A remedy is offered in an alley.
Money moves
from sufferer to healer.
quickly.  What has been purchased
proves to be weaker than was desired,
but will do.  The sufferer mutters,
but settles for it.

A farmer settles on a smaller price
for a larger crop, smoldering
with thoughts of winter ahead.

Linchpins
are carved from hard wood
in places where there are no forges.

Where there is only soft copper
and little wood,
those who need linchpins
traditionally long for iron,
will scrounge and scheme
for something to trade for it,

and plan for war.

While we’re all making do,
civilization develops,
rises, and falls in upon itself.

Without each other to shore up
our resentments, to bear
our brunt,

we’re nothing.

That there is a matter of fact,
of any fact,
is not obvious.

That there is worth
is ruthlessly questioned. 

That chaos is our manacle
is not permitted
to be discussed among polite company.

That we once had hopes, good ratios,
explanations, heroes,
is not worth mentioning.

Are you sick yet from stories
of sickening eggs?

It is no wonder we admire vampires.

Are you romancing cameras?  Are you
booking trips, taking trips,
tripping on music? Are you
blue-fingered
from holding on?

We hide our marrow in our parent’s bones.

Are you yelling loud enough?

Our pockets are rusty.

Are you saying please and thank you?
Are you paying for what you always got for free?

Sucking on dry bones,
we must fall in love with whatever
seems as warm as blood.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

Monster
is multiplicity of me — awkward me,
smooth me too,
ripped up me in claw costume,
clay head, raw meat eyes.

Monster Me drinks a little, expand
each bogeyman, and then all
see it, see me.

Each Monster is not
response.  I don’t answer
with me: Monster Me
doesn’t talk,
just stands scary —
animal leather-hand,
vegetation jaws, mineral
lungs. 

You gave Monster Me to me,
enabled me
with reasons
not to be shown off.
Made me these jungle desert
alpine scimitar teeth.  Made me
folklore legend leftover spooks.
Made me a book
read and tossed into a garden
on fire.  Monster Me, a pair of
clamps on a veined muscle.

A monster is not
mothered or fathered;
to be rather stark
it rises in a stand of
pointed sticks, sore,
and sleep
never a bed.

Monster Me, I am that —
all of that, all of them,
no me in there
I do not want to flee.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations