I Heard Titles Were Important

I have not written a poem
for a long time.

A real poem, mind you - with stark enjambment and dripping metaphors that spill over
and flood the living room floor.
I've started several, recently.
But I keep stalling at the first stanza.
Right when I shift into second gear my engine sputters and I quite the cresting hill.

sputtering engines
crestfallen

A resilient ambiguity attends me whence ever I go. It covers my tracks like Pongo in 101 Dalmations. (Rachel that simile is for you.) Pine branches sweeping my little footprints back into the slate of snow.

I was never there.

I forgot I was here until a girl in class today stood. Quivering, she read her poem about earthworms.
"I'm a little passionate about them." She ends, with a shy smile.
My foot presses through the crust of of ice that always covers
snowfall in Oregon.
And then I remember the words I love,
The way reading fills my belly with a warmth that
could replace food.

I write down "little passions" on a piece of paper as the girl sits back down (did you know words only last as long as it takes to say them?) and the ambiguity settles like dinner: filling up my corners.

Spring crashes through my window and melts winter into pools on my living room floor.

A Toast to the Gods

Here's to

conversations in the middle of the night

stamped obsolete by more rational minds

but kept in secret

pockets and boxes only to be opened, coaxed out into the

dark car interior,

the blue light from the stereo casting shadows

across the words as they sit in the air between our mouths

the Shadows playing with the Light

on our faces

and we wince and smile because they will only play for so much longer,

until either sleep or dawn will call them their own.

and once Shadow and Light are summoned from

their child hood haunts in the curve of my lip

and their hide-and-seek games in the space between your eye,

and your nose,

we will return our thoughts to our pockets until 2 am comes again.

because daylight has no room for

years and the quiet keeping emotion carried therein.

oh the little lives and little deaths of those.

listening: Iron&Wine - Judgement.