Sunday

It's Simple

It's funny how the simplist of things
can turn your world on a cliched dime.

I haven't written in months; not one word.

I thought I had stopped forever; some great,
dark thing had reached out and thumbed a switch-
one I couldn't find the care to turn back on.

Found that mosquitoe again. Let it right in
like I never let it out and shit, Joe...
it was good the first day or two, as good as it gets
and then it wasn't. Just like that. But the strength
to swat was as gone as those elusive words and it
goes like it goes and it's all mine, after all.

Then the simple thing happened.

A pimped-out duece and a quarter flung itself
out of a clear blue intersection and before I had time
to think "Damn, that's an ugly fuckin' car"
it had buried it's big grin of a grill in my lap
and somebody told me later that it never hit the brakes.

Jump

I press between
the weight of day and push of night;
a quilt of skin sewn sinew to bone.

Scars trace my surface,
map the past in keloid and curve;
I rub but cannot scatter the years.

A girl once drew her palm
down my laddered back, not asking
what raised the rungs beneath her touch;
lucky, she said, to know where the ledge stops-

the falling off is to know where it begins.