SHIELDS

How many murders in a broken mirror

How many superstitions and lacerations

Shards of an unincorporated self

How much blame and shame

How many orphans and riddles, curses and slurs

How many humiliations

How many shadows, loomings and woundings

Fables and counterfeit conspiracies

Cacophonies

How many betrayals and trespasses

Duelings and deflections

Shatterings within shatterings

Scars

How many shadowed segmentatas

How many shields

How many men 

Before the Man emerges.

MINUS THE METAPHOR

We can sit around a table on the Sabbath

on the first day of daylight savings

eating Olallieberry Pie and Vanilla Bean Ice Cream

for breakfast and debate if there is a god or not

and whether the divine force was here

before the beginning or will arrive just before the end.

We can muse on the existence of intelligent life

elsewhere and why all our efforts to make contact 

go unanswered – and then wonder if

our SETI instruments are just not smart enough 

to receive what’s being sent.

We can make ourselves delusional

pondering the imponderables

by setting query inside of query

as if they were nested matryoshka dolls

or by stacking turtles on top of turtles 

into infinity. We can and, happily, we will 

do this, all of this one fine morning 

and probably with a little pie on our face 

because we must. Because we must 

make meaning. Without it we don’t know 

who we are. Without it we are like the poet

minus the metaphor. Like the heavens

without the stars.

MUSIC LESSON

Two men.

One young, one old.

In a redwood grove.

At the end of a day.

A lesson.

A gift.

A legacy passed on.

Music from man to man.

Love.

A clarinet sings in the shade.

Birdsong answers from ancient branches.

A burl clones new growth.

Embouchure is everywhere.

THE ANECDOTE

The toxin and the tonic.

The thief and the saint.

The ransom and the bail.

We are these.

We are these.

One sunny day in Santa Barbara

I took my broken heart to the Mission

and handed it to a lame priest.

He gave it back sooner than I expected, saying:

Thorns have roses.

Thorns have roses.