I wish to age like a wrap-around porch
In a thunder storm,
While generations tell tales,
Sipping drinks.
A porch of blinking stars,
A shelter out of rain,
With ascending and descending friends.

I will age like a tree,
Grow stronger in the wind;
Give shade and shelter to all
Beneath my ring-aged limbs.

I wish to age as a river bends,
Contiguous with all shores;
Floating everyone I know
On eternal waters,
A current winding with no rest.

I will age like a star,
Burning bright, giving light,
Something to reach for.

I wish to age like a mountain,
With secret caves and riches.
And you can rock your soul
Around, over or through,
Solid, snow-capped summit,
Beckoning you.

I will age as the moon,
In stages, full and new;
Each night different,
Unnoticeable fading,
As all who age will do.

summer is lonely
without direction
and I'm ******
I prefer living in the shadows
and imagining dreamy tones
lost on auto pilot
foggy days
time is a concept that has gone away
but I still feel like I have something to say
nothing comes out or up anyway
but maybe that's okay
for just a few more days

you're not doing well
with skin like bed sheets
ebbing tides in your forehead
and the malady that keeps your mind guessing,

these next six nights
of not having to feel
so alone will make you
fall back into sleep
to grow roots.

i'll cut holes in the ozone
to put your heartache in

i'll walk you to the hospital,
i'll wait in a white room,
place your sad eyes in my drawers
until my hand breaks

the universe is twice as big as we think it is
and 'you are so important to me'
is easier to digest than
skipping heart beats

i miss you like a dart hits the iris of a bullseye,
or a train ticket screams 4:30 at 4:47,
and
i've fallen in love

you're the only one that made that idea
less devastating.

raw
green beans
this past afternoon  
brought back
my Oma
full white apron on
in  the kitchen
one summer  
in Germany
decades ago
window wide open
to the garden
sitting at the table
busily breaking them up
together
for her delicious vegetable soup  
I'm  helping ,I'm helping
I said as  they broke
in my little fingers
her soup
a mere  memory
as she  stopped making it
   a lifetime ago

Today Grandma sinks in the seat, and smiles

at the fake trees, while the black
and brown crosses that hang over
her  shoulders as cancer calls her name underneath.

Holding the heartbeat monitor with her eyes,
the priest says "she's been cleansed, she's been cleansed,
it'll be alright, it'll be alright,

She's God's favorite."

Today in the mirror,
her
reflection removed from
her
beauty she once written with
her
lipstick, yes,

beside her
coffin, I mean bed.

the doctors notes declare
her
hope as thin as a paper cut,
the smell of fake smiles and dreamy prayers
stain the white walls, but with the families
tears run like razor-blades against the
skin, this may get better,

She still sits serenaded by silence,
baptized into a cloud of gloom.

Today it feels like a black Christmas, but with
a green moon, and red stars, and weak blue angels,

Gee, thanks, oh young Mary, for all of today.

I've
become so numb

I can't feel you there,

I've become
so tired

so much more
aware,

by becoming this,
all I want
to do

is be more

like me

and be less

like

you.