The Poetry Marathon

You are my favorite
food group. Thank you for
your brewing,
brooding ways,
your dark deep
stirrings, your
faithful
dry roasted boost.
No matter how many
lumps I take, no matter
how low the day goes,
there is always a
mermaid mug
of Joe.

**hour 14, written off-site and posting late**

(Frosted by Robert’s words)

Older now, and tired.
I just want to take
the quiet road.

**hour 13, written off-site and posting late**

(a haibun)

My mama always said there are no good moves. Something always gets lost. Something always gets broken. Some last minute much-needed kitchen item winds up in a box marked Bathroom. There isn’t enough packing tape in all the universe for all of Granny’s heirloom eggs, which are on their 11^th move in 20 years. We survey the world around us and deem many things we were just using yesterday as unfit for cardboard travel; relegate them to garage sale piles and secondhand store fodder. We fold our losses and fill the boxes and ask ourselves, What’s worth keeping?

Pack up all you are.
Arrive on the other side
fragile, and less whole.
 

**hour 12, written off-site and posting later.**

(a haibun) 
My mama always says there are no good moves. Something always gets lost. Something always gets broken. Some last minute much-needed kitchen item winds up in a box marked Bathroom. There isn’t enough packing tape in all the universe for all of Granny’s heirloom eggs, which are on their 11^th move in 20 years. We survey the world around us and deem many things we were just using yesterday as unfit for cardboard travel; relegate them to garage sale piles and secondhand store fodder. We fold our losses and fill the boxes and ask ourselves, What’s worth keeping?

Pack up all you are.
Arrive on the other side
fragile, and less whole.
 

**hour 12 written off-site and posting late**

she curls in, possessive
of my love – a contraction
of sloppy kisses
and tender paws.
 

**hour 11 written off-site, just now back at my computer to post

Even as the cartography
of her skin
begins to fade, he maps
the constellationesque nature
of the thousand starred miles
between her freckles. Her eyes
are moonspill, outerspace, light
years scribbled onto parchment.
Her lips, the kiss of sky;
her smile all the paren
-theses he’ll ever need.

I have been clacking black
spor
-adic(t)
-ally all the live long day,
trying to find a way to spill my
self to page without throwing in
the (white) towel. I have indulged
in a third cup of coffee and a quiet room;
fed myself a bagel and a handful of phrase.

I’ve coughed. I’ve played.

I’ve splayed my fingers loose
and wondered if they’d wander off
on their own
(they tried, but got a bit lost.)

I’ve tossed 16 lines out the window
and fed them to the mocking birds
taunting me from their leafy places.
I’ve left traces of myself all over this house

– an empty cup here, a dang
-ling participle there. I’ve stared
at these walls
(which, by the way, need painting),
and walled myself upstairs in hopes
of just.one.more.moment alone.

I’ve stoned my own path. I’ve tripped and fallen.
I’ve stalled for time. I’ve rhymed, and un.
I’ve had fun. I’ve watched the sun
s t r e t c h    across the sky
and asked it not to set too soon.
I’ve longed for moon. I’ve swooned
at someone else’s lines and bided
my time and staggered my own sway.

I’ve dipped a toe in
and tasted the day.

We need a sign,
a sage, some semblance
of stage to soliloquy
our last songs.

We need a crowd,
a cloud of witnesses
to call us lost
and find us home.

We need a word to etch,
to stretch us into more;
a less
-on learned, kerned close.

We need a heartbeat,
ready feet stomped
loose
into unfamiliar shoes.

We need a mad
-dash joy to temper
all this violence.

We need a still
small voice to break the sigh
-lence.

Dawn brings fractured fragments: a murder
of ebony crows scattered across
a wire, inky feathered music
notes – treble clef, octave, breve.

That incessant sun, he’s a lemon
-orange scorched ping-pong ball
plopping up
where he doesn’t belong.

A stone-washed sky
breathes her secrets to
the raw umber of earth
and a skeletal tree clad only
in mismatched shoes.

The sun shines best
through the cracks,
through the tracks
of the paths less taken.

Shaken, we stir
the breeze; ask
the trees for ribbons
of things we do not know.

Throw us the glimmer
of a day spent raising
limbs, climbing something
greater than all this skin.