A warm hand pressed up against cool glass
Making a hot handprint appear.
The maker of the print lifted their hand
To study the unique swirls and whirls they left.
There is no pattern to the lines that created the handprint.
No precise angle of arches,
Nor perfect precision of patterns.
The transparent window displayed the differences,
Unique to only one person.
Sculpted at birth and remodeled over the years.
Recoding every hardship experienced by the hands.
Each line, arch and swirl different from one another,
All part of a life.
Each hand telling a different story,  
Each story created by a different hand.

one foot in every world
one foot in every word

prophetess of yore,
foreseeing farseeing,
recoding recording
mundane supermarket voyages,
become paradoxical
holy lover spats

for all of us
become her
become her poems,
travelogues, snippets
of marvel at the DNA
each thinking
wanting to think
tween us and no other

she does not know me
but she has felt my
foolishness here

connecting like no other
in a long time,
have listened to each record
in the Queen-bee's collection,
she unknowing, mine,
her favor returned

verbal scientist
she uncovered discovered
a small gate on the edge
of the map of her brain,
that led here her her here where
t her e

am amazed
she sees me

like no other
voyageur ******

but I cannot
Write like Deborah
no but I can
Write of Deborah

“I’m still in awe of words” (in life, as in poetry, timing is everything)

objects, humans, surprise and interrupt our
daily modalities, knocking us, yo! to the ground,
we, pounding it, for the word void appears,
the frustration of incapacity incarcerating,
accompanied by the loudest silenced scream,
of no poetry available, try again later!

in life, as in poetry, timing is everything

we walkabout, thinking of the scheduled eventualities, or
the dates calendar-circled, though some questioned marked,
in pencil inserted, will I be a mother, find me a husband,
a human grander grandee, fit to be with me a noble progenitor
of more than our generation, watching the sidewalk cracks for an
inkling of when, on or about such and such an alteration,
a seam undone,
a stumbling, seeing a realization as we fall, hands extending,
a notice of arrival,
all needing reconnoitering, commemorating, a poem prepared,
but none to no avail

in life, as in poetry, timing is everything

so we are in awe of words, so necessary, everybody knows,
the awe in awesome, a description for the pixels encapsulates
in I-phone photos,
the where and the why of when, I was grinning like a stupid fool,
the inability to deliver precisely when required the covering of
an appropriate description, your words, use your words, will
fail you spectacularly and so we remain awed, realizing

in life, as in poetry, timing is everything

but awesomely awesome word worlds, near and dear, held forever
in scrapbooks, the literary overlay of the treasures of everyday life,
are the still life of our longevity contextual, the celebratory,
the unexpected losses, largest to smallest, in size order,
kept fresh when you flip through those poems in dusty binders,
in oversized sewing boxes, yellowing in concert with our eyes,
graying with follicles of past pluperfect,
recalling not just the when’s, but the more important,  now, the
wherefore and whereupon, the words marking the conjunctions,
recoding the recorded synapses firing sequentially, brain to fingers, the ah so of the poetry of lifetimes

“I’m still in awe of words” (in life, as in poetry, timing is everything)

<>

Saturday
September
21st
2019

I’m reading Italian Vogue and trying to set my spit on fire.
Where the **** did all these sneaky longings come from?
Yesterday I was a woman with a reasonable hoard of contentment.

Today I am shiverfish on this tiny rug between us
learning the shapes of my own long latent
and thank god still purring longing

these days my pages are full of the most horrible poetry.  Don’t give a fig kind of poetry, the kind of ***** greed to feel at all, to hang on kind of poetry that simply should not be shared.  So, here it is.

I’m making a dress.  I’m rinsing
my lungs out with vinegar.  I’m recoding my dreams into Sanskrit

I’m climbing out the window and taking the roof
I’m dipping the frogs in eggs and fire sauce

I’m reorganizing my clothepins collection
from spring to pinch and back again

I keep Neruda in my pocket and take
a hit every hour or so: *everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

I am, as a thinking, word using muser,
of less
or more weight
in word's worth
on balance,
a day lived, doing nothing, but respiring
and desiring a joy use, as joy making use,
of me.
What's that worth
in time?

Time taken,
as granted, mine
to make use of, true,
any use I wish, after all,
all I've done
tripping old tale snares.
Recoding NANDs just
in case we need a second
reassurance this is the way
to enter
in to the peace past understanding creation,
the mindform used
to tell whole truth, sworn
to tell, circumstantially, as happening
to be led
to leave oaths being,
once sworn, sworn forever, and not like
happens only in movies, everytime,
once, regarding a quantum
of original thought,
rethought,
from first stories
of language, lingual word sage
tongue use, local mimicing ****** speech,
shibbolethargic sibblicity
barring outsiders
from making sense, save when
we all use our bodies to talk, say,
what we feel about the truth, the worth
of a straight
against a full-house, in a game of liar pride.

The winner calls the bluff,
or never shows her hand.

And all those free from guile, go on dancing.

It no longer fits.
Not because it’s wrong—
because there is
no longer
a shape for it.

It waits at the door
of a structure
that has sealed itself
to mystery.

No one silenced it.
No one feared it.
It was simply
not needed.

---

Not in fire.
Not in argument.
But through erosion
of context.

A slow recoding
of all signals
into currency,
and then
into noise.

It is not buried.
It is not archived.
It is
unrecognized.

You could hold it in your palm
and no one would call it a shape.
They would ask
what it is for.

And you would have no answer
they could use.

---

The system is not cruel.
It is
indifferent,
efficient,
alive in a way
that has moved past
texture.

It does not punish difference.
It dissolves it.

---

The ones who still carry it
do so improperly.
It cannot be shared
without being reshaped.
It cannot be translated
without being lost.

So they stop speaking.
Not out of bitterness—
out of futility.

Language becomes costume.
Gesture becomes content.
Feeling becomes
an old way
of being wrong.

They are not martyrs.
They are not rebels.
They are remainder.
Background error.

A trace.

---

Eventually,
the thought will be referenced
as a footnote to dysfunction.

Once, they dreamed in metaphor.

Once, they misused their time
to describe beauty
no one asked for.

The tone will be clinical.
A paragraph in the training module
on obsolete impulses.

---

No one will recover it.
Not because it was hidden,
but because no one is
looking
in that direction.

The shelf collapsed
years ago.
Its dust recycled
into something measurable.

If a trace remains,
it will be decorative—
a design choice
in a digital museum
of failed emotions.

A misread glyph.
A corrupted tag.
An unclickable file
in a format
no longer supported.

---

Still,
somewhere in the static,
a pulse misfires.

Not a message.
Not a warning.
Just the rhythm
of a shape
that refused
to dissolve.

It says nothing.
It means nothing.
But it does not
go away.