She winks at me from a bed a stars
Her idealized formed languorously spread across a mostly-shadowed moon
Come a little closer, she seems to say
The sky is not truly that distant

You feel as if she has made the whole thing just for you
That she kept that figure after birthing the night
So she might lay herself upon you and feed you from her breasts
Mother night, holy night, the moon is simply a chair for a goddess
The stars specs of dust arranged into semi-patterns by apathetic divinity

She parts her long red coat and lifts her striped blouse
An invitation for you to wrap your hairy arms around her neck
And Drink. Drink. Drink till you are full
Your body is rebelling against her charity, and still you drink
Her nectar fleeting, her bleached white flesh more valuable than yours
You weep for what you will not have after you have drunk her dry.

Look upon a tiny black spec

Watch it grow. Watch it grow

Watch it overtake your peripheral vision

See, see, as it stretches behind your head

Until you feel it sneaking up on you

It will never touch you. But you know it’s there

It will always be there. Sometimes you just forget about it.

Do you think about the morning when you wake up?

How the sun seems to yawn while stretching it’s arms

Across the black sheets of pre-dawn?

Do you think about the morning dew hanging to the underside of your car

The little birds and squirrels that come to drink from your rafters?

Do you think about your house, your job, your children and spouse

Do you think, this is a good day to be alive?

Give me a sign of the nighttime sky

Some hitherto unknown constellation

That I may navigate across the dark waters of this bay

The mouth too wide to keep out the storm

Are you too normal to be a writer?
Perhaps. Your words are articulate, your sentences concise
You love myth and imagination, you love to hear and tell stories.

But you are not consumed by a passion so intense,
It must be forced down the throat of an undeserving world.
You are not arrogant
Enough
To know you understand the world better than most
That only through you can a wicked world find salvation.
You merely think that is true,
That if you were God For A Day, the world would be a much better place.

An old man was selling roses on a street-corner
A pretty young girl bought one from him, smiling
She walked away and gave it to a handsome young man
Kissing him, they went into a restaurant together
The old man sold no more roses that day

Don’t worry too much about being depressed

You’re in some pretty company

But don’t go thinking it makes you special either

It’s not a very exclusive club

Autumn leaves descend from treetop to footpath
The trail is muddy, but my feet are dry
I thank the dying of the old year,
For it eases my passage to the top of the mountain,
So I may look into the world not yet made

A beautiful woman once came to my home
She said I was a beautiful painter
I believed her
She asked why I only painted people in the nude
I told her that clothing hid the true essence of a person
That only when naked are we our true selves

Meaning

I do not know how to paint clothing
Fabric is lucid and unpredictable
It breaths like a living cell
Flesh and bone move along pre-ordained axis
Transitioning from smooth to bumpy to greasy to porous to loose
Bones, unadulterated, do not leave their prisons
No matter how weakly the bars are tempered
Bone does not want to be free

But what about hair, she asked
Hair is wily and bohemian
It takes its own path
Hair comes in all colors and creeds and ethnicities
All alignments and political affiliations
Sometimes it feels as if the whole body is at war with itself over the issue of hair
But hair is a lazy nonconformist, I told her
It girds itself against the cold but in comfort it lays flat and weak
Hair does not stand up for itself, only for the whim of an aggressively domineering overlord
Even then it does so grudgingly,
Sleeping on the job when the boss has turned their back

All bodies, I told her
Are ordinary
Not mine, she told me
Touch it, she told me
I did. Smooth skin, small pores, soft hair and soft belly
Hard cheekbones, good bone structure
Button nose that looked nothing like a button
Lips like two little neck clams, moist with clarified butter
Slimy, yet satisfying

Paint me, she said
I have no canvass, I said
I am your canvass, she said
Naked, I paint
Green breasts upon browner skin
A blue ocean between her thighs
Sunny yellow face pierced by red eyelids beneath whitecaped hair
She is beautiful in my image
Gaia, made flesh, personification of my mind

Sadly I wipe the paint from her joyous form
Laughing, she enters the shower
And amid her singing, like the last sparrow of autumn
My essence falls from her body in thick, black glops
My mind spirals, unsalvageably, down the drain

Make the point of early waking
Not for sunrise, that’s too early
Jesus walked in the day after all

Light enough will be brought by the sun
Upon yellow flowers and green grass
Though gentle rain will perfume the cement
And clouds with white tops dominate gray underbellies
It still feels like the first day of spring

There are no bunnies in the city
At least you hope they’re aren’t
But the birds are, for ounce, louder than the cars
Church bells do not compete with sirens this hour
In a place overflowing with art and commerce
It feels, for once, that nothing important is happening

Your friends drive leisurely through the un-trafficked passes
The fog fractures, rather than mask, the sunshine
The underside of ripe blossoms are illuminated
It’s as if the world was painted by Picasso on a happy day

You talk with your friends of things profound and profane
The existence of god, the nicknames for coworkers
The fact that you are all so lucky to simply be alive
That each of you was born in the same year and state
For once, it is as if the world is made better by the existence of people

You eat, your friends, sugared bread and black coffee
Fresh fruit, unadulterated, and dairy produced locally
You’re aunt has made quiche, but there are no colored eggs
And that’s okay, because that’s not really what Easter is about

There is champagne later, and orange juice, and cookies
And blood and alcohol mix into something beautiful
More beautiful than the tall foliage covered in gray dew
Than the train-tracks that run beneath cedar boughs

You stop for a smoke. Once. Twice. Three times on a ten mile mile drive
Each time just to look at a new vista
To tell a new tale you have all heard before
To simply listen to the voices of each other

A new thing will be found today
A hidden gem in a sea of warm familiarity
Something that can only be found by looking above
Something that can only be seen on an overcast day
When the sun can’t blot out it’s weaker competitors

An unwashed hand. A tired foot. A belly grumbling from too much food
These are things life is made of
These are the gifts of the holy day
Like a gravestone half buried in mud
A drop of black paint to make the whiteness seem bearable
A friendly smile. A wave goodbye. A kiss given through telepathy
The release of joy into remembrance
Today, for once, the scale is tipped to the good side of life