Dreams/Children

But how could I forget the ambition of my youth?
The glory of an ivy-clad blood-brick profession?
The romance of a life that doesn't exist, that has never existed, not for anyone?
(See, a horizon was never something you can approach and straddle)
Let these dreams die hard as a triple-armored warrior

For how could I forget the children of my mind?
They have danced and sung and I have watched them grow,
in the terrifying pallor of the doomed young.
My kids and I never spoke the word among ourselves, never once;
I glanced askance of truth and simpered little false sentiments to them instead:
"I love; I will make you grow; you will make me alive."

I laid in love with the love and art and beauty and industry of this age,
and these offspring were born for a sickeningly insignificant death

not even punctuated
not capitalized
not articulated

Like an afternoon comment from a teenage girl to a friend's wall:)
Lol.

Surely someone could pull out a hankerchief and set up an exclamation point as a memorial pillar--
but no, the children of mine simply whimpered and fell silent,
and I never explained to them why it had to be.

One year I was to be someone, to have someone,
to make something with my hands that dazzled,
mature, supple grown versions of my children-dreams.
The next year I doubted; they were pale even in sunlight.
The next year they began to cough, and there was blood.
Then they were gone.

My heart, in shock, is beginning to understand--
I will sit behind this desk for forty years, married to an accountant from the south.
This, I know,

this is how one forgets the ambition of one's youth.

I found a man named Luxury

I found a man named Luxury

And climbed up on his lap, to see

what answers to The Question he

might have for Generation Me

For Generation Y

For generation Why, and How

For generation Do Me Now

We push the cart and pull the plow

We swear our freedom, and we bow

to painted porcelain kings

I found a King named Microsoft

Queens Google, Lexus, Davidoff

With smarter car, and higher loft

So while our minds grow Downy-soft

Our speech grows cheap... not free

Give us this day our low-carb bread

And do to us as Oprah said

Sell pills for demons in our head

And guides for books our fathers read

for roads our fathers walked

We'll savor loose philosophy

In coffeeshops where we drink tea

We're coffee-shopping for the key

to holes in Dad's theology

And maybe to his heart

So give us now our daily cleanse

And pierce us with Palm Pilot pens

Tell us our stories through a lens

Design a logo for our sins

And sell them to us cheap

One day we'll notice that we're old

we'll notice that our kids are cold,

Our marriages are green with mold

But as for now--no need to scold

History must repeat

Pleasure

There is pleasure in my neurons

There is pleasure in the graze of a man's gaze

There is pleasure in the button nose this baby doesn't know it has

In scalding sunset, in stomping the feet on a beer-sticky dance floor

pleasure in the edge of a woman's face etched into a painting by a man who has been dead for 213 years

There is pleasure swimming in a bagpipe, and clutching to the inside plane of an open piano

pleasure in a bottle--in a crystal-cut glass

But

Galloping, swallowing, enveloping and streaming beyond these pleasures is that of the

perfectly

chosen

Word