Tag Archives: 8

Five Devastating Kicking Techniques

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Five Devastating Kicking Techniques

kick

Pancake kick
Sit down into the kick
And spread out until you are irresistible.

Trophy kick
Hold a single moment mid-kick
Perfectly balanced and do
Not move the rest of your life

Winter Weather Warning kick
Promise vengeance. Promise no mercy.
Then walk softly and meekly past.
Then kick a week later.

Spring kick
Turn your kick into soft raindrops
That hurt nobody. Immediately
A million small green kicks emerge.
People come outside and beg to be kicked.

Love kick
Kicking the habit is
Just another kick.

Landscape, mild February night, with parked car in lot by field and trees and second smaller landscape closer than it appears

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midDusk

Landscape, mild February night, with parked car in lot by field and trees and second smaller landscape closer than it appears

Mid-dusk turns gray green; image on an old TV.
The shadow on a rock thrown by the lot’s

Halogen lights lands with jumpy dog stillness.
Wind spills through lowered windows unevenly

Like coffee in a cup after a sudden brake spills,
Returns, spills again. Go out eleven steps

Into the woods and the dead leaves hanging
On the tree are wilder than the dead leaves

On the tree in the school parking lot. The wind
Passing through them has a different accent.

From a driver’s seat you can look backward
Without moving your head. Without thinking.

You imagine a speeding car coming up beside
You, too late to stop moving into the same lane.

The future can keep only one of you intact.
But blink and it is only three trees, on the lot’s

Far edge, in some complex leafless interaction
With the rest of the world which has no idea

How much they see. Don’t take those gestures
For scenery. They have been waiting here

A hundred years to warn you that the past is
Speeding up and passing you on the left.

Imposter Syndrome

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Imposter Syndrome

1.
Driving

The width of the white wall
On either side of six

Inches of air is all
That connects

You to the ground
Speeding beneath

You to the past

2.
Wormaxio

Monsters wait at the margins.
Tackling anything head-on

Kills you

3.
Asleep

Sometimes wondering
If everything I do when

Awake if everything
Good is the dream time

I call you
To tell me I’m wrong

Because I could
Not dream you

Poem to be read in the middle of the night (iii)

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Poem to be read in the middle of the night

dreamish

In the forest path dream where the light slashing through
leaves are words written too fast for me to read

And your spirit animal pauses, its white head shifting as if sniffing
the undergrowth and pulling the colors of the undergrowth into the air

I am the trunk of the blue tree, observing silently as you walk by,
grazed by your eyes like understanding is a wounding season

Still unaware the words in the air are poems I am writing
by the light that filters past me unabsorbed and I’m growing only

to be still, rooted deep at passage’s edge to the turning earth
beneath the whistling sun shuffling its days

 

-painting by Mary Winifred Hood Schwaner

Last Days

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Last Days

Told me to wait another two nights.
and the truth would rise like ice cubes

In a celebratory drink. Without taste
But accentuating the taste that’s there

Already, then adding volume to it
While weakening the taste but by then

It’s not the taste you’re after is it and where
Has it got to finally, absorbed, invisible?

The moon looks full but it’s not. Not that
It matters but it does. Like other things

That never happened but did anyway
And because they never happened never end

Dusk and Beyond

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Dusk and Beyond

 

The dusk sky is a gameboard of bats,
everyone’s lost apologies for what

They knew they did wrong but could not find
The words to admit. Homeless things.

The poet’s night shift has me emotional–
The moon’s pendulum scythe swings

Below the tree line and I wake up astonished
To be alive. The poem holds a word

To my throat and the word is your missing
touch. In the world are some animals whose feet

Never touch the ground. Birds who only
Land on the uncertainty of open water.

Just as in you there are poems
that may never land on the tree of language

But whose wingbeats keep you awake,
Whose migration over open space

Turns everyone’s heads though they hear
Only your voice on a quiet morning.

We Tear

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We Tear

We tear
Inconveniently as bread.

After our walk
we wanted no one else

to enjoy the moon like that
so we buried it.

Li Po found it floating face down
in the river and revived it.

It’s like when you think you see
a corpse in the water

but it’s back-floating
looking up at its real self.

Six late-August evenings (2)

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Six late-August evenings (2)

late-august

2.
I heard the earth breathing through its lungs the trees.
Outside the beasts of habit prowled back and forth.

But we are all beasts on another’s street.
Inside, we are the small shadows of the trees,

Doing their opposite, breathing in what they exhale
As the earth breathes in our every word,

Translating each into half a hand of shade above us.
When dawn breaks, the sidewalk is empty.

A newspaper lays on its side by the butterfly bush,
Condensation misting words within the plastic bag,

The beasts of habit are nowhere to be seen
But the grass, wet and flattened as if from a struggle.

The headline says that the words
Had just fallen during the night

From the future

Looking to the ground on an overcast full moon evening and seeing the sky

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Taken with NightCap Pro

Looking to the ground on an overcast full moon evening and seeing the sky

And on waking we move from the month
of vines to the month of ivy.

From sensing

our own growth relies on support to sensing
heights

and a path we create by ascending.