If you’re a pop up, I’m not interested in what you have to offer.

I dance in clown shoes.

You compose your conversations.
Fitfully gesturing with whatever you hold,
ending arguments with a flourish.
Make a point, now whirl, quickly.
Make it impossible to counter with your unpunctuation.
You duck and weave, spin, sidestep, pirouette:
One, two, one, two, faster, harder, stronger.
You leave me confused and two steps back, 
just far enough behind to appear lost and unsure.
And if I catch up, if I make a point,
you spin again, a trail of words falling like pixie dust
as you make your escape.
And as you storm out, you slam the period behind you,
Ending your sentence with a door.
And I must follow you, my thuds down the stairs preceding my statement,
trying to catch up before the page break.
Now I capitalize a W, and follow with an a, i, t.
And you pause, spin, speak, gesture, spin, continue.
A waltz to counter my four-four.

You don’t dance your words-
you speak a dance.
You speak a dance Baryshnikov couldn’t follow.
You rapidly reverse the rhythm,
changing tempo in a blur of sound,
conducting your opus with hands to match.
Then, as you end your symphony, you bow.
You bow your head, turn on the car, and drive away.
And my two left feet shuffle me back inside,
your concert still ringing in my ears.

Coffee Shop

Philosophers think
We may dream our reality.

With earphones attached liked IVs
I dream my own melodic universe.
Until someone laughs behind me
And strikes up conversation with a friend.
And in that moment they become my anchor
Are they spinning through my dream
Or am I spinning through theirs?

Sometimes life fits in a coffee cup,
Sometimes inspiration pours out slowly like a packet of honey,
And sometimes it all mixes together
Like liquid incandescence that I drink right after brewing.

When no one speaks to me for hours
I begin to wonder
Is everyone dreaming a reality that includes
The whole café but me?

The street outside the window
With passing strangers, dogs and cars
Is a whole new Milky Way
Waiting to be discovered.
But I am no space explorer
Aliens are beyond my reach.
Whispers of the people around
Reach my ears distinctly
Like waves lapping on the shore.

Words on paper go no way
Towards proving that I was ever here
My identity is slowly condensed
Not into the people who know me
But into nothing more significant than a spiral-ringed, Walmart notebook.

Strangers flutter around
Like pages in the wind.
My actions spread across my world
Like ink across lines.
I check a pulse
And it flutters weakly
Like a small camera shutter 
Snapping open and closed beneath the skin of my wrist.
But I only show up as white mist
Glitches upon the film.

Coffee shop memoirs
Are the legacies
I shall write out
Fold up 
And snail mail 
Out to other people’s dreams
Desperately reminding them
That I am still out there

A small planet, a pompous rose and one little prince.

3.6.12

there is rage in the trees, 
rage in the wind, 
rage in the pin-point vortexes of black leering inwards towards us through our walls - 
we have taken their children, 
wounded and dying, 
from their cradles of dirt, 
trapped them with gravity beneath their broken wings
and we hold them, 
safe 
(from the world and the vicious nature of the fallen, of role reversals and the karma of the universe.)
and threatened, 
and we are the enemy, 
now. 

we are the monolith’s of trespass, 
and we have stolen their children.