The Art Created

audio

The sun,
too young
to know
much of anything

in hope
bends down
to pull
water from the ground

and build
with clouds
his kin
like shapes in play-dough

as weight
and wind
tear down
the art created.

The son,
who forks
and knifes
his mashed potatoes

to match
the hair
he once
knew on his granddad,

whose mum
walks in
and says
to cease. Stop playing.

What He Can Do

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The sun, whose arms reach down,
three quarters down the length
of his body, but who
cannot move grains of sand,

not one inch, who cannot
get a man walking down
a dark path to turn back,
whose birth cannot save us.

Our sun, with no power
but to stretch his long ray-
like arms, make vapor dance,
build great turrets of clouds

only to be torn down
by the airs and the land,
whose distance makes him great,
admired and crippled.

Sun who tries, whom we fight,
who hears the father-curse
and mother-cry, so who
balls himself up at night.

Um… (Take what you will of me tonite)

i accidently tripped, fell and wrote a song. I didn’t meant to.

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Scars that rise with time

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Gauze, which allows us
to look on the sun
without his dark eyes
singeing our dark eyes,

blemishes, pocks on
the body that rise,
lesions without cause
lifting in the night,

skin that with the flick
of a nail, flakes
off just in time for
another to rise.

The sun, blinding
in his brilliance,
the rasp and fear
of his flawed body,

his faulty mind,
lost loves and nights,
when the best choice
was the wrong choice,

when following
orders left scars
across the sky,
scars that rise with time.

Sunday

audio

His light,
held captive
in this chapel,

compelled to live
on the waxed lip
of a candle,

pinned up
on the wall,
depicted as

everlasting,
eternal, gift
from a distance.

We wander,
catch the striped
sun shimmering

through paned glass, watch
our prisoner
flicker. These walls,

the grain,
this tallow,
the wax statue

of our teaching
keeps the sun from
these wood trestles.

We gawk
and pass quick
hands through the flame,

pass the tin plate
and the blame, pray
to the constant

who’s now
a convict
to the quick wind,

to the snuff end,
or just a breath,
our sun contained.

Narrative of Light

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In the morning
the son
waddles into our room,
reaches up with his hands

and grabs two mountainfulls
of blankets, tugs himself
up the edge of the bed,
crawling in between us.

We ask how well he slept,
if the storms disturbed him,
the rainclouds and thunder?
“Storms?” He squeaks.

The son
knows none of it, says he sees
himself tucked underneath
the covers with a yawn.

This is every morning,
explaining
to a son
what night is, what we mean

by an overcast sky,
which rolls like a sick day
at school he can’t make up
by getting assignments

In the morning
the son
is bright-eyed and ready
for his long day, beaming

through the arch of our lives,
spilling his narrative
of light across what was
an endless stormy night.

Pyramid of the Sun

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Muddled
by the chores
of the day, trips
to the fields to raze
rocks and plow, ignore
the coming and going clouds,

droplets of water hung in the air,
prism beads bending the blinding glare
off at exacting angles, away from the fields.

This shrouded day baths another place, dreams,
landscapes, horizons, to him it’s a pallet, a pyramid,

to the field hand whose eyes wander, imagining its building.