A Brain, a Heart, a Home, the Nerve

A Brain, a Heart, a Home, the Nerve

Out of nowhere, we’re human,
and some need burns in us.
How do we find the fire,
and how do we know

to keep feeding it, to protect it.
Maybe we have many fires,
and only so much kindling,
so some flames flatten,

barely blackening what they used
to burn. How do we know
what we’re good at, is it
only that we are told

by others, or that our bodies obey
certain fires with movement.
There is fear around
our strongest fires,

that they will subside or wander
away, we will be forced
to refer to them as an
old flame, not ours

any longer. Or fear that the fire
in us will never match the
mountainous blaze so
surely in others.

Add to it anyway. Give it what
it wants. If it ever goes out,
so what. Find a new place
that can hold a flame.

Two Thousand And

Two Thousand And

Once upon a time, time
weighed hardly anything:
three digits set in a line,
barely a row. Assembling
the years helped to recall
how long since that prophet
emerged from people,
how long since he left.
From the beginning, years
have been love letters
to things that disappear
and remain. We better
trust time to tell us when
big stuff occurs, how else
can anything happen
if we are not here to help
future Earthlings know
what we did before they
got here. We will go
because time stays,
gets too huge to budge.
We built numbers to fit
time as it goes up and up,
as we back away from it.

Audio: What Panic Wants

The title of this poem reminds me of this movie, "What Women Want," and for some reason that really makes me laugh...that makes this poem the neurotic sequel, I guess.

While writing this poem, I was thinking about what behavior panic prompts...usually, we feel frozen by panic. I really wonder why this is--I interpret it a defense mechanism (maybe thanks to our ancestors who were scared of being eaten by saber-toothed tigers, so they held still and thus had babies who also knew to hold still in threatening circumstances....isn't that how evolution works?).

Hope you enjoy the audio of "What Panic Wants," and wishing you a calm, rejuvenating weekend!

Listen to the Mel Gibson-less audio here.

Hold Your Horses

Hold Your Horses

Hold your horses,
count to ten and breathe
slowly. Counting shows us
that time continues without us

but that we can see
it if we look with the right
lens, with numbers that are
given to us before we can speak.

There is so much
to know, we will never
know it all. We are angry
for the wounds in others and

the wounds we have
and make. Let us try
not to shoo our anger away,
it has a story for us to listen to.

What could we ask.
What are you hungry for,
or What pain do you know
that you fear has been forgotten.

Hold your horses.
Wrap your arms around
their bodies, talk to them
because they know your voice.

Now What

Now What

Some of us are pulled into
secondhand shops.
We wander and touch hems
of other people’s skirts
hung on a silver rack a bit
above waist level,
like a line of invisible girls
pushing anxiously
forward. In the used bookstore,
we go to the scariest
room, the room in which towers
of books threaten to
bury us if we choose the wrong
book to yank from
the pile. We look for the thing
that speaks to us, as if
it has been waiting for us, there
is something in it
we need to be told. In museums,
where the colors
of the walls and the frames around
the art point like arrows.
On the bus, a person stepping on
or deciding to leave.
In the cafe, in the cookie we buy
because it screams
at us through the display case,
on the radio station
or in personal ads or job postings,
isn’t someone seeking
what we have.
Keep watching your email inbox,
most of us keep
waiting for a message from that
sender who has
worked so hard to make contact.
There are only
so many places for the future
to hide from us.