DAY 21: Morning Offerings

Morning Offerings

I always believed that girls
like you would never give
me the time of day.

The type with hips like
grandfather clock pendulums in slow motion.
Setting a room on stun, freezing time
and leaving fantasy in their wake,
eyes of men glazed over like
frosted glass watch faces.

So our lives revolved around
seconds of second glances
that would never add up to minutes of conversation.

But then they did.

I told you how I was a morning person
and you said that you could sleep for hours,
sometimes into the afternoon.

I explained how sunlight meant sheer potential
a day with a story waiting to be written.
Hours of minutes with no agenda
except possibility.

And I wondered how you
could possibly sleep all day
and all of the potential moments that
were wasted buried under covers.

I decided that I would give you the gift of my mornings.
I heralded them in as we watched the sky lighten,
you slept on my shoulder
and we fit together like carefully carved cogs.

Watching you walk to your doorstep with dawn in your hair
I remembered how we said we made cameo in each other’s waking dreams
and knew that this must be potential
must be providence.

That night my fingers became sundial stopwatches
by candlelight tracing shrinking shadows
across your skin.

Morning daydreams were interrupted
by the sound of your bare feet
on my kitchen floor.

You wore my favorite button-down
and left over kisses like morning offerings.
Your skin still smelling of the oranges
I had traced along your lips, the curve of your neck.
I wanted to make memories of you synchronize with
the smell of citrus.

I wanted to give you my mornings.

If I were a magician,
I could somehow stretch those last days into weeks.
I could get you to hear the choir claps and halleluiahs
that chimed every time you looked at me.

But not even magic could saw in half,
dissect the moments we spent together enough
to make me believe that I had a rabbit’s foot dangling
from my chest,
the one you’d been waiting for,
disguised in the mornings on a mundane life.

I used to be a morning person
knowing that sunlight meant sheer potential
a day with a story waiting to be written,
hours of minutes with no agenda except possibility.

But mornings aren’t the same
without you in them,
and now I sleep through to afternoons.

As morning creeps across my bed.
I hope that it might find you there,
where you ought to be.

But it never does.

So seconds pass thinking of you
thoughts never manifesting as second chances,
unable to freeze time, and
waiting for you to bring back my mornings.

Waiting for you to give me back the time of day.

DAY 15: At home for week 3

Something old and pretentious.








OCKHAM SHAVING

FIRST INTENTION
William shaves the faith from
the reason of his face.
“Musn’t complicate the chin
with plurality of hair…
to do so would be vain.”

He finds all the pieces unique
in the basin and laughs—
“I think I will name that one Aquinas”

SECOND INTENTION
William assigns Aquinas
the symbol “hair”
and it begins to loose significance
resembling the other floating
objects in the white water.
Aquinas becomes hair.
No longer particular or individual.
“What a nominal idea,” William says.
As he dumps the basin of universals from
his second story window,
they no longer exist.

It is easier to rid ourselves of the namless.

DAY 6: At home week 2 (a sestina)

Something from an old notebook; I am going to count it as my at home this week. (Be minful that this online format may change the line breaks a little).


Parole
First memory of the morning—footsteps
that sounded on the dusty ground of the prison
like steel-toed raindrops. The sleep that barely found me was the eye
of the storm that brews in the courtyard below. A tear
slides down my face, for the hunt
in progress has ended my slumber—jarred by the stirring beyond these walls.

Shake the morning’s dew from my head and find the far wall
is papered by a large, dark man who steps
cautiously towards me as if he were hunting
some furious beast. “I assure you I’m not dangerous imprisoned.”
He smiles, he doesn’t know my language, but tears
me from the urine-stained cot a sadistic satisfaction in his eyes.

A priest greets me at the door with sorrowful, avoiding eyes.
He would like to help me, but I see the crucifix on the wall
behind me and think, “Who saved him?” If only I were still Catholic…long since torn
away from that disillusionment. I turn from him towards the steps
that lead me to my release, far beyond the prison.
Rays of light strike me like the arrows of the sun-hunter.

