a ritual to start the work week
How can I square
your thoughts and prayers,
your vows and oaths to change, for growth
with all the fear
that keeps you here
so sad and still, no drive, no will?
Perhaps our lines
will never meet,
my spirals mine to find, complete,
and your tower
yours to protect.
Slept-on power can not affect.
So if I must
unearth my own,
then let my gratitude be known.
I need not throne.
I need not crown
to tear your broken systems down.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
the tip of the spear
the flat of the coin
pricked and pressed
prepared to stack
to stand to grind
to join the grip
of your hand the awe
of your gaze resolved
renewed and relieved
to see to breathe
to prove to praise
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Quiet can settle and firm like soil:
rich with potential, heavy and dark.
Press it into your palms.
Quiet can blow and flutter like breeze:
lifting hair and leaf, sliding over skin.
Spread your fingers for it.
Quiet can flicker and burn like flame:
warm and bright, expanding.
Keep it carefully nearby.
Quiet can spill and flow like stream:
pouring over and into itself, slippery.
Cup your hands to cleanse and sip.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Hands spin ticking off old hours
our fingertips flick past fresh posts
ghosts of silent laughs and gasps
grasping at our backs and beckoning
us toward reckoning with the rewards
hard won and wired into our brains
trained to fire joy off like guns
automatically responding to thumbs
and hearts and hands replicated
insatiable thirst for perception
desperately fearing deflection
destruction of our carefully framed
faces and names wild places tamed
racing to bottomless brunch mimosas
forever refreshing but never
addressing our pulpy fictions
friction bubbling under sunny skies
wise words forgotten as bunny hops
cops tried and the crying never stops
just so many digital tears
tearing through our motherboards
another hoarder holding the heat
taken and shade thrown under
thundering buses backed up
stuck and cussing out cups and
handcuffs for cutting us in line
time and time and time and time
wasted worrying who when what
why and why and why and why
hold that which can not stop?
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
I come to myself my phone in one hand and a candle in the other
set for the expansive, expanding universes they reveal.
One we fall through in tandem, hand-in-hand,
float and flit, flicked and flowing, swept
by so many streams. But the other,
this webbed and dusty attic,
must be mine alone.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
If I can't be your beacon,
let me be your bay,
if not your bay,
your shore,
or hoist your arms up wide
and hold my breeze.
Let me carry you
and you me.
Whether we stand apart,
deep seas between us,
or sail atop them,
shipmates,
we sing the only melody
either of us knows,
our voices wide
and high.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
One more stone is all the cairn can hold;
earth's riches move lump by lump.
Two is too is to juggle is to drop;
each blaze only lights the way to the next.
Three assemble forming four and five hums;
multiplied, seep to flood and flow to rush.
Six feet clear an easy path for seven, alone.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
I can't help but misspeak my history,
miss uncomfortable subtexts
and gloss over little mysteries.
The sheen is a shield
that keeps my soft parts unprodded,
my daily trauma triggers unplucked.
Because once thrummed,
these strings can echo unchecked,
a minor wire sizzling with too much heat.
So stand before my upturned feet
to witness what their roughness reveals
about the smooth myths my two lips repeat.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
the mind flows
the body dams
hinder and drive
slipping and held
emotions billow
steam and downpour
the skin receives
the muscle seizes
the bone remembers
the brain jumps
conclusions fall
pool and wellspring
returned and fresh
freeze and seeping
the mind dams
the body flows
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Pull back the curtains, my bleary-eyed loves,
for morning's warmth awaits.
Peek through the blinds at first, if you must, but
know that your fear must melt
with the dripping icicles that slowly
release their grip and fall
shattering to their ends; it's best to throw
the window open, know
the swords that threaten you, to see their shine
so you may recognize
the lies they ask you to internalize.
Night may seek to lull you
into the comfort of the status quo.
But morning lets you watch
your cell bars tilt, fade and fall, mere shadows.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
scalpel's edge couldn't slice
the refracted sunrise
casting spectrum swatches
across my chest and arm,
couldn't remove orange
from red, purple from blue,
just as it fails to take
wick from flame, flame from smoke,
and curling smoke from air,
take one breath from the next,
take reflection from glass,
the mulling of new paths
from the choice to take them,
the front heel's push into
fresh sand from the back heel's
slow peel out of the past
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
