Sees, Kindness, and Made

Sees

We fell into this lake together
and traced the clean soft lines straight back
to ourselves, with a carefree laugh, ha ha ha-- 
an embarrassing ease. This small
miracle does tend to put in
orbit something high flying besides
clouds into the sky inside
of our minds for a very long
time afterwards. You simply trot
around on clumps of roses for
traveling shoes, carrying this

crazy dream of a painting with
you wherever you may go. It's
alright--the painting's with me. Can't
be avoided. If you've got a
working car you will soon drive it 
over to her new place, avoiding 
the many bumps in the road
as you can just barely make out
in the mind numbing darkness of
overflowing time. If you have
to go on foot you'll be forced to

shrink the hapless feeling down to
a quickly jotted footnote in
your hot little hands and hope that
no one cares to know what's so patiently
lurking down there in your pant's 
pockets. Robbers can usually
smell a pretty dime from a
good long mile away.They're always converging
on you anyway, but
this gives them that extra incentive
to puff their stuff in your face.

In the meantime you hunch over 
your stolen maps like a mad scientist
in a too tightly worn
lab coat and try to ever recalculate
the exact earth where
you first did meet up. Or is it gone, 
maybe still waiting somewhere on
her angel face at the far lost  
world's woozy frontier? Oh, please, let 
it be her that takes me again
to confront that holy presence.

Kindness

I didn't know that I was not being
super invisible. I had no idea.
I thought for sure you were much too
busy talking to someone else's feverish
imagination on the night's budding springs.
That stupid jerk standing up there holding
your hands at arm's length didn't even realize
the hours of trouble you'd gone through

just to match the color of his dull eyes.
He was brought up on a brutal farm I'm
told by alien farmers but that's no
real excuse if you ask me. And but so
what? He painted in your private journals
with nothing but a bark, wet mudbrush, so that
at least for that particular day there's
nothing for you to see on the page but

his sloppy overgrown fingernails. You
maybe shouldn't have said how you were suddenly
being attacked by a wild animal
that came charging at you from out of
nowhere like a flying bullet. That you
bravely fought him off as best you could, but
he was still able to smear a little
something sticky and on your best intended clothes,

too. I don't know. I really don't. I can't.
You always seem to have your one sweetly
sculpted tiny swan hand on the back of
his fat little head, like if you didn't
somehow steady his boulder skull for him,
the poor,poor boy, it would be bound to come off
and roll away and be forever lost.
Limitless time. At all times. And; always. That's the real stuff.

Made

Birds await. They know the way the wind
likely blows the sun. It's all second
nature. They're curious but become
just as baffled and bemused when you
get right down to it by a differing
song made out of some strange new circumstances
as any one of us
might be. When you reach the useless flathead
summit you'll see at last, you'll get
the same moon,the same leaves,the same stones,

the same knowing awful realization
that was squishily fermenting
in the pungent bushes a mile
or so back on the tight grill of the
tiger trail. Things smell pretty good and
then they stink just as bad. Your own fabulous
part of that stinkdom is your
freedom calling you up to suggest
you might want to stop and think for yourself.
You only have this long to be

you. Be ready. That's all. Then you're expected
to quietly bring your bought
and paid for stack of disappointments
back home with you and try to sell them
on the sly to someone else who's still
listening to lite Radiohead-
like bands for all of the above answers
to all of the above questions.
What if you had all of the right ones at
your fingertips--would you still be an

unhappy cheat and fritter your life
away on sad unrealistic movies
playing nonstop in your head?
Let them have to deal with them telling
us what to do for awhile. Go home
by way of living out the journey.
Us, we poets do it all the time.
You'll be fine, but probably won't get
as rich as a ruby this very
moment sleeping somewhere underground.