The Pebble and the Turtle
Underwater lay a smooth pebble never glowed upon at dawn from depths well below this sea’s sand bottom for who knows how long until recently when startled by a tsunami it became lodged, quite by accident, between a Loggerhead turtle’s shell and its hind legs frantically paddling to the surface where, loosened by waves washing over it on shore, and beside its own egg cluster, it’s deposited deep in sand shaded by tall grasses in whose midst leans a crooked no trespassing sign
Art/Life
After squeezing this soft clay face hard with fingers clenched as tight as can be into its skull’s empty sockets, I quickly realize it’s not clay, not the soft giving texture my fingers expected, and so relaxing my grip, I watch as this face fills back up with not just the color of its blood but with the exact same expression of fear it’s worn the entire time
A Wishful Moment
While night turns sideways along this half of the Earth, anticipating moments that come and go without much notice, I reach out to that one particular moment when, instead of stretched out to meet me, it snaps back in my hands as a reminder of the way the sun once shot a single ray of blinding light precisely through my nursery door’s keyhole, spelling my name for the very first time without any well-known letters’ help
Sequential
Handed me in another dream, a delicate white cup, spattered with muddy red flecks of color as though lifted off the shell of a cardinal’s egg, and filled with a warm, aromatic, tantalizing liquid, keeps slipping away each time my lips try sipping from it, causing my teeth to bite down hard on its rim, savoring only the porcelain dust this entire dream’s made of
A Dead Future
We won’t know
there’ll be nothing
left to do
when we’re dead
We won’t know
the Earth around us
any better than
when we were alive
Only those who gather
around us at the end
holding nothing’s
weightlessness
in their empty arms
as a final offering
understand
this sudden silence
that the rumors
of our deaths
have already spoken
After It’s Done Starting
What awaits my absence
stranded by the life
that’s buried me away
may be this empty desk
on which no one else
will ever again
place paper or pen
will ever again
write in praise of creation
using so many rescued
or discarded words
or ever know
it might have been
more than enough
to have left
just a few remnants
engraved forever
on such indelible whiteness