Of Mother’s Day Balloons

Slap across my facing down.
Manna.  Heaven.  Motherhood.
The day is set like tea-cups on a 
rocking saucer destined for a waterfall.
I’m busy, frizzy, dizzy with the 
luncheon stuff to steal my mind from
all the bliss I never knew.
Hallmark cards like orange peels
that float in Venice’s canals.
The litter of such perfect joy
should not be jealous cavities.
Emotion’s horses down a canyon.
Moving faster than my will.

It isn’t that I wanted babies
more than anything in life.
It was the promise purse of dreams
that fate had raped, discarded too.
Womanhood without a womb
is such a hollow cave at times.
With bitter winds that race and rush
up inner, utter, dampers shut
and rising up a chimney flue.
Babies always flocked to me
for reasons that I can’t explain.
Holding them was oxymoron paradise:
a warm and realizing freeze.
A canvas stolen from my thighs.
The leaning trellis of what if...
It tickled all the buried dreams
the same as winter patios that dance
because they see deceiving hope emerge   
from feathers of a summer breeze.


                

        Olivaceous Eyes

Your presence slick.
Like olives sliding from a can.
The darkness was acceptable
because you lost your job.
Then the shackles of regret
for selling assets of the dawn
to cater lunches meeting need.

Two-thumbs-up for fantasy.
I blamed it on the booze.
We both would move
like sliding doors that cross
a path and never touch.
Depression’s darts. 
They ate the air and
melted plastic valentines.
A dozen roses C.O.D.
They’re dying on the severed
vine of reciprocity in love.

Olives work in two’s or three’s.
No one eats entire cans 
without regurgitating coal.
Hearts and minds will soon rebel.
Turn away the tragedy 
like envelopes without a stamp
for traipsing on another soul.


        

        Ovaries and Agony

Artistry.  A simple fix.
Stand-up comics for the tears.
Boning fish and circumstance.
Lovers lost.  And nothing left.
The jockstrap of a spreading smile
that takes the worst and
holds it there in self-defense.

Audacious in its architecture.
Desperation at its core.
Perfect rhyme forgiving fate
and chasing truth until it moves
like avalanches giving way.
The ovaries of raging pain.
They always seem to multiply.
Writing is a fence of sorts.
Despite the calm admonishments
of those who argued Robert Frost and
told us we must tear them down.

I meter what I cannot cry.
Like turning thorns to daffodils
because I like the equipoise.
Syllables are prostitutes who
have a right to walk the streets.
I quell the devil’s prairie fire
with nothing but a garden hose.