Devil's Advocate

http://www.kqed.org/w/youdecide/

A Stranger's Face

Tender with age and smallness like a rustic quarter
Perfectly cut around the edges
As if filed carefully
But burdened with spots
Decorating the jaw line of a face:
Modest in the warm light of love
A surface touched and rubbed
Like an infant’s velvet hand:
Polished with attention
Alive in the eyes with youth-
A swirling green-gray like the offspring of clouds and earth
And I’ll never smell the rush of cold water
From where they are born,
But they hold me down like gravity to understand
The damages
of being so small, but so proud

The More I Run, the Closer I Am to Love

The ratatat echo gets softer
Since walls push together
Until love and I are sharing oxygen
Making emissions with every breath expelled
Poisoning the sky;
A bitter acid rain
Burning with every sizzling drop,
But disintegrating my resent
Despite the overwhelming evaporation
And down pour
The freezing shock,
And the failure
Of every escape route.
I drink it in
To quench the burning itch
On my insides

meow

Sleepy Soup

Souping through the day
Slopping through the sludge
Leaving puddles of abc’s
Spelling nothing
Sloshing soupingly
Spilling over the rim of a set of lips
Speaking cold tomatoes
For anyone who wants to listen
To the swirling of letters in a bowl