Writing With Scissors

In three months, fill a notebook, one page per day. Rip out the pages and get the scissors. Yes, get the scissors. Put on a blindfold, and then cut up the pages. With the blindfold off, put the pieces in a plastic bag.

Now, then:

Throw this week's trash on top. Add extra coffee grounds and eggshells and a skeleton mask. Turn the bag like compost for a week, ten days max — and imagine attending your own funeral. (Funny, isn't it, how an orange peel is stuck in the mask's eye socket day after day, but not always the same one.)

In the middle of the night:

Dress in something innocuous and unassuming with at least one pocket. Walk the long way to the city park, carrying the bag. Open the bag and spin around, letting the scraps fly out. If the wind rises, you win. If the wind dies, trust your cave-born eyes and be alert for peripheral light . . . .

Win or lose:

Sit on the park bench at the east perimeter as the sun comes up behind your back. Do not watch the dogs and dog walkers; pay attention to the leashes between them. Do not watch the children and their attendant mothers; pay attention to the footprints between the sand box and the picnic table.

Wait —

A dog or a child or a walker or a mother will bring you one scrap of paper. Put this in your pocket and hope there are ants crawling on it and a bit of dog shit in the footprints that leak with the sand from a hole in that pocket.

A Tuning Fork

The other day I heard about
eighty-eight keys turn in doors locked
that last I looked were open. Now
Time could have shut them to keep out

Regret, forgetting to tell me
as usual. Not surprising
considering all the damn dirt
Regret tracks in. Like it lived here!

Or maybe it was Confusion
who thinks it's hilarious when
things aren't as expected. Like this
song for discordant piano.

Reclamation

Recalling a fear of lonely heights
with neck bent to measure valleys

spans fool clouded eyes seeking
the peaks of other mountains.

I horn the sky, grow goat legs
crumble rocks under hooves, leap

over pebbles that scatter and fall
to ripple the streams beneath me.

On Man's Image

God writes on foolscap, etches
dotted lines to guide artists
in the making of origami, cuts
tab A and slot B to guide scientists
in the making of machines, crinkles
it all into folds for philosophers
who'd scry the palm so clear to caged
birds taking aim at the watermark.

Oh How You Bloomed

You've lived such a charmed life in my imagination, changing over the years from chubby three-year-old blue-eyed girl scientist to gawky ten-year-old brown-eyed boy tycoon to twenty-year-old sexless intellectual.

Today, my nameless never-born, you're a hazel-eyed gay man of forty, broad shouldered, curly haired and deeply tanned in summer. Your smile crinkles in a Latin way and your graying beard shyly hides a country singer's mouth. Your art is complex enough to twist my mind, and its heart is beyond me, as it should be.

We know, you and I, that your future is limitless. Scatter my ashes in a field of Saint Exupéry's flowers to show you understand, when the time comes.