Power is not a crown,
Nor trophy, nor gavel,
But activity allowed,
Restraint unraveled.

Power is function,
Respect, and validity;
Lifted injunctions,
Softened rigidity.

And it’s not innate, but granted.
We give and take it every day;
Some installed, some supplanted,
Some caught halfway…

Some defray.

I venture again
Into the forgotten wilderness.
I walk through my years
Every step, every leaf,
Every new breath
Pushes in what I can’t expunge.

I wish you’d given me a token,
A reason to hope.
I sneak through this jungle of ghosts
And I’ve become one too.
I miss you. Have you moved on
From sticks and stones?

I tried to hide away during early growth
Under your top leaves, unbeknownst,
But I knew, I always knew,
Your roots spread farther underneath.
I was passing through, but you would stand
A mighty oak.

Here, in strange and familiar trees,
Green-filtered golden beams
Illuminate the lost, the found.
I thank my God.
I mourn my past.
I think to you.

A piece of you, how could I know?
When planted secret, planted deep,
Even broken offshoots regrow
In the right soil, in the right keep.
I thought I took a piece of you, but
Maybe I left a piece of me.

Striated clay half emerges;
Earth’s fractured rib cage.
Roots, like talons, exhume the sepulcher.
Streams dredge where they converge.
Nature airs her secrets on the finest stage.
I wish I’d told the truth.

Funny, you never end up,
Where you expect to begin.
What you loved at the goodbye
You awake loving again.

I have lived sequential lives,
Overwhelmed a steady mind
With words of no consequence,
Words too true and too unkind.

Blooms passed through my fingertips;
I refused to grasp their stems.
Now I’ve crushed tender petals,
Both clasp and cast become sin.

Born from the coffin, my eyes
Are still blinking at new light.
Fresh beginnings are not fresh,
But they can bring fresh insight.

I can’t see that far just yet.
My friends are foreign lands,
The song repeats, the new hello,
The call to bloom where planted.

A good day with sun baked skin,
Laughter, merriment, the past
Lies dead in The Graveyard-
The ultimate outcast.

Still, I hear a distant tune,
Sounds of surf, and midnight communion.
I have no concept of home
Outside of that reunion.

I try to follow the rules,
Somewhere under the rubble.
I make no waves, waste no tools,
Keep my nose out of trouble.

I try to parse all my words.
In step with syntax and scene,
Weaving tiny bits and blurbs
To reveal the wondrous dream,

But some levees are overwhelmed;
Small breaches opening rivulets into rivers.
Words burst forward like sharp laughter, pour like tears,
Heal like salt in the gaping wound,
Sit in awkward silence.

All these years, these thousand verses,
Can’t reverse the flow of time, can’t divert
Its fearsome force- rolling on remorselessly.
Throwing myself in the sea, it carries me- flowing free.
Words don’t dry the bed, but try treading alone.
I’m grown, but each syllable sown blooms-
It blooms before it dies.

I try to give these words their room,
Sometimes even a nudge or two,
What they may say, I don’t assume
Until the tide rises again,
Until the lyric breaks through.

You heard this moment pass.
I shed my story as dead skin,
A fragile, empty shell
Hidden away again
Finished.

You brought change.
Friendship forged in delicate fire,
Cauterizing, purifying,
The union inspired
Hope.

If I was meant to speak,
It would be here, with you.
Solitary steps cannot compare
With a waltz for two,
Or more.

I return to silence full,
Your love a dancing flame.
In the cool of your haven,
My tattered wings became
Whole,

and wholly unnecessary.

Words smash together,
Collide and contradict,
Affection, perhaps forever,
And also affliction,

And affirmation again.

Phonetic explosions,
My last dime,
Erudite and erosive,
Evolve in time

Lessen and expand.

Did you hear the echo?
Reverberations in the air.
Water carries sound, you know,
Maybe it made it there, where
You are treading.
I’ve got a life now.
Remember when I didn’t,
Couldn’t live? Somehow
Some hidden splint
Reset the breaks.
I ran away alone,
God pursued, overtook,
But I never did get home-
Found some nice nook,
Some cleft in the rock.
The summer days, breath anew,
Burned too quickly I suppose.
What’s to return to, if not you?
These memories don’t decompose
Under time and earth.
Another day to put back on
The years that fell between,
Until eyelids, like curtains drawn,
Play ancient, aching dreams
Scenes to be.

We found each other in dream again.
Amongst crude, ambitious men
Two classical souls cause sparks.

You kept a secret from me,
But I could plainly see
You had no malice.

Perhaps you are an idol of the heart,
A thing to tear down, and tear all apart,
But that’s smashing the Pieta.

I’m tired. I’ve done the best I could do.
Insufficient next to you,
But the rise and recede bring no comparisons.