I Know Why The Caged Bee Stings

The power in these lines
I cannot tap without burning my fingertips

Liquids and lightning
Seeking their own level

Pink is for girls, blue: a boy’s best friend
And fishing nets and city maps
Can both be worn, don’t count for clothing

Charged, you turned your glass eye skyward
Full of tears devoid of artifice

I saw your live wire masquerade
To your hidden hum I wrote these lyrics

Buildings Of Night

Hundreds of miles east,
Moments before I can see them
The setting sun kisses the evening sky
With his flame, in your eyes.

We are just the same as I watch them
Tussle from my front porch,
Two drunk lovers
Folding into a darkened alley,
A purse dropped onto still-wet bricks.

Arcana

Fan your bad hand
palm down before you—

hard yellow demons
displace the tarot

and tell uncertain chances:
tea leaf bruises,

the tale of the Empress
inverted like a bat

ill-dignified
by no fault of her own,

swallowed
but scaling the tongue.

Update After An Absence

Just to let everyone know (who might be interested) I have not vanished. In fact, I've begun drawing again, and will try to start posting my efforts here for your viewing pleasure. Tonight I'm working on a poetry assignment of sorts--my good, good friend SaraEve and I exchanged three photographs each to be used as prompts. It feels good to be creative again.

Check out my newest link under "In The Forest", called Auld Manhattoe. I found this blog when I was looking for information about an old tale I read back in elementary school, about a fisherman's daughter tasked with appearing before the king under a set of paradoxical requirements--neither riding nor walking, neither clothed nor nude, etc. I don't think it has any single title that everyone would know it by, but the story is sort of archetypical.

While On The Warm And Faraway

Enough of absence becomes a presence.
The void of your voiceless days
Becomes a pulse in the wrist, after a time
A throb in the wind in a bottleneck.
Broken green glass in chiming chips on the blacktop
Settles into the imagination
Like rain upon a parched garden,
And all the little million wriggling
Words surface to fit themselves together.