waiting

My eyes cannot 

stay open tonight. For weeks

I have longed

to pull back 

the thin sheet that separates

me from anxious

dreams; the kind 

where I'm waiting tables in some

vaguely familiar place 

and people are 

waiting for me to take 

their dinner orders.

The guilty panic 

starts setting in just as

I remember that

I haven't worked

at a restaurant for years.

Still, I feel 

them waiting for

me, just as I wait 

ever more impatient 

for just one restful night.

Poetic Bloomings #65 - Betrayal

Your mean-ing

I just don't know what
you mean when
you say you're a follower

of a religion whose deity
clearly stated that 
the greatest spiritual law is 

to love one another as 
you love god;
to judge not; to forgive. 

And yet, you judge. Harshly.

You call it god as you
judge true followers
who know to love you

despite the self-righteous wrath
you spew at
people whose lives, decisions, and

agony you could never imagine.
They will never
forget your judgment. Your mean-ing.




Poetic Bloomings #63 - Uncertainty, I don't understand

The Way

Just finished watching "The Way," so this prompt couldn't have had better timing.

Sometimes we walk
down paths chosen for us
by well-meaning folks

Sometimes we choose
the well-worn paths for ourselves

Sometimes we chance
down paths with well-meaning folks
who choose to share their journey

while searching for a path
of their own

Top 10 Tanka

Clear Direction made it to the Top 10 of Writer's Digests Poetic Form Challenge!

Thanks to Robert Lee Brewer for doing these. It's a great chance to try something new. This short form is one of my new favorites.

Foxy lady

You do not seek
to see behind
my mask
of timid refinement

You do not see
how I slink
unseen
into the background

You cannot hear
the faint pant
of anxious breath
trapped in this cage

You wear me around
your neck
a fine catch
to show your friends



April PAD #26 - animal

Love, rinse, repeat

What can be said that
has not been
uttered by thousands before me.

I am no Rumi or
Shakespeare or Shelley.
I  trip over trite words

and into your ready arms,
laughing at the
foot in my bumbling mouth.


April PAD #24 - love or anti-love

The jury is out

Your throne, dear sir,
is not heavenly nor kind.
Your tone will win you no souls.

You sit, so blind,
at your father's right hand, but
he's fit to judge for himself.

April PAD #22 - judgment

Sacred warriors

Inspired, perhaps, by Earth Day and watching "Howl" last night.


We left the compass
at home, forgotten in some
drawer full of coupons
and crumbs and fortune cookies.
We knew where we were going.

We felt our way through
the flat night, navigating
by murky moonlight
a spiderweb of street lights
that led to something beyond

city water pipes
and cookie cutter housing
divisions and fast
food drive-thrus. We followed the
elemental pull of some

primal lust buried
deep in our mother's mother's
bones, a knowing that
this land was the breast milk of
thousands who had walked and died

crossing great plains and
mountains, sacred warriors
led by ancestors
who traveled beside them and
honored their transcendent quest.




Poetic Bloomings #52:  from every ending comes a beginning

Going the distance

He thought I would come
to my senses
after I'd missed him awhile

as if distance could make
my bruised soul
fonder of the late nights

worrying where he might be
and who might
be siphoning his angry love




Poetic Bloomings # 51 - senses

Apology accepted

There are nights
when he cuddles in
to feel her
body close,
a warm apology for
all he has failed to
do today.

There are times
when she accepts the
naked truth
that he is
trying his hardest to be
the man he really
wants to be.

On those nights
she pulls his hand close
to her chest,
kisses his
fingers and slips an icy
toe toward his toasty
feet and laughs.




April PAD #7 - two people interacting without speaking