outside my window

Riveted, my eyes, to the red swing,
pumping, pulling, pushing
By cold fingers imagined
but the movement real.

The palette of neon green chartreuse
challenges the vicious blue of the sky.
My altogether put together student would say God clashes,
no sense of style, but she wouldn’t say it aloud.
The thought was written all over her
coordinating jumpsuit.

Cave etchings scribbled on the sides of white scrapers.
I am not speaking truthfully.
A civilized people painted these black lines and circles,
but I do not understand and so
dismiss their meanings as archaic.
Safe in my ignorance?

Beyond the emaciated once leafy arbor
a pleather couch soaks up some rays.
Can a piece of furniture really smile?
The orange cushions, like maybelline lips,
smirk at me from several hundred feet within reach
of the glass and there is my answer.

Creeping up to the sunbather I see a cat,
equally as orange sniffing the big lips
curling its tail lightly around the chin waiting for a kiss.
The cat looks up, squints at the sun
and with a dismissive sniff retreats
to where I can no longer see him.

for you.

Little green light gone red,
I know you have gone to bed.
On the other side I am still awake
wondering which direction to take.

Near or far makes no difference,
I am who you are lying in the bed
with you right beside me in theory.
Yet you are what you are,
where you are
a world away.

A moon, a star and a light year,
you turn like the earth under the covers.
I watch you breathing in my dreams
more real than this moment now and
here you are in front of me.

Did you think we would meet?
Too real, too soon, too much to be true.
When the needle pierces the fabric it circles
only to return to the hole it has left.

surging
ocean
wave
breath
still
tide
plane
ticket
window seat
frost on the glass
sweat of your palms
kiss of my lips
touch of your cheek
a night and a day
taxi
hailed
luggage
passport
flight
return
memory
linger
red light
green light
hana
tul
set
wake up
before the other side
of the world catches on.

the contest

Peanut candy and fiber drinks,
plastic plates and mandarins,
feet dangling, open stares,
introductions, nervous faces,
polite bows stumble over names.

I retreat to a class like
the waiting room, the doctor's office.
English exam.
In the web, spider waiting
for her juicy flies,
such cute little flies.

Do you have any brothers or sisters?
Where do you live? I don't know.
How old are you? I don't understand.
I cannot eat these flies.
They are too beautiful.
I let them go, one by smiling one.
It's alright, the butterfly is still alive.

seven minutes

A butterfly, dead, sits in my grey mitten hoping for revival, a second metamorphis? Words, vowels, paper shredding, tapping of feet on the wood floor and I cannot understand, any of it. Tiredness brings on a wave of existentialism.

Mind floats to warm grass and the park in another city, another country. Will I return? Is there home? Hope Of My Existance- my definition. The desk is next to the ticking time bomb that measures each class. It will ring, I will get up and I will teach something about conjunctions, perhaps a verb, and if they're lucky, an interjection or two.

The teachers are more restless than the students. They hear the ticking class massive egg timer and they are boiling, some soft, others hard, most scrambled.

My fingers have finally thawed. Several cups of brown rice green tea and spoonfuls of lemon orange peel sugar in hot water find their way to the tips that type.

Three minutes and I look outside. Bruised brown fields that match the contents of my cup. A stillness in the dirt, a settling in the trees and tuxedoed crows watch and take it all in.

I stare at your picture and see butterflies, marmalade, the licking of fingertips, and the makings of an interesting sticky story.

foray into fashion