Time is flying on the dark side of the mountains. Wars have been won and lost, lives have began and ended and I sit in a timeless void where the library is only open 3 days a week and the only hugs I receive are from trees. So return the hug I'm sending the void and you and post me a comment because I miss you.

Home (sick)

Tonight this poem is for the stars
unsheathing themselves from hazy
ten o’clock milk of magnesia sky
and laying, back down, spread-eagle,
cradling head in woven finger
baskets. It is for smoke clinging
to breezes and thoughts that slide
under stringy witch's hair draping
on branch-like old-growth cedar
tongues that lick up stringent clouds
like pillowy marshmallows.

This poem dreams of rolling rapids
and horizontal roller-coaster rivers
that twist through rocks
and toss rafts, paddles and water
into velvet constellations.

This is a poem about bedding down
like a young fawn to watch ancient
Mesopotamian and Greek myths play
across the sky like the Illustrated Man's
tattoos. I can tee Taurus guarding
the Pleiades from great hunter Orion
and the rafts, paddles and water
and the scorching hot veldt ranged
by lions' prides, but I don't see you.

This poem remembers nature, drifting
night skies, weekends on the water,
icy dips in frigid alpine lakes
and pelting hard rain on tent flies,
but the ink curves around you
like sun blinks through forest canopies.

This poem wanted to immortalize
the stars and nature's charisma
but it has left that to more focused
poets with finesse and skill.

Today, you can have this poem
and lounge in flowery prose
and tear apart similes and gauzy
metaphors that guard thoughts of you.

Today, you can have this poem's
hollow images and feeble attempts
to evade you. But tomorrow, its words
and stanzas will melt into the Skykomish
and ebb into the Sound.