Paper-Okie Hands

Create anew these old and tired veins running thick with dust,

course fresh blood to quench aching hands.

Cold, crackling, paper-Okie hands.

This is no graveyard ground in to bury spent roses,

petals gone to rape like violent waste,

thorns like bones like blackened bleeding

bent and felled into the earth!

Warm streams instead for planting,

tending veins;

grow a field of lilies

not made for red

or flowering for the hands

that will lose for them virginity.

Tin Man Eternal

What doesn't mean forever means scarce much.

Every lost Today is an Ever we can't touch.

Supplanted by Tomorrow's fresh forevers, they spiral down

into the realm of Yesterdays and never.

And over all, it seems, stands watch a man of hollow-chested tin,

Saying:

"If you love me not today, then when?"

Outside the World (Communion of Hands)

Outside the world is melting and pooling and rippling.

I see it through a spotted wire screen

on the other side of the glass in a window-frame.

The outer walls are streaming and running cold between the cracks,

fissures in brick and mortar to form rushing rivulets in grass

and run quietly to secret-silent places downhill.

A thousand million E.E. Cummings hands

are drumming in small splashes somewhere up above my head.

Companions meet eyes against the rain as enemies' glances are washed away

by warm and trickling feelings of closeness.

Voices are softened to deeply reverberating music,

out of the ears and into the heart.

Quiet, warm communion of hands in the rain.

An Inward Dawn (the Intimations of Leaves)

Morning saw branches illumined with an inward dawn,

a bulb not yet become a flower of light,

but warming and secret-saying,

wind and whispers breathing the intimations of leaves.

A mid-day ocean in the air,

uncounted crystal seas

suspended in a blink

and the heartbeat of the sun.

Tonight a garden and a velvet star exploded from a stem

beneath a streetlamp with a tin-capped head of golden flame.

It breathed a breeze and blew a perfumed sigh

to the low-lying cloud on the face of the street as it steamed.

My forest thrummed awake and parted naked fingers

to unravel and be clothed in secret vestments

held in palms the winter through.

In the distance off, my train

blasted its roars and whistles, cut the sky

and told me that my love was true.

My summer broke the earth

and freed me utterly from you.

Or Clouds

It is impossible to know whether the horizon holds

reflections of light on the water,
or thin, soft clouds.

I close my eyes and refuse to know.
Even my existence in this world of stillness
is a matter of faith.

For this moment, I am.

I choose to love these fleeting wonders as they pass,
relinquishing the best of myself
in hope that I may someday be repaid.

Even for a short while.

Rain in the Engine of the Earth

The window falls open beneath slow hands
because the air in the room, so hot, has killed it.

In streams the gaze of streetlights,
in on the cooling wind
the sound of a silent world.

Even standing in a field a hundred thousand miles across,
the earth is a motor
and an engine
and the fresh-air scent of smog and silence like a disappointed sigh
blots out my eyes before starlight can reach me.

Even my whole skin in a moonlit stream
feels like rough grains of salt inside a fragile dream
from which I'll wake to find I've broken it
while sleeping dressed in cotton.

Wind in my lips, I lay unshielded in the street and listened:
heard the howls of a train.

The stars unlocked their lidless eyes
and whispered:

Rain.

Ghost Drunk Moan

Where my naked body, bathed in coolness and fever aroma,

parts from a torso and splits into legs, at the base of me,

I am affixed in sweat to the edge of a mattress;

a leg on one side stretched to brush the headboard,

a calf on the other melting from behind the knee to drip and wet the floor.

Damn it all, who melted iron in my blood and wrapped my pulsing veins around my brain?

And what the hell did they do with my feet?

If ever I escape this steamroom of a skull I'll be a ghost

and haunt the workers in a brewery

till kingdom come.