Open mouth chewers
Cheating
Stinky feet
Liars

Oh, I win!

I hate when people make lists about things they hate.

Some of us just naturally have fish lips.

your name stays with me
I am a suitcase of dreams

night is for hunting sleepers
it depends on dreams
as a day is a long dream

eyes see what they are thinking about
nightmares rise with the sun

your name has no words in it
is a sigh uttered in sleep
where arms flinch empty

I am insubstantial
I float through you

an unanswered question
I have dreamed myself
and you dreamed me

those lost forms float
through each other

never meeting
hands have no meaning

I can touch myself
only when the dream
becomes bright and wistful

intense and strangely sad
I can feel us

me having a body and a life
and then it goes pale
like a thief

prisoner of the future
and the past

a ghost that still knows
many years of gray
cannot take one satin night away

Beautifully written, Mom

Thank you

Art
Roco
pkd
Mom
Bill

I was dreaming
of you unexpectedly; you were sipping
strong coffee and my attention, a familiar voice drowning
out distance, weaving and drifting
between us, through my ears and lungs and fingers, moving
even lower, then taking
me by gunpoint, pulling
us closer together, walking
me through playlists of our past, singing
me back to stupid and dangerous love, repeating
the chorus we wrote together, turning
the volume up on the songs I’m constantly humming
without realizing.

I’ve never mastered poetry,
though I’ve written hundreds.
The keys click, click again
like a street mime pushing,
pushing, pushing the wall
and then some more.

There’s resolution,
even initial satisfaction, but
the wall is still there, and
the stones of the last poem
turn to dust and blow away.

Thank you

Harold
Kaalena

Quietly I make my way

while reading lusty novels

to keep my lonely stirred

and out of trouble.



Simply I walk my path

while listening for a footstep

to fall sneaky up behind me

and gift me with a grin.



Tenderly I shelter my worry

and dream of bigger days

and what messages come

from listening

to a heart still strongly beating.

you know i you!

lol

haha...seriously

The thought of sleep, it wages heavy war.
It weighs my eyelids down against their will.
But I do not submit to its sweet lore.
I fight for moments more to touch and feel.

Submerse myself in knowledge and the words
of authors whose great legacies urge on
and poets whose great loves still fly like birds
around this room long after lives are gone.

If I should fade to dark I’ll never know
what verse should come forth from these hands of mine.
What face and name should out of my mind grow?
What sultry grace should birth within each line?

But then, alas, my eyes begin to close.
I dream immortal thoughts of rhyme and prose.

The pilot in the broken
plane loses sight of the
ground and goes ripping
across the massive night
upside
down. Above his head
crowds of cars crawl
along the concrete ground.
Far below his feet galaxies
eat galaxies in feasts of
waving flame.
The instruments
are off. The headset’s
useless. No other lights are
met. He cuts the void
alone. The plane’s
frame, ribbed like wicker,
shivers as speed increases.
In the scarlet aura of a minor
light the pilot flies a straight
line through dense, black
space. On and on the
flight pierces emptiness
until all is gone but the
sense of moving forward.
The pilot presses feet
flat against the floor,
tenses muscles to mimic
stillness, reminds himself
of mountains, the sun,
things that don’t seem to
move. The effort stuns.
He keeps it stable and
wings toward an opposite,
unreachable destination.

Hi (((Bill))) - thank you!

The first time I kissed a boy,
it was as if a bomb had exploded,
as if its timer had been set
by some manic puppeteer
in a rare mood of giving
to go off
at fifteen years and some odd days,
designed to detonate the second
his lips touched mine.

The newness
of being inside another's mouth,
to be that close
to someone’s thoughts,
to have my cover clumsily blown
away, teeth to teeth,
tongue to tongue,
such a blinding blast of
of intimacy and awkwardness,
normalcy,
the collateral damage.

I walked from that wonderful wreckage
with my expectations in pieces,
the taste of his cinnamon gum
the shrapnel left lodged in my head.