April Again  

Excessive green
and all those silly daffodils
splashing across the landscape.
The sunlight’s too bright,
too insistent for my winter eyes.
Even the dumb brown earth
wants to fool me,
sending up the daylillies
around my mailbox posts.

Lungs full of spring giddiness.
Rampant motion
outside my thin winter skin
and everywhere I sense
sap running, blood thinning,
grass greening, buds unwinding.

My heart forgot to hunker down
for the annual
winter-to-spring upheaval.
Forgot to remind myself
that spring’s only temporary.

Your letters are suddenly
not enough of you; your calls
are salt on my longing.
I decide, six states distant,
you cannot be my lover,
you can only be my friend,

a decision as silly
as those daffodils,
as temporary as spring.
  





 

First Poetry Slam                                                                                    

Here I am--the delicate, personal poet--
sure it isn’t for me,
a poetry slam-a fatal contradiction.
Persuaded by this venue,
a staid New England library,
I’ve come, fearing
a hyperbole of poets
riding torrents of words
into consummation.
Will I miss the dulcet tones
of poetic intoning, the safety
of a proper poetry reading?

but Kara succulently mouths
“Rebecca’s Words”, obscenities
concealed by good girl Rebecca
until filled with passion’s fruits,
they crept to Kara’s lips, exploded
from her pretty rosebud mouth.

Kara and Rebecca warm me,
skeptical Yankee with my mouth
set firm, now thawing
and smiling as Laurel,
cat-like, purrs
her body’s words
into her story
of sex, sin, and salvation.

Then, like fireworks sending flowers
into a night sky,
Jay’s suddenly on stage
dazzling us, talking us
into nakedness.
He wants to be naked, he tells us,
I want him to stay clothed.
But he strips me down,
line by line,
until I come away, satisfied
as I recall
my first honey-coated kiss
on a warm bed long ago.

Portsmouth
2001