i can’t stop imagining how it would feel to be a snake shed the shell of myself

As the voices merge and swim  in unison beneath the darkening blue,  as swallows dart above the top 

You made an art of freedom in restraint, O wilderness! O careful cultivation! Lover, lady, lion, patron saint.

Focusing  Setting goals  is an obsession  that pushes 

Dolls of glazed porcelain in China towns Posed proudly upon their doily shelves, yet I am dusty beneath the kitchen chair.

We get rain a lot like tears, hot, clouds like pallors, like the shade on Grandfather's face

Father believed I could not love a tree Because you had no hands for me to hold,

to Hell when I die, all my many fails and transgressions and trespasses but sin

Where unchosen silences abound people whisper silently inside. Silence whispers, inside people

This pen is drained. The barrel’s dry.

An inveterate die-hard listmaker The Buddha

She lived before the lighthouse rose. She loved before the library

Blind, as a tick hovers for its next meal, I hunger after you, leap to your smell,

we witnessed fallen men, drifting from wet alleys with their bundles— in Cohen’s rasping hallelujah

It was the kind of day that death should not visit, should be respectful enough, of life, to stay tucked

Facebook has solved that pesky problem of mortality. Most of my dead friends seem to keep having birthdays.

According to my Baptist neighbors, I am docketed for torture from my demise until the heat death of the universe.

Say it isn’t so, Momma, rock me slowly, ease the pain. Wipe the teardrops from my eyes,

Forests of green flank slate mountains obscured...

The dark summer clouds are roaring and hanging. She dreamed again of the white-Walled room…