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 |