Kisses in Colors

I kiss you in colors

Blooming behind my eyes, tight-shut

Like windows in waning winter light

Once it was scarlet, and sweet

Warm, steady and secure

Once yellow, both you and I

You stole my breath and wouldn’t give it back

Curled my toes and laughed a smug laugh

And once, we were black, edged thickly in white

Secret on the street in early hours

Contraband kisses that scuttled for cover

With every knowing approach of headlights

Always, your silhouette in every shade

A bright new hue to each tryst of the lips

Couplet

I forgot the snow, and it shocked me
With all of its white electricity

Writing Hands

So often lately I have felt lacking in drive.  I would look around and think, What on earth am I doing, and why?  There was no why.  It's been the cause of no small amount of stress in my life over the past little while.  Only recently I realized that my passion is, and always has been, writing.  It's a God-given talent, it's 99% of who I am, and it's all I want to do with my life.  This poem is a self-apology for forgetting about that for a while.

Dear writing hands, this

Is my apology

For your emaciation

Your cruel starvation

From your vivid, wordy fare

Dear writing hands, I

Will not make excuses

I forgot the feeling and sound

Of the pen in my hand

And the letters in my head

Dear writing hands, you

Are deep in my heart

At the core, squeezing

Pumping the blood, rich, dark

That gurgles with whispers of so much to say

Against Prejudice

I was in the midst
Of penning a poem
Against prejudice
When I made a remark of careless taste
Regarding the voice of the girl on the radio
And that is why my poem
Against prejudice
Will not now be written

Overcast, a Summary

I see it fit to give you fair warning.

In the future, however distant

There will be days, given infrequent

When the air is too cold to move

And puddles languish on the road

And the mountains have burrowed

Beneath their gray down comforters

And we will do the same

Meaning—

Forget your daily commute and stiff-backed chair

Forget my ringing phone and pressing matters

Shove the consequences beneath the pillow

Hold me close in lazy white seeping through the blinds

The air is not moving, and neither are we.

Such a Rain

Hair crowned by dewy rain at the point of molecule snowflakes

Hands deep within the shallow pockets like a mole hole

Stepping from the slick street onto the curb holds an unsteady weight

As though the concrete sand hungers for a greedy flagpole

I find myself set upon the long way home, serendipitous

Basking longer in the lunar-hued glow of Heaven’s will washed down

Brief hesitation, and I stoop to scoop up a handful of leaves

Tiny russet brown ones, curled like chocolate shavings on a cake

Cupped in my hand, the struts of a pale Noah’s ark about their ebbing fragility

They are safely borne to a new world in the name of memorabilia

For a day like this, with such a rain, such a mist on the mountains

Would be unjustly dealt with to receive no lasting memory

Unmoored

Would that I were unmoored

From the harbor which manufactures care

Would that I could halt the procession

From the dock to my decks of involved despair

Would that my hull was thickly built

Enough to weather the typhoons of change

Would that I could slip loose the rope

And drift, and drift, on hard waters away