The scrub and tumble weed are scant
against colorful sands.
The burning heat will ensure rants
while crossing desert lands.
The heat is felt, and rage supplants
the awe of the badlands.
A broken mind enters a trance
as it dreams choking hands.
The hands enwrap, at just a glance,
the throat of a strange man,
who offended with just a stance,
given the heat’s dead hand.
every heavy step
an act of resistance
against the indefatigable force of gravity
— hell on the knees —
why does everyone think coming down the mountain
is better than going up,
as if gravity were doing one a favor
the desire to live high in the mountains
with stunning beauty on view everyday
is one of those romantic notions
that reality pummels
and robs of its lunch money
i’d say something about everyone
who goes up a mountain having to come down,
but then I think about the stories
of the frozen corpses on Everest —
instead of coming down the mountain
they became stone-hard monuments to ambition
cities grow outward
like angry amoeba —
false-feet stretching down
the motorway corridors,
and developing tumors
that will metastasize
into cities of their own,
sprawling until they span
the global petri dish
There was a young woman from Zambia
who developed an instant phobia.
She’d suffered a trauma,
finding two Black Mamba
curled up in her corner of Zambia.
a hot spike of adrenaline
sluices into my blood
not a shot, a squirt, or a drip,
but an adamant flood
if you can find someone who gives
you that kind of feeling
without fearing a certain death
but, still, with mind reeling
Hold on!
I snatch a coat from hook on my way out.
The gusting winds are rattling the panes.
The sad line of tracks, when I wheel about,
suggests I’ve made little by way of gains.
The cabin keeps me ever near at hand.
I walk and walk and yet it won’t recede.
The slog is slow as if I’m in quicksand;
I lean to snap my chains, and so be freed.
But chains I cannot see, I cannot break.
My sisyphean lean does me no good.
And through the air there falls just one snowflake,
but there’d be more before I reach the Wood.
The cabin wants me back; I hear it call.
I buckle at the knees. So goes my fall.
From out a rocky mountainside
juts a sinewy limb.
Its existence appears brutal
and its future ever grim.
It hangs on by roots pinned in rock
dangling over the edge.
It’s splitting up that rocky crag
as if an iron wedge.
It feels the wind that whips around
that abrupt precipice,
and when the clouds envelope all,
it must feel perilous.
But never will that old dwarf tree
bemoan its cliffside fate.
Or curse the addition of a
hawk’s, or raven’s, weight.
I
granite domes
bubble from the flat lands,
earthly zit, or
beauty marks written
in topography
II
the foothills
spread from the mountains
like ripples,
echoing from
the cordillera
III
four horses,
standing on the hilltop,
as if meeting,
but with no common
vision or purpose
What is overproduced & under-desired is cheapened.
We live in a world that does not want for information.
Perhaps, if we had to carve our words into stone —
or press them into clay tablets —
and had to carry said tablets around,
we’d be more careful what we said,
and people would be more eager to read it.
There was a bold florist from Vietnam
who was graced in great measure with aplomb.
There was nothing quite like
how she rode motorbikes
with eight thousand flowers, two kids, and her mom.
