Jokes

Wolves enjoy a good joke.
You can tell by their teeth
so obviously used to penetrate
to the heart of any matter
finding the bone
sucking out the marrow
of a beast still alive enough
to wish it were otherwise.

Comics and Candy

Moreover the sky has stopped wishing I could visit.

It tells me I can stay for as long as I want.

I can cut down trees and wear shoes made of green suede.

I can eat pork rinds and ask for more time.

So now that it’s settled, thanks for the address.

I am a good person who sometimes needs a place to stay.

If a fellow drops in claiming to be my cousin

let him in. He is an old, close friend.

He sometimes needs a blue popsicle for his tongue,

which gets hot and tired from talking all day,

and then he runs his cool tongue over his red face

and gradually feels much better.

The tiger might want to come in as well.

He brushes his hair with a thorn bush

and wears a pink begonia behind his ear,

that’s how you’ll know it’s him

and not some other tiger,

also his eyes glow with a yellow gold fire

and his voice is rough and low.

My mother the clown will be coming later in the year

with her own axe, and boots made of rhino skin.

Her kind of clowning involves purple chiffon

with real silver thread woven in

and an unexpected, shocking, and ultimately funny

something or other,

that’s usually bright red.

Now I’d like to give thanks again for the earth

and for being able to stick around for a while,

and for all those who wish it were nicer

I say why not roll your birth records into a tube

and blow a trumpet to far distant hills

and wait for the echo.

Speech

I lost my way again

that’s why I can’t stop laughing

discovering items that may or may not

belong to me, or otherwise fit

not like an addict wearing a necktie

or a beast with a busted bone

like smoke, without specific intention

but with allegiance to form

I try so hard to mean what I say

to be inside my words

my songs carry across waves

I play with sound, I feel meanings

beads are strung into lines

that I wear to remember things

this is the truth, maybe

or maybe wind is my author

a hollow tree singing to me

my dna getting a good idea

water main

Beautiful Crow

Beautiful crow, you exist,

make your mark,

hide the world

in your feathers.

Bold companion,

true crow self,

your heart is clean,

a voice I aim for.

Playful relation,

return in noisy crowds

enlivening trees.

My heart needs you.

The Eve of the Eve

I was on a street in my own neighborhood

terrifying in its ordinary strangeness.

It was wild and overgrown, with tracks in the snow

leading to old arrangements of curbs and hedges

and a faucet tangled in dark bindweed.

In order to be a welcome stranger

I had to be dressed like a movie star and able to fly,

in other words, a “city traveler” (words I misread somewhere)

so I was feeling kind of crazy, like I knew

anything could happen, and probably would.

I didn’t care, I wore my velvet cape and rhinestones.

I might get beat up for being the wrong color, or yelled at

for cutting through a yard, but if there was someone to tell it to

who’d laugh at the funny parts, it would be all right.

I was also chewing a piece of gum I peeled off the sidewalk

in warmer weather, and saved in my red purse.

It had sand in it but that didn’t bother me

because of my love for gum and all that it stands for,

the freedom to chew without swallowing,

to move my lips with nothing to say.

I crouched in the street to carefully pick up the shapes

tires left in new snow.

The sharp edges tasted good.

An older girl I didn’t know said I’d die if I ate them,

but I didn’t believe her, I only believed in things

if I liked how they fit the story I continuously told

to all my friends, like the old woman

on her front porch, who showed me

how to make evergreen perfume,

rubbing the crushed green buds on my wrists.

I worried about her future, all alone in the where-ever.

I wanted to keep her company in a snow globe,

frozen in time,

dreaming privately of adventures while I got shook up

then watching the plastic flakes float down.

I dreamed there was a place I knew by heart

and I was inside it, and lived there.