so long
as we’re writing it.
happy to squint or
wear those sun shades proudly
and let them slip down over my eyeful
tower of thoughts and rest
on my noscapine intake bridge
danglin over the edge
to waters and affluent waves of argot.
but so often we don’t.
wind up fallin asleep behind the shades.
make excuses about not having sharpened time pencils
ennui of tappin’ away at the
keys to havin’ a good life
content with being stuck in the cracks of the present
inside the lines
becoming stencils of who we were.
face in hands
squatting on the corner
of our writers block
cause the hands can’t seem to face
the problem.
if we just listened to the hushed advice
of our imminent selves
we would look to our childhood.
they tell us
just right.
back when we didn’t have to worry about writers
block
cause we played with that shit like legos.
they tell us "just write".
whether indigo soot acrobatics
or keypad tap
dancers scribe,
makes no difference
native or foreign prints
and projector screens still move like Elijah’s scrolls.
mount carmel apples on a stick
and regress me
back
to shopping cart
backs
and riding baskets
down the aisles, arms spread
grabbing fruit roll-ups, snatchin’ bread on a
skid.
just us kids.
back when my laugh sang
a song of its own.
a song called home
home.
i knew it then.
knew it when
the neighbors patio patois played
radio hits of hearsay and pipe tobacco
smoke so loud the earth had no choice
but to sigh and harmonize
(she’s got quite a set of pipes, by the way).
sinfonietta strings of cricket legs
and cicada wings
made Tchaikovsky color with green crayons
so people wouldn’t notice
the color of his heart.
knew it when the back
screen door would fling
open wide and snap
shut
like a fly swatter on my dreams
and you would be there
to mop up the guts
holding a new set of wings that
said “let’s go for a truck ride”.
nose high to the dashboard and dash
for the fireballs in my pocket.
nose high.
(back from the candyman)
555-year-olds drug fix.
no seatbelt, so I’m wild like
Indiana Jones wind whipping
through my hair.
cause the windows are down,
and so are mine.
