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…

borage tomato maracuya pepino dulce and lemon home is an island, a corner of peace, my small imperfect paradise and the city roars outside, blistering under the sun helicopters coil the sky searching for a man on the run chopping the air the children bewildered they paralyze borage tomato maracuya pepino dulce and lemon my nerves strain, suffering abounds, a terror spun from violence and gangs and neighbors not having what would suffice and the city roars outside, blister

helping a friend with a bed out the door of their rental. the van parked in rain on the corner. their home like ants with a grasshopper being taken to bits. biking the quayside and toward a small house out in eastwall. all pieces about, and leaned on in corners, of their lives (I don’t see them often since they moved out to here). a garden as messy as a turned over pizzabox – beautiful to leave when you leave. they are selling the bed and have promised delivery – it's the bit

Join me, my wonder, palm to palm a walk in the wind with me under palms or pines or firs, such mercy skin to skin, a thirst holding fingers and palms our rhythm, our breathing. Walk with me through ribbon grass and leaves palm to palm before you eyelash me, flash me your blue-eyed smile. Feel it in your palm when crunching gravel, balancing on logs— come walk with me. Feel the quiver in palms that slide above the forest floor, our music our silent hymns. The wind is