Earning a Wish

A thousand paper cranes
is supposed to bring one wish, but who
could fold a thousand today and not think,
at least once, of wasting so much;
the trees felled, the fossil fuel burned to power
the plant where the paper’s made, and the gas
burned to bring it near—
all for a single wish for me. It’s surely
a kind of bad karma yoga.

If I met one of these in a dream, large
as an angel, it would strike me
as a messenger of fear: the wildly unbird-like
spear of its tail, the sightless
dagger of its head, and the wings,
and the wings that look bound up by threads
tied to the sky—a marionette of heaven.
Indeed, if you drop one from a high place,
it floats down, slow and straight.

I make a thousand little deaths, let a thousand
small slivers of the earth vanish from my mind.
Whatever strange shape the end takes, it will
strike me subtly as the work of my own hands.

Strength

I love the way you can
push through a sore and stiff
body whose bones are trying to fuse
and burn it all down into motion.

All the pains of this world
are curling up their creaking knuckles.

Radiation

I used to open my mouth to the sun
and try to taste its rays.

I’d learned about vitamin “D”
which comes steeping from the leaves of flesh.

and I believed, ever so gently,
in the magic of ancient things.

I didn’t know about the liquid
syllables of “melanoma”

or the cup and dagger dirge
of the pregnant letters U.V.

I knew it was warm and make
my eyes wild with red veins in pink space.

and that the sun
had been there forever.

Killing the Camomile

The plant began to turn yellow
after many days of rain so
I let it sit leaning over in the heat
until it was a melting tumbleweed
stuck in the bog of the still damp dirt.

I cut off every flower with scissors
and brewed the dusty heads
into a clear gold tea and drank it.
The pot is now holding a tall mint.

I like the idea of the dead flower
that isn’t kept for its ironic beauty
but is drunk down with hot moving water
and breathed out on the ghost of your breath.

That’s how some of us would like to go.
Others want the rest of the garden
to dry up and spoil, grieved in the ghost with loss.

Give-away

“We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.” -Aesop

and who are my enemies?
If that’s you, have as many means
of my destruction as you can carry.
I’m seeking peace, see, inner peace,
and I believe in those scenes
where it all comes down to the gun
held in the good hand—and the palm’s
sweat tastes the metal for the tongue,
and under the open mouth of the barrel,
one heart claws its own arteries
close, waiting for the bang,
and the good hand can’t
squeeze and goes limp.

I’ve lost the heart for all this almost-killing.
Take it all; the only things left are knives I can’t
find, nooses woven from mucus, and secrets I’ll never acknowledge.