Whether or not you can muster the wherewithal 
to plug up the rain, blow back the stampede of clouds
and hook your extended arm ’round the sun, dragging 
it back to bask under and to share in its warmth,
find your own smoldering log first. Feed it with breath, 
guard it with resolve, learn its heat and its dampness,
where it ashes and flakes and when it catches in flame.
Focus its light. Let it lead you through your feats,
however Herculean, and let it reveal
your follies, too: firework and many-hued balloon.
And if more simple tasks await,
still find and feed, inflame, inflate.

---

love notes
a ritual to start the work week

When we say “love wins,” we mean it will.
We speak some ultimate truth,
with eyes that reach past the horizon 
over the dense treetops that
crowd out light from the forest floor,
follow the sun as it floods
far-off hillsides, imagining its splashy
yellow and juicy orange as it clings
to rain-soaked meadows, and 
feel its warmth at our backs
as it rises to end another night,
many mornings from now,slowly warming the chill and 
urging us forward: a spell
cast in open hearts, that much 
easier to entrance. To share.

---

love notes
a ritual to start the work week

The breeze swipes my cheek and brow
nudgingly: time to begin,
it sighs, a gentle demand.

Shimmying leaves fuzz around
my eardrums, fizzle my gaze
and frazzle my synapses.

Like snow meeting flames. Like tears
evaporating on hot
blacktop. Like gasping. Like Mars.

---

love notes
a ritual to start the work week

Can it be, when faced with walls
of thick fog rising and falling,
sliding into each other and all around
us, that we rise with them, billowing?
That we slide underneath, equally
uncontainable and swirling?
Can we use our pace — each frenetic
and rushing, yet slowly expanding
as one — as our power, eke through
cracks to widen, expose, and glow,
beckoning? Can we plume like smoke?
Hiss and slip, reach through pinholes
and pour, forever slipping over each other
to fill new expanses, do we dare?

---

love notes
a ritual to start the work week

The alchemy of gathering transforms 
us from within: little switches flipped and
mutations gained. Skin pressed into muscle
and muscle pressed to bone, palm in palm and
aura to aura, we grow with each squeeze,
compressed into something new. Come change me,
my loves. Embrace me into my next self, 
guide my evolution with your caress, 
my growth with your closeness. I crave the heat
of instability, reacting to
your you-ing with my me-ness, gaining and
losing, trading blocks to build new castles
and empty old moats, yearning to be grown
and held, reshaped by magic all our own.

---

love notes
a ritual to start the work week

Frequent flutters and a constant sizzle,
something like fuzzy electricity jumping
across imperfect connections or
the seventeen-year cicadas screaming
into summer’s stink, crowd me out,
do not hold me, do not embody me,
do not necessarily nudge or nuzzle,
yet always push and pull my gut and
gizzard into inhuman acrobatics:
my brain playing chutes and ladders
with newts and adders, doubt-addled
and mistruth-splattered without 
taking root, just blind branches reaching
for ghost-light, any sign of room to grow,
any word of acknowledgement 
or shadow-sliver of home. No, don’t
fill me up, you frothy frustrations
that urge painful gestations through pesky
garbled permutations too eager to check.
You are not me, so not of me, sow not in me,
grow not, own not, knot not around my mind
nor tourniquet my heart, lungs, spleen,
clean thyself of me by sifting and sieving,
crushed and squeezed by holy tendrils,
breathed out like filthy droplets into
utter innocuousness, untethered and free.

---

love notes
a ritual to start the work week

The battery in the old clock next to my desk
is not quite strong enough to push the second hand
all the way through the thirty-fourth second of the 
wrong minute of the wrong hour. And yet it does 
keep tick-tick-ticking all the same, counting nothing. 

The thin black grid of the window screen boxes up 
the greens and browns of two treetops, their uneven 
branches reaching into each other, out and up,
and the wispy white cloud that slowly slides eastward
through soft blue skies, pixelating the gradient.

---

love notes
a ritual to start the work week

If you believe, as I do, that little 
ripples can stretch into waves and oceans,
then you, too, must worry and fret when your 
finger mis-taps or the milk-pour misses 
your glass. 

The mighty ant that lifts giant leaflets
and carries them back to the mound knows that
its impact is only felt in tandem.
To choose to do is huge, nevermind height 
or mass.

---

love notes
a ritual to start the work week

One tick ’til four, she peaks 
just before disaster 
pours itself onto us; 
adds her weight, builds its churn. 
Rough cycles spin and soak, 
hiding her. Catalyst—
fist raised in full salute, 
lit by the fading sun—
surges forward, lifting 
up the tides: a jail break 
bursting, cacophonous. 
Rivers run unbound and 
echo through the valley. 
A wave and then a snap: 
new bridges to raise up. 
Tears wiped clean, sobs slowing 
to gentle groans, once more
she peeks out grinning, sly.

---

love notes
a ritual to start the work week

Heavy and huge, some slowly sighing mass,
expansive I sit, grown by my own breath. 

Liquid rather—a lava pool whose thick 
heat releases gently upward, soft harm;

returned to muck, holed up, hidden, cocoon-
ridden, mid-shift and shapeless; I begin

another period to traverse and
stretch to end. Who could help themselves from this?

---

love notes
a ritual to start the work week

A tangle of wires, 
switches, screws and circuits
connect us, reach through earth
and air to find their way
from me to you and back. 
Some ordered jumble of
lines and dots, ones and ohs,
sent screaming into space 
by hopeful fingertips
and hungry eyes, dashes
to meet you where you are,
to call for your gaze and
urge you closer to me:
a fire burning red,
impatiently smoking
in giant swirling plumes.
How fast that thicket of
electric sticks sparks and
flames. How bright. How quickly
cut short by water, too.

---

love notes
a ritual to start the work week