Nature as a Writing Prompt

Variegated brushstrokes on canvas
And should we know the painter?
She drew an asylum with no bars
A staircase with no cause
A welcome mat speckled with greens and blues.

Phonographs play ‘birds’ –chirpchirp—
With ‘wind’ its baseline, footsteps keep rhythm,
Going always going.
Characters are molded. Stories are penned.

It's choreography at its best—
A performance piece where every leaf knows his place and every blade of grass bends on cue. The sun plays curtain and we laugh at the right moments.

But he doesn’t feel it.
“Beauty is nothing,” he says “A construct.”
A plastic mannequin.
A fairytale’s daughter, preservatives and fillers.

But she knows better. And with a perfect Fibonacci finger, she presses her lips, “Shhh.”
There are things that he may never understand
Like
Somehow there are 13 petals on a daisy
And that’s why he always loves her
Rather than not.

Faro del fin del mundo

We drove east chasing
The shoreline
And what it meant
To reach the end of the world.

We felt so significant
In that purple odometer light
That our shadows could have been
Painted on postage stamps.

“Let us yell with all our capacity;
Splinter the sky with our cadence”

And in that punctured night,
I sat swim-suited and voiceless
Sipping wine
Dirtied Dixie cups

As you untangled my hair.
--Your fingers speaking
For the both of us,

Let’s get out of this mess.

A Poem for Mark In California

Where are we with our winter scarves and bad decisions?
We've flown ourselves to California.
We painted the ocean and leapt from bridges
With memories around our ankles
Like hard bound story books.

Where are we with our ink stained fingers and leather jackets--
Our frigid laughter painting fog-speak in the sky?
We stand tall like candles
Warmed from the Santa Ana,
And resolved
Like codas
Atop intricate compositions.

but what I really mean is you're the best thing that I've ever found...

I. (if you were here)

I'd tell you about a girl who wore
god- aw(e)ful cowboy boots
and sang pretty folk songs.
You'd like her
and I'd like
to be her
or kiss her
or write about her.

She's hum hum humming
and strum strum strumming
and I'm thinking like
I think
best--
hands calloused from
dragging
along paper.

II

I want to take pictures
of the shadows
and how they change
by the end of the day.
We are not permanent
and that could be enough.

I'll call you to hear
your voice.

III.

I sleep in
a space
where your rolling papers stick
to my dresser.
Where we communicate
in Bastardized English
and tiny sounds made of consonants
in the bed with the blue
cotton sheets.

Ah,
How things are kept.
swept up
under the law of parsimony
like pieces of tarmac--
simple
but not simplistic.