What I Assume

April 30th

Snow runs straight across the road parallel and pale gray,
plankton on the unseen currents.
Normally Summer upstages Spring here,
but this time April ends with this howl,
having inhaled numberless seasons of mockery.

A magician, before diving in the tank
to break his breath against death,
first fills his blood with euphoria,
and stores it.

Everything is backwards.
I've wakened from the walking sleep of day
ending the warmest April in this freezing fool's night;
The heater in my car feels cold like a vacuum;
Classical plays on the punk rock station;
Twenty minutes ago my head rested on my wife's warm ribs,
who scratched my hair-thick head.
My nose whistled, a mewing puppy,
comfortable and quiet in the face of peeling laughter
the universal joke whispered every day.
I've never caught the punchline, but I've heard enough;
even though they get the details wrong,
details don't matter.

The universe, they say, will contract like an elastic band,
and with itself bury itself,
or it will expand until the elastic breaks.
And if it contracts, it will expand.
either way it must have somewhere to go;
oblivion or persistence—involuntary either way.

And now the snow has stopped, on the road:
remnants of a light Spring rain.
And the car has warmed.
And the green light grins, Go.
Go to a place you never go
for a hot drink and a cinnamon roll.
The light licks it's green lips,
Go,
and,
There's nothing you've forgotten,
nothing left at home,
except the funny passing moments
you call love.

Eventually the puppy will begin
to dig holes for his bones;
not out of practicality, but because they are so precious
he knows not what else to do.
He'll plan to come back,
but never will,
having forgotten the holes and the bones, and any
way, having
somewhere better else to go.

Anthropomorphizing Spring

Laid lazy across the horizon two mountain ranges form feuding families,
a mix of soft curves and angles, both are draped with snow white stoals
two jutting peaks, warrior guardians to the rift between them,
a canyon tomb of their clans.

Beneath an unbending, single-minded cloud, who spreads it's eagle wings and shades
grow gray rows of outcast trees, starved branches eerily ashamed of their budding greens
and the baptism their roots shared with the grass in the winter run-off.

While the trees meditate in the cold spring wind the grass just bristles;
as it's million precocious leaves wait to begin cheerleading for the tulips
youth misled by perennial beauty, by the winter run-off,
rushing towards the dry, interminable summer,
or, of their own accord, misleading.

Since taking up skateboarding again last year after a 15-year hiatus, it has brought me back to several things I’d loved in my youth but taken for granted as my commitments to work and family have grown. Writing is one of them. So it’s fitting that I at least try to pay tribute at the shrine of the skateboard, and here’s my first offering.

Cool Night

Cool night
taken freely by me;
the lights of the city,
the incandescent eyes that pass,
playing on the pavement and curbs;
the mantis lamps
preying on a subcelestial emptied lot.
A skateboard stamps, I, the rider, step up and am
shown a third/foot taller.
And, at last, the spring airs sweep
the grime of winter, the scent of rot.

The muscles know they now may flex,
tendons stretch, and thus will wheels
run on in twos and fours
like a train rumbling, a rough dog panting.
Their hot frictive spinning incenses my soul
and spurs it on, toward imitation and invention
till the body chafes with it's burning.

And each tap the wheels time down
resonates ancestral roller-skates.
I speed past a sign: No Skateboarding
not rebellious in my age, but desperate.

A pop and the wood will flex, the feet
attend to it:
one heel kicks, or these toes flick,
to flip the board on either axis;
a sharp mind and smart catch will land it,
else chaos worsts
and bites with vicious gravity.
Whichever, let my chest swell in
the cool night, it's lights, it's airs--
elements of which new blood is constituted.

So I force life to circle through me, as inevitably
the night will end as it began, I
just one of many
sad dogs running solo, in training to be
Lone Wolves:
unconquered, uncapturable
but by film.