Budding Love:

Falling again
Heart in throat
Pain receptors dulled
Logic circuits suppressed
Flaws overlooked
Tasting a taste so foreign to the tongue

This must be love
Until the cute opens
Applying gravity once again

Hating the way he chews
The annoying way he snores
Never listens
Always apologizes
Blood rushing
Vomit rising to wash the love away

This must be hate
Until a new scent wafts our way
Clouding the mind again

At least long enough

F=ma

Shafted again with the shitty shovel
Hands burning with the uneven grip
As blisters popped upon popped blisters
Gravel scraping in a one-four beat
Irregular and halting
An awkward waltz in motion
Always seeking a more steady pace

Blade worn shiny by contact with the pulverized rock
Fading to a fine rust as it went to the top
Curving in a lover's grip
Firm to the wooden shaft
Gripping to the death
No matter whose it may be

The joules pile up steadily
As each metal cart is filled to the brim
Rolled out by metal donkeys
Lashed with electric wires
Glowing eyes piercing the darkness
The only light in this goddamned place

When the whistle blows once
The time to push is at hand
To get one last load into the hopper
Steel animals frothing at the joints
To get the job done

Then the whistle blows twice
And it's shovels down
Time to count our day's output
A yardstick to determine our pay
With the second law of the land
As work converts to coins
In this measure of a man's worth

Foolishness In Poetry

Full of 'Thee's and 'Thy's 
Ushered by 'Thine' and 'Mine'
And 'For so art my heart be true'
The Fool published his poems of true love
To the foolish acclaim that they deserved

So full of emoticons 
And lacking real emotions
That the page filled up
Before the idea fleshed out
Scarring the eyes of those who read them

Leaving them blind as blind can be

So The Fool
He switched to braille
Enthralling himself with carefully placed textured bumps
Until he fell in love with images his fingers revealed
Masturbating ideas right into and through the pages

Feeling more the poet
And less the fool
His readers pressed their fingertips
To what he had left for them
Burning their pads and prints

Leaving them as fingertipless as they could be

Finally understanding the err of his ways
The Fool of a poet pondered his rules
That the way to rhyme this with that
Was with a tall top hat
Full with curled cues in a row
Glittery and stolen from a crow

The simplest of half stolen rhyme
Filling up all of his leaking time
With the wonder and the question
Of whether he was truly a fool of a poet
Or only wrote poems fit for fools

Last Drive

"Who wants to go for a ride?"

Once upon a time with those magic words
I could rouse joyful bouncing
Barking and tail wagging
In a full-body wriggle of endless elastic electricity

Now
Those words warrant a weary opening of one brown eye
Glazed over with a cataract
Seeing ghosts awash with Vaseline
And perhaps just enough to avoid bumping into walls

A slow giddy-up get up for the front end
Handled completely separate from the back
With a little help from my hands lifting on his hips
The old Poodle finally stands
Swaying slightly side to side
Equilibrium slightly out of whack

One painful walk out to the truck later
Has him planted in his seat
Chin on the sill of the open side window
At least this ride left in him

Time to go

Tempered Split Dream

Sometimes
She still dreamed of
The feel of
The fine wood grain in the handle
Running silkily perpendicular to her fingers

The tug towards the floor
From the honed head of the axe
Balanced upon the fulcrum of her hand
Gripping tightly to the belly of the haft
With the knob end angled upwards to the sky

Liquid dripped with a steady beat
Which she sometimes taps out
The memory a catchy tune
One that she often dances to

A waltz through some odds and ends
With a deft foot placement here
Then a half spin to plant a toe just so
Following a red placement diagram
A dance she doesn't want to forget

Those nice bits and bobs strewn about
Were once a very unpleasant whole
Creased and separated with ease
A patchwork assemblage in reverse

And just like that
The world was a much kinder place

White Shirt Blues

I can never keep a white shirt clean
Be it food dirt or other
Some foul substance will stain it

Frankly
I blame the weight loss
For if I had not lost those seventy-five pounds
Then I never would have fit into this space

Aluminum walls sprayed with shiny white polyurethane
Covered in brown anti-corrosion coating
In turn bathed in all the greasy oily dirt
That a jumbo Boeing aircraft can kick up with its tires

The ten years passage
Since I had last fit into this vertical coffin shaped place
Had clouded my memory
Erasing the difficulty level of squeezing past the nose landing gear assembly
With the flat wall of the wheel well to your back
While stepping sideways on odd bits of structure
And carefully squeezing one's belly and clothing past sharp edges to the front

First came a crimson smear just below my breast
As the red grease from a fitting pressed hard against me
Slowly making a teacher's correction mark upon the blank white of my shirt
Distracting me so
That I missed a sharp pigtail end of twenty thousandths safety wire
Looping incompletely off of the downlock sensor canon plug
Allowing it to pierce the snowy fabric of the t-shirt
Tearing fibers gently
Silently
Until finally pricking my skin
And making me notice its action
Drawing a drop of blood as price of passage

In the confining area at last
Giving the area a five minute inspection with mirror and flashlight
Fulfilling the requirements of my task card
Which clearly state:
"Visual inspection performed within touching distance"
I'm left to ponder my results

A cut belly
Bruised chest
Grease and blood on the front of my shirt
Dirt, oil, and the odd sticky substance on the back

A pressing need to pee
And the validation that I can't keep a white shirt clean to save my life

Falling Water

"Tap tap tappity tap"

A long nailed manicured hand sound of impatience

Played out upon an old piece of plywood

By drops of water from a metal eave

Straight down eighty feet

Pushed this way and that by the breeze

Almost crystalline teardrops

Squeezed to their ultimate aero shape

Terminal velocity achieved

Target in sight

An Alcoa Aluminum stencil on the veneer

Blue logo paint faded by past sun and storms

Ultimately splashing down

Forming a momentary crater

In the slickly thin watery film

A hazardous place for any strider to skate today

Gone all too soon in steamy rise

Evaporating to invisibility

Leaving the old shipping flat to bake

Fading away in the heat