If poetry is the bread, what is the butter?
It gets succinct after that, that first reading
and you're left with an unconscious reflex.
(You want, you ache begrudgingly but never trivially.)
She feeds you lines as if she were your slave
but she's a headhunter eating your
brains for breakfast and your soul for dinner.
He's the master of disguise and you are devoted
with purpose--to love his real face.

Words often can fail
but I try, anyway.
The verbs wrap around
a particular noun,
and adjectives help them stay;
causing images to move, and sway.

Before your very eyes
I'm hoping that I write,
will an image, send
concerning my friend,
the woman known as Twilight;
who toils throughout the night.

Summer, in the desert
owns a suffocating heat,
dispatching out
enough self-doubt,
to squelch attempting any feat;
including walking on the street.

When we were children
We knew nothing of this planet
In the wood we’d build our dens
Play war games with our plastic guns
And cowboys and Indians
Then I’d be the Lone Ranger
Or Roy Rogers with Trigger,
Sledging in the winter
Swimming naked in the lake
In the heat of summer
Playing doctors and nurses
With the girl next door
We had no idea what to expect
The world was an adventure
A great big planet
Waiting to be explored
Yet, now we are grown, we find
Life did not fulfil its promises

if you have never defiled anyone's couch
you're not an angry moving man
the twenty-dollar tip running from your nose
heavy refrigerators you couldn't lift
in the crook of your back
the cast iron sarcasm of chipped porcelain
paydays missing you on those windy days
like runaways laughing, blown into a thousand tight spaces
with calloused hands
going from place to place they leave you
another empty room

Long ago on a small island in the Caribbean, (Puerto Rico) there was a people who worked the sugar cane fields. There was an abundance of cane in the town of San Sebastian.
This town was the largest producer of cane on the hills, in the village of Alto Sano.
The men of Alto Sano lived and died by their machete.

While wrestling with a wriggling muse
I sit and look out rear glass door
and try to write of sylvan views
which have washed up on creative shore

Pen in hand and butt in chair
spiral notebook in my lap
snatching rhymes from the thin air
ink flows slowly as spring sap

Reckon I'm so deep in thought
that at first I do not realize
that my attention's being sought
by someone with emerald eyes

dawn crawls up the floor
to my room
my echoed chamber
full of you

I can feel my pockets full
the soft sweet dampness
hanging on straining
wire with shoulders slumped

we wore lives in radiant expulsion
transfiixed and fickle
while radiator spoke her
murmur messages throughout the
past
and snowflakes ticked against our
glass

Sometimes I feel the flames
surrounding the form around,
make me dwell in moments of ecstasy
then devour me
as in consummation

Life’s just a flickering flame
worth seconds only
ere the flame blows
wow,
all is lost in the moment
of once having been
a being,
like a scorching feeling
petals or wings of butterflies feel
ere they are consumed…

Oxen of the sun
birthing canal
Wilde on his rock
colouring banal

Bram stoking fires
Behan's door ajar
Kavanagh with kindling
hailing Synge from afar

Yeats in Ithicabra
polishing his horse
Beckett in Bray
waiting in morse

Joyce yet awanders
ash thatched to hand
plitting a plot, plotting a plan

TESOURO

O homem quem gasta a vida
Procurando um tesouro
Perde aquêle que deixou
Atrás
Não sabendo

Eu sou os raios dourados
do sol
meus olhos lapis lazuli
e meus labios rubis de sangue vermelho
meu coração opalas puros
brilhando reflexões na luz
da minha malancolia

TREASURE
The man who spends a lifetime
Looking for a treasure,
Loses the true one he left behind
not knowing.