of a complement she wishes to preserve

Before the winds carry the permission she has given herself

To experience this, to open up and be, away

Swaying the press of skin like medicine and felicitous sincerity

Hinting something has him and her acting on the verge 

Hitchhikers on the road Kerouac’s searching for an engine  

Could the page turn; the man without a net learned long ago to let it be

He places his leg below her knees and cradles in

Glides his fingers across her back, pressing firm in alternating currents

The sun, the hours pass in a lazy Saturday morn, the flowers’ stems appear

He thinks of the thousands of words he wants to share

She says she likes to pinch and grab

Named after a song that is not even good

He used the word volition three times before the crow

Wary of anything everyone else seems to like

A person should always have a few enemies even theoretical

Like Jay-Z, Elvis, or Mother Teresa

Standards are important otherwise

We’re all popping bubble gum at funerals

She said she liked that he did not misspell words

And juxtaposed the responsibility of breakfast preparation

He smiled about how all the moving boxes have been picked up

She said she is very big on rules and wraps her hair around her finger

He thinks he failed school yard

And wants her to pull him out of his own head

She jokes why he is so serious like a bubble releasing as his insight into her registers

So he cuts a violet flower bloomed from a seed to match her dress

She asks how long he was married

And he cannot begin that sentence because the morning

Has rolled and the time of the question after will fold into fissures

Of time better for a morrow and she

Has yet to verbalize she was married at all

She knows he reads and that is all that need be said for now

Kindred and love is not forced or chosen it is a reaction

To the stimuli based on a path we choose (in steps)

For two birds to fly