Back to the Wheelhouse

(Twelve Short Poems)

I. (Aries)
When cares are released, like a fist,
The child emerges, untouched,
From behind the margins of age.

II. (Taurus)
With my voice I can paint the actual sky.
In my eyes one can see the waters of life.
My breath can revive the yearnings of flowers.
But I cannot convey what it feels like inside.

III. (Gemini)
All must make their way
In the solitude they call togetherness;

How can I say no
When no is a turned back,
The light shut off in the mirrored room,
When I am free to examine how wrong I was,
And how pointless it is to be right?

The conversations I have with others, pale shadows
Of the ones I have with myself…

IV. (Cancer)
While the Earth
Heals silently
The heart’s fluttering
Is connected
In the blood

V. (Leo)
Ash
From flesh
To salve the wound—
The strongest touch
Is the lightest.

VI. (Virgo)
That’s the problem with intellectuals:
Too much feeling trapped within the pearls…
The history of great ideas
Is the sordid tale of personal failures
To explain the world.

VII. (Libra)
Stay here.
She waits with her dramas
In the next room,
Teasing you like a TV;
Be within your peace, for once.

VIII. (Scorpio)
There is only love down every blackened alley
And inside every hole
The space between stars
Pulls the threads together
Of nothing important—
Not what we fought about,
The anger that consumed us for days,
Nor anything held in recall
For there is nothing really there at all
Except the right to exist
Outside of somebody else’s reality.

IX. (Sagittarius)
A phalanx of women,
Curved limbs like artillery,
Battalions of smooth allure,
A wind of longing, fussing, teasing and taunting
But then a ceasefire—
My daughter, holding a ball,
Wants to play.

X. (Capricorn)
Sometimes it’s best to let anarchy out
From the boundaries that power has drawn,
Even though, when the wall comes down,
So do the hopes and lives of those who
Dare to hope and live,
For their hopes were used to take hopes from others,
And their lives were too important to be saved.

XI. (Aquarius)
I used to live in that idea.
Its four walls
Framed
Paradise.
I could not bear
To move,
My heart would break
Without it.

XII. (Pisces)
We know. We let go.
That’s how we learn to live
Stumbling
Between forgetfulness and memory
Like a cat between string
And sky.