All it is...

All it is...
Just enough, just enough
The breath opens in and out - little effort
Just enough, just enough
Legs loosen, tense toes uncurl
Buttocks tightens - then
Dissipates along the thighs, lower back, abdomen
The tension opens in becoming stable
Just enough, just enough
Shoulders loosen, arms lay weight on wrists
Wrists to knees in reciprocity
Just enough, just enough
Brow smooths, tongue and jaw open, slack - but
Just enough, just enough
Living, wanting just enough and no more
Holding on just enough
A delicate moment expanding
And the moment it is seized
It collapses into thought

Find me a word

1.
Find me a word
To start the sound
Of all placed before me;

An incantation to bind,
My words,

My breath,

My intent.

Give me an image
To still the storms of

Wandering eyes,
Something to keep me rapt.

2.
Ideas pile up, become obdurate,
Half formed like a lame mule.
I have progeny of halfwits and retards.

Everything is a mirroring projection,
A continuum migrating through action
(Half-formed life, six years dead and calcified).

Even inaction acts.
Dumb, the mounded work falls,
The pot boils itself out.

3.
"Gotta' pinch the sore jus' to heal."

A chorus gathers volumes at the edges of thought:
Radiators ticking, expanding metal,
Snow plows scrapping temporary clearings,
And the freight train is like dumb oboes on different pages.

The road dusts over,
Congealing where the coarse salt thins;
Banality overtakes the novelty of now.

"Lettin' it all pile up - just as ti'rin' as havin' to always clean up."

"Do you really take the time to try? 'Cause if you do, then I don't know where you're taking it, but 'It ain't helpin'."

"I mean: goddamn it; get out of yourself! Here put this on... "

4.
The house is gathering heaped up energies:
Loose threads,
Actions 

Laid along paths of dwelling.

Isles piled high:
Deposits of a stratified,
Stubborn life,

Living in piles.

Disorder is always easier... at first.

(Fall: 2011?)

Cold Day

Cold burning diesel scours my nose
Dry from the December morning
Moisture seemingly sucked up into the clouded sky
To dissolve into the pale blue day
Packed snow over ice that crunches dry under foot

All this change we speculate
All the eyes we see through
All that we absorb to become expectation
"Is this where it is?"
All we script to be...

But we must always come back to the unmediated
The moving sand bar collapsing beneath our pruned feet
And though the past is built dune, gathering grass here
And trees up further, belies stability
In the light of our continuously rising hopes coalescing above our heads

Days Inside

The soot of living wakes me;
Dry throat, sinuses packed snug.

The snow came punctual
And as matter-of-fact as
The home team's prospects this season,
Or a life expired, though the prayers ought to have sufficed.

With this wind clamoring to get in,
A winter storm advisory brings the cold I fight
Or become resigned to endure.

The door of summer's memory fades
Until the noon sweat staining the carefully kept suit
Becomes a foreign myth, strange and unfamiliar.

The nuts, so carefully stored up, are lost under white oblivion
And the tree from where they were harvested recedes into forest.