Tucked In Nonesuch

I’m tucked away in a small cabin
 ’mid your vast forest
 and float upon your world of love,
 breathing in and out your atmosphere,
the stars twinkling ’neath your sun.

If Umbrellas Could Talk

I wear a white dress with a pink ribbon in the hem.
I hold my white parasol,
 sit, and exchange glances with your sharp eyes.
You lean in and my lashes fall.
A red-hot poker melts a fat candle without touching it
 and the exposed wick ignites.
You just want to play around.
My strings lie loose on my chest.
Fiddle with them.
Wind them taut to a perfect pitch.
Play till they sing.
Wind, wind, wind
 till they snap.
Break them.
 All along I just wanted you to break them:
 just break them well.

Tender

Gazing at iridescent coals
 we remember at leisure
 the wet logs we used then jettisoned,
 the dry ones we trucked too many of,
 the rolled magazines the fire choked on,
 the lighter fluid the flames absorbed as quick as we poured,
 the ineffectual pop of the lighter sacrificed to the pile.
When we placed
 leaf next to leaf,
 stick over leaves,
 stick next to stick,
 log over sticks,
 log next to log,
 tending over logs,
we had s’mores for a time,
 tending fire.

Demon Documentarian

I’ve driven into the garage of this old man, a neighbor. He has 2 MGs in their original antique green. I’m driving a newly issued one, white with black trim. The dogs are with me, in the back seat. He looks at me, turns the lights off, and closes the garage door.

I sit there for a couple of minutes in the dark and don’t know what to do. He peaks back in and asks if I’m going to come in.

We walk past his first driveway which is where I probably meant to park and overshot to that second one, which had a drive branching from the first one. I walk into his house; it’s a converted office. There are people under his employ, including a bored secretary. It’s the kind of boredom where the employee isn’t appreciated and the employee finds no value in the organization she’s helping.

He seems to think that I like Benzes. Well, I like my MG. I try to say that of course I don’t like Benzes but feel too rude to say it.

I finger my way through his metal stand of papers on display. There is a religious bent to him. I pick up a dry, medical-oriented write up on women entitled Demon. I’m kind of laughing to myself in disbelief. Just then, his wife peeks out from the inside of the office. There is a kind of I’m-trapped-here-with-this-intellectual-domineering-man shift in her eyes. Well, I put it back.

I continue to look for the Benz write up. I pick up a proposal for school lunches. So, people can just sit down and write up school lunch proposals like this… at the same time I consider a possibility I hadn’t realized before, then the sadness of one guy thinking up an entire school lunch for kids… Poor kids.