MOUSE FEET

Teeny-tiny mouse feet run along my ceiling
in rapidly fluttery pitty-pats

God’s dimension is so vast all the
ticking clocks face sideways

There’s a sound in the universe so pure
only one of us can hear it

Way at the end there
that silhouette of someone
standing against the moon

When you lift pen to paper
the savannah floods with light

If we’re only visiting for a short time
will our echoes elongate behind us?

There’s a shack blown down by the wind
all its nails shrieking

When the scrolls are unrolled
everything will come clear

Will we be there?

(There go those mouse feet again above me

Is he in such a hurry
to find my mousetrap?

If he pokes far enough in
he won’t be able to get out

I let them loose in the woods
at the end of our street

Little tiny creatures
with delicate finger-and-toe nailed feet)

1/30/2008 (from The Fire Eater’s Lunchbreak, in progress)

PEWTER MOONLIGHT

Old men are writing poems
by pewter moonlight

They live in different parts of the world
but their pen unites them

Their blood is as thin as rivers
after winter floods and the
springtime dries them

Each of them writes his ode
to pewter moonlight

Their eyes ache from peering deep
into lamplight

They’ve seen the comings and goings
and sheep led to slaughter

The night no longer holds any
terrors for them

One ray of moonlight from the window
is enough to save them

The Holocaust is over and slavery and
cries of despair

New chains are on their way
with clanking regularity

Humankind often finds its better angels
disposable

Old men are writing poems
on rickety tables

Chrysanthemums wither in the
vases before they are done

Everything in reality takes place
by pewter moonlight

The sound of their pen scratch
is enough to heal the world

2/15/2008 (from The Fire Eater’s Lunchbreak /
Tall Tales in Short Takes, in progress)

THE WINE WE LOVE

The wine we love is the wine of the spirit
The wine we avoid is the wine of the body

Though the wine of the body lead to spiritual bliss
its dregs and bitters are magical temptation

Shattering the glass is the way to the pure wine
though the glass itself is the wine and the

wine itself the glass
and the lips that sip are also the blesséd drink

that we think by simply sipping we’ll be
able to drink

And we drown in the world of what is
always drunkenly around us

whose otherworldly bubbles of light always
drunkenly surround us

                        11/25/2007 (from The Fire Eater’s Lunchbreak — in progress)