bits of elsewheres

protuberance
an echo poem *
[written late last night]

i mouth my secrets from a
mountaintop, where they are heard as silence
by everyone. the breeze that blows here is
flecked with bits of elsewheres, and the
sand that grits my soles the sum
of anywhere and nowhere, fragments of
a family of rocks, somewhere, all
shedding their substance to the
cutting caress of the wind. an echo sounds
my voice, in a tone i do not
recognize: my being
tallied in mistakes not made.

i see myself a
poet only when alone. a poem
does not wriggle when the sun is
out, for fear its presence will outshine the words. it is the
dusk that finds the gaps of which i am a product.

* (After Jennifer Hill, this poem contains an "echo"
made by reading the last word of each line, in a downward fashion.)

black & white

"Dichotomies" ~ a quasi-poem
[originally posted as a Facebook note on 11.14.08]

I think people
get so hung up
on dichotomies,
on good and bad,
on right and wrong,
that they fail to realize
that lies are not always evil,
that hope is not always false,
that love is not always perfect,
that change is not always a mistake,
that tradition is not always exclusive,
that family is not always to be trusted,
that the future is not always predictable,
that giving up is not always the only choice;
because they just don't really know any better,
they tend not to know that what's best for them
is not always what feels the most comfortable,
what appears to be the least frightening,
what inspires the greatest confidence,
what induces the least dissension,
what looks the most familiar;
they see the black & white,
and they panic, and they
fail to consider the grey;
and now, of course,
as I usually do,
I digress.

~ Siesta Lingo