Day 0

We are all such fragile heroes
An empire as powerful as confidence, tumbled
By three words:

Who are you?


---


To seize the day means to never seize
The day we quite wanted; making do with what we have,
Too old, too timid, too tired. The milk's gone sour, there's a chill in the air, the tools
Aren't quite right for the job. 


I want a life where I am happy.
I want a day where I am everything I wish I were --
Brave, strong and unafraid. Why should I grab this day with both hands?
It will only be, as always it is, relief to lay it down again at night
To stopper my ears with a pillow
Drowning out those who sing the songs they want to sing;
They don't care who hears it --
They love whoever hears it --
And even as they sleep, they are the happiest of dreamers,


For what they have, they feel good in loving. What they have is good enough.

Day 16

I don't know if I have love to give;
The love of stray hairs and chipped fingernails,
Of glances from halfway across the room
Felt as a tickle on the back of the neck
As warming as lemon toddies and,
in its absence, freezer-burn.

Day 15

1.
Oh, the singing of cats in the wee hours
Could warm the cockles of a polar bear
More accurate than the rooster
Shriller than a teakettle
Insistent as the sun itself, in peeking over the horizon!
And a harmony they make in difference;
Lizzie howls
Jack squeaks
Tucker brays
Mindy shrieks.

Day 14

1.
What is birth?
It is the universe saying "hello,"
Life grabbing one by the ankles
and pulling you along the ground
until you've found your footing and run.
It is the old universe
Kicking out everyone who could use
Some innocence
Some time to reflect,
and it is the future universe's time to wait
A magazine in hand, for you to come back round again.
To be born
starts the clock ticking, the hourglass flips, the heart beats
Everything shuffles aside to make room for your potential.
It gives the sun
Something new to warm.

Day 13

1.
Jackrabbits zigzag across the desert
Blurring red with tan and white
Over coyote's tail, and when he snaps --
Dive into the earth
Into the clay
Hot, magma center where everything slows
The heavy heartbeat of the world.
Scrabble on rock and pebble, jackrabbit shoots
Through volcanic tunnels and surges to surface
Popping free in some foreign jungle.
Monkeys swoop at his long ears
He whirls and bares
Fierce yellow incisors
Only the blue butterflies make haste then.

Day 12

1.
Red mud
From mountain blood;
dye washed from fox's tails;
maple leaves and poppy flowers.
All collected in one big puddle
Becoming red clay
In  sunlight.
Frog seedlings
burrow into the red mud,
black tails wriggling, waving, frightened;
nothing to breathe but silt.
We fill buckets
with red mud and black tadpoles
haul them out to safety
all afternoon.
They were saved.
Not all;
some died, but
many lived.

Day 11

1.
I am old and you are new,
because I like rainy Sundays and naps on the couch
and you want to be out riding rollercoasters,
which are fast and furious,
too fast for my taste, I want to stay
surrounded by all the things I love, whereas
you want to leave it all behind,
and we don't understand each other,
not really,
not well,
still there is a time when I invite you into my home
and with you on the threshold and I inside
we are both briefly happy,
holding hands at the edge of something new and old,
but it is too short for me
too long for you
the one who would catch a bullet train to Paris
with nothing but the clothes on your back and
a light in your eye, and I the one waiting
on the couch my mother bought
in the house I'll live the rest of my life,
if luck is kind,
a fate you would call a prison,
full of jailhouse mirrors which would reflect the dust
settling deep in your hair,
turning it gray instead of black, the color
of a moth-eaten vulture
like the one sitting in the attic, biding its time
glass eyes brighter than mine,
you said with cruelty --
"the world passes you by,
bright, beautiful, and you are unchanging stone,
and I cannot be with you,"
who knows which day that was, all the
ones you returned to my doorstep
hungry for permanence
which I have in plenty,
and the funny thing is how you do, too,
perhaps more than I
permanent in your impermanence,
you always come back.