The sound of my name upon your lips
is a beguiling caress
there is a warm invitation
in the way you speak to me.

I feel an intimate familiarity
that spans the physical distance
to but an arms reach

When you speak to me
I am enveloped in an embrace
that steals my resolve

Through the darkness of a late night
you speak to me and send my heart
racing with excited stirrings

I hold my breath in anticipation
of the magic your words weave
You have but to speak to me

He remembers auburn hair,
like the color flickering before him
along Hwy 261.

Thoughts of yesterday
fill his mind —
on his journeys.

Roan Mountain fades
as he steadies the wheel
along a stream of white hyphens.

Flashes of her
blend into the mountains
and trees, when he travels.

Their daughter has ringlets
bright as the autumn patches
among the forest display.

He dwells on her
and their daughter —
when he’s driving.

If love was the wind
passing through the autumn trees,
the melody heard
would sound as a lovely hymn

Like the birth
of the morning sun,
warming us with its light,
or rain giving life too all the earth

Love is the fertile soil
that is in our hearts,
A place to plant a seed
cultivating it to grow true and loyal

You will have the rains of May
fall gently so you may drink
giving the strength
to make love live another day,

i.

implications are not words--
they rarely cut to the chase
merely insinuate the distance
between cold sheets of light
and the water we throw on our faces
to awaken
from the gloom and doom on the one-way
street that
reminds us silence is the path around those razor hedges

once words were green fields
blue skies filled with echoes and clouds of unknowing,
dandelions
roar with their big heads
poking through
and no one hears the wheat grow
bending into the softness

ii

to fall asleep under a tree
blue shades of grass
laid back dog pal
and mud between my toes

one more shoeless day of denial

rosebud, my rosebud

now today, a tuesday afternoon
a knock on the door
I cringe

THE ILYAD

In Paphos, one momentous spring, (when nothing much was happening)
A rock-fall in a tomb caused consternation:
Behind the rocks, revealed at last, a great epistle from the past
In ancient Greek, which needed true translation.

Unfortunately for us all, to translate what was on the wall,
A vagrant Scottish drunk blagged his way in.
What follows is his woeful verse, which made a bad job ten times worse
In his grave old Homer’s having quite a spin
================================================

Implosion

mallet strikes
bone splitting blow
unseeing eyes
reflect
explosions
of pain
vision erupts
in starburst patterns
and shards
of splattered brain
this headache;
MIGRAINE!

'Twas over forty years ago
came The Hammer and the snow.
The flying mountain which brought ruin,
freed the wolf, the lion and bruin.

Near a full year of no sunlight
resulted in near total blight.
Of trees and plants a sudden dearth
and famine came to all on earth.

"'Merica" was called this bitter land
ere the glaciers came to hand.
Their conquest still shows no retreat
none ever have enough to eat

I thought
I saw his eyes
in the headlights

staring,
numb,

blind to change,
open to adaptation;

tight-twisted with colored sugars
to sweeten past paths
and make the hard roads
seem

softer.

Myopia helped him forget
about human beings;

free and equal,
with dignity
and rights.

It helped him define mankind by its color
and strength of mind by its sex

and he forgot

that humanity is endowed with reason,
conscience,
and an inner spirit of brotherhood.

the rain falls here
despite it
i am not despondent
freshness comes with water
washes clean
all the stains
i have been friend and
confidante
a failure and success

home will resume with
more of the same
different people
directions and dreams
memories stay
tucked in pictures

in gestures and actions
life will be as restless as it was
no regrets
i left them
long ago