holds

there is a moment that
holds me together like
a warm brick wall
newly stacked,
gently padded with cement and
laid atop one another
across and across
by a sweaty man's
calloused hands

brunette

my renegade daughter
with hands that
unravel and explode

an adamantine smile
that rides the
easy wind over

collapsed around
decades of her eternal
growth

wrapped carelessly
in existential questions
and flights of fancy,

stirred with chamomile,
drunk in slowly

snow globe

it's all just a
tiny glass bead
and i come and go
as i please;
where i exist
within this burrow,
free from
slings or whistling arrows,
competing ideals,
stuffy nonsense
of the outside
world;
desires and memories
which cease to be
the threshold comes to pass
have no more a hold on me
than episodes of a dream

laundry

i really like taking my wet laundry
out of the washing machine
and putting it into the dryer.

to hear the behemoth
slushing, whirring,
moaning and churning, then
its gathereds coming into
dazed inertia blinking,
questioning,
eyes adjusting to the light before
being hoisted out for more

is to know that helplessness in the face
of hidden fate's enigmatic advance against us,
a raging machine
of tumbling chance
that we cannot help but to endure.

they lay stretched and whipped across those
gleaming black walls breathless
and exhausted, dripping
drops of water around the bottom of the
basin, gasping

having been dusted in a funny white powder
before being thrown and drowned inside
a maddened cauldron determinedly emulating
the rushing blow of an angry river's water
upon their cotton blend and pitable
buttons clinging to some simple threads,
they fixedly gaze in quiet shock
at nothing in particular.

"all of that,"
he said,
"is a bunch of bullshit."
"it is whack," one agreed,
"it's the language of fear," he continued,
"it traps the soul. It provides no pathway
for one to go. promotes distrust, self-destructive lust"
"disinterest," added another,
before said I, "seemingly enough."

ain't happening

march on,
through the stream-lined ticker-tape
city parades,
through piss-soaked back alleys
and cash-cluttered, overwrought promenades,
bleary half-eyed open and mumbling halfheartedly slogans,
slurping down a cold cup of coffee (cooled by time,
not by ice).
blessed be my 21st century;
breathing down a chiseled back its
mounting pressures and tangling ways,
reliving our most desperate moments,
swirled in the tar black self portraits
down, down, down the old road lays.

the great grief of fortunato

Upon a glade in Misty May
I came across these Charites, three:
each blossom bloom in holy singularity,
each gaze reflect a fix'd
innumerability.

Such subtle sloping of their shoulders
in supple stroking fed
from gently 'round their fertile forms to
infinitum ends; a point upon each
blessed womb in punctuated glory bound:
umbilicum mundi
from which the scenery expound.

Rolling fields of ample crop
adorned each comely crown,
from blank marble pale each brow atop
burst bountiful shades of honey brown.

From stoic poise to every way
root simple limbs
and idly'd sway,
born'd down from
the silver trickle of the stream
to huddled trees, hilltops away.

What is left there to behold
but those mind-abiding fields of gold,
cascades of light in eerie bright
bold blankets white upon those
sacred shapes that
silent bathed
in immortal purity?

What fool's so sped in his depart!
Bumbling on in light of heart,
that merry den had
sense confound:
Spotless in his certainty that yet
again it could be found.

What gleaned from rustling branches since
has my desperate search for Eden given,
but that finely woven wind
is yet graying in memoriam;
its fleeting warmth can only serve
as cruel suggestion of wondrous worlds:
a tarnished souvenir, impotent
paradise misplaced.

Then should I welcome misery's reign
when time reduces joy to pain?
When all the Earth can not return
the chirping worship of those birds?
How I lack that hallowed glade
that I found in Misty May!
Be found once more
I humbly pray,
the Trinity of Gratiae.