Frantically try to shield myself—hunting
for clarity. Hoodwinked by the light’s haziness, my eyes
finally find themselves. Guards line the farthest side and a sniveling mass of a prisoner
the other. Fuego. The ground becomes a palate blood, saline before the canvas of wall.
A uniformed man steps onto the Dias. A guard tears

my knees from function with his stick. Shirt torn
from my back—a flogging maybe—the man hunts
for the words—conspiracy treason. Sticks step
across a drum. Sadist offers me a cigarette and a blind for my eyes.
Take the free smoke. Towed to my predecessor’s pool, I wish the wall
would embrace me like a protective lover. Another priest from the prison

asks me if there is anyone I would like to write outside the prison
I blow smoke into my eyes. Maybe I can blame it for the tears
that have arrived like unwelcome guests. My only love, the wall,
knows my sole desire. My hands hunt
behind me for a door that I hope my eyes
had missed. The priest hangs his head in the soon to be memory of me and I step

back hard hoping for mortar of the prison will give way. Fuego. Bullets hunt
my organs with precision as they tear through me, leaving me with a dozen blind eyes.
Painted on the wall with each bullet’s brushstroke, I crumple. Sadist takes my cigarette—I die to his fading footsteps

DAY 2: In Case of Emergency

When I was young, my mother would
come into my room, check to see that I was breathing
and go back to sleep.
Since I moved out, she has no other option than
to pace the floors and pass the hours until she can call and
hear the reassuring sound of my breath.

She says she’s
been having dreams again—
the ones that find me
handsomely dressed in caskets.
She’s been having them all my life.

These dreams are not premonitions.

These are exaggerated memories.
These are contractions three months early.
These are the tears of
water breaking before it should.
These are the nightmares of a woman who almost lost her first son.

Because by all accounts,
I should be dead by now.
The survival rates of premature infants
in 1978 were so low that
two pound babies didn’t live more than minutes.

The average birth weight of a child
is eight pounds.
I was born six pounds incomplete.
Sometimes I think that some of my missing pieces
remained, settled somewhere in my mother.
She’s carried the weight of it ever since.

So every time she paced the kitchen
floor was my mother rocking back to sleep
her worry that roused in her like
a restless child.

After her latest dream,
she asks me to carry my next of kin,
in case of emergency.
Says she can’t go on wondering.
Every time she calls and gets a machine
rather than my voice, she settles in for the worst.

I tell her that I do,
but the part that I don’t tell her is:
“If I die, you will be the last to know.”
I’ve made sure of it.
If something should happen
her phone will not ring.
Paramedics will place long distance phone calls
to friends to cities hours away.
Word of my demise will travel down highways and pay $6 in tolls
to be delivered.

My parents spent three months watching me grow
inside a plastic womb.
Time with their son revolved around
intensive care visiting hours.
Mechanical beeps and buzzes whispering,
“It is OK.”
“He’s fine.”
And so machines will not comfort them--
It will be flesh.

It is out of love that
I’ve listed friends rather
family to carry the casket
of bad news to my parents.

And this isn’t a premonition.
This is a memory of the strength lacing my bones.
Memories of hearing about my father, who, when confronted with
bad bedside manners from a doctor who said,
“You might as well leave; there is nothing you can do.”
He responded with “You are talking about my son.”
It took two grown men to restrain him.
Two men to pull back strong shoulders, force him into another room.
And I am his son.
So don’t worry about me.
While I may have been incomplete when I came into this world,
I am whole now.

My life has been an audition for others.
For people strong enough to carry me
through this life and to the grave if that’s what I need them to do.
Shoulders strong enough to support you, Mom
and carry your tears if I don’t come home.

So sleep,
sleep now and
know that this weight
is no longer yours to carry.