it's not a question of finding new words
for a poem, it's a question of shuffling
and dealing the same old words
in some other order.  words like :
desire, bowl, transient,
belief, intrinsic, dust,
chaos, shadows, walk,
dreaming, today, tomorrow,
trees, flowers,
pond, snow, sun,
ascendancy, deceive, act,
faith, tomorrow.

shuffle, cut, deal :

dusk, demands, soft, edges, like,
charcoal, drawings, smudged, with, the, thumb,
when, night, comes, there, are,
dark, and, light, blotches,of, ink,spilled,
on, a, silver, speckled, paper

discard several unwanted words :

descending, into,
hard, core, silence, beneath,
the, lowering, heavens;
crumbling, bricks,and,
ashen, gray, lawns,
are, as, desiccated, as, your, devotion,
in, times, of, trial

draw  replacements :

when, your, return, touches, and,
embraces, my, spirit's, seven, rainbows,
with,sounds,unknown, in, any, language,
i, shall, spread, wide, my, wings, and, fly, to, you,

play your hand :

no matter the past
after an ending that ends so unendingly,
can we not begin again
what we have so unendingly begun?
i do not know where--or if--
you have gone, don't know
if this is a reverse
alchemy, a mockery
of what was once so golden.
but i know that today's bowl of snow
will become a freshet trickling
into a summer pond
of tomorrow, overflowing
with the intrinsic belief in
a chaos of reflections
that are dreaming
of trees and flowers
and the ascendancy of the sun.

in an act of faith, we will walk out
from today's shadows and dust.

no transient despair
will ever again
deceive us

sometimes i remember
the components of intimacy.  the
small noises of another body in bed
beneath a pressing darkness of forever
where stars are like visionary images

sometimes i remember
not sleepwalking, but dream-dancing
along the craters of the moon,
it became the only escape from a belittling marriage.

the sun is built to endure, but it is all by itself out there,
always burning with an incurable loneliness.
to the bipolar soul, the only feelings worth having
are beatified ecstasy and mortal despair.

i have not achieved the tao-- too much of this;
too little of that. i tried to restrain myself.
things don't grow if you pull their roots,
i'd say to myself and i'd put down the phone.

i can't help my endless ache for love.
so every day i hurry to my mailbox
to see if you have written to me--
Nothing there.

the invisible often casts more light on things.

i keep so many small things in my heart :
your sighs mingled with your breathing,
sap running in the trees
new branches growing
in their own direction,
you leaving without
ever looking back.

these things should be light,
almost weightless.

but no matter how high i jump,

i still have to obey the laws of gravity