i love you

what is distance amongst friends, between lovers

even technology cannot cook up a connection enough
to satisfy
the longing hunger pang
the headache temple throb and
distance makes the marrow sob
out of the bone and into the spine

making one feel anything
but in-line with fine

oh distance you despicable design
no reason or rhyme only
a peeled, dried fruit rind
stuffed into the clock to slow the
hands from having a faster wind

oh time
oh travel
oh personal exploration, gratification, self-discovery sensation
occupation, celebration, manifestation of meaning

here in st. louis, my meaning is
to say
i love you
anywhere, anytime, anyway, -everybreath, everyday.

Fruit-- good for your health?

Theres something about wealth that
Is not to sweet for your health
You stealth with a lot of wealth
Eating oranges, grapes, bananas
Any time of the year
Feeling no cold weather sneer
As you imbibe juice without jeer
The sweet taste, we appreciate? How near—
Are we to the rind as we are to the

pricked-scarred hands, Thank you
bent-ached backs, Thank you
sweat-wiped brows, Thank you
Thank you


And, too, for rain,
rain fall rain
For trees, roots sinking soil anchors and
Worm logs
And-- for cotton ball clouds caesuras
Split by holy might of a forever sun
Keeping us warm and from ravelling undone


For the sweet taste that is anything
But lethal-if-ingested oil, black murky mystery
Writing a bloody history in the
Truth tomes of time
The drip drip out the tail pipe slime
Oil, oil fall oil
Falls into barrels and soars into the chorus of chaos carolers

All we did was eat a pomegranate, a peach, a pear,
A pair of oranges, bananas, apples
We like to eat, eat, eat any day any way
Sliced, diced, chomped, peeled, unpeeled, seeds, hands, forks, with friends, on a bench, at a kitchen tile counter, while wakling, talking, knife cut up

And, was that same knife used to cut the pie of fair-share wages to profits to oil owner to oil user and
Mercy on the sky!
Mercy on the worker!
Mercy on the fruit!

We smog, we ache, we bruise easily

Being able to pick grapes of a stem gets harder
Biting into an apple’s done slower

When known is the relationship of worker-grower
When known is oil spike heeded for the fruit to come over

And a tree is just a tree, or is it not a commoditree
Commodity, excuse me, what about that fruit
In your ring fingered hand stands a quandary I
Ululate to understand

Is the fruit fair
Is the trusting truth there
Is the worker wobbly from wear
Is the Chavez1 care appare-
apparent and in the supply-demand sentiment

That’s peeled dry of emotion and squirted is the
profit potion to keep the mundo2 in motion
mass transit, interconnection, injustice infection
blood and oil and fruit and farmers

these big picture, macro-multi-complex matters
examined, seem a ship splattered at sea
sinking humanity on the t.v.

Mercy on humanity!
Mercy on money!
Mercy on trade!

What is fair? What is fresh? What is fruit?
What is in your hand

Ah, always more, to
(cut up, chew, choke, swallow, purge, digest, absorb, release) to…
understand


-----
1 Cesar Chavez led United Farmer Workers to improve rights for produce laborers 1960s-1970s
2 mundo (el mundo—the world, in Spanish)

may words/1

Sometimes I think and really believe there are
One hundred minutes in an hour
And so when it says 4:55 that it is only half past four
About
And
I know I am wrong about that
And I know I am wrong about
So many other things
Like thinking you and I could be
Could be
Be
So I rearrange the ahnds on the clock to 4:75
And know its been 20 minutes and I
Have 25 more minutes to express
More thoughts (right, wrong, wrongight)

I want to melt myself into a silver ring
For you to wear on your finger
Cary me around smile down at me and say
You’re pretty
And someone will ask
That ring is so pretty where did you get it
My friend gave it to me,

And I am the ring
And I am the friend
And I am you
And I am the inquirer
I am the sunrise
I am the sunset
Illuminating and dusking you
With magenta, orange, glow
You know
That all I got is these words
Im hanging on to, hanging with this rope
Hanging on this hope
In words in you in me
In life
Connected interbeing so
And I sort out the platinum guts spewing purity
From the fake gold ones puking impurity
And I wander more in words
In clouds of dreams
In sandcastles of meaning
That always lose grip on the grains of one another
And all fall down
Making blurb blubs not headlines
Like some third world country
Twenty years after the fact that oh
We raped their country and privatized
The life out of earth and made it hell
And I still chew gum, eat too much,
Am ungrateful am guilty am a consumer
Am unmindful am weak am soft am so much
I should not be and not good
Not bad just a sick luke warm snail in a puddle
A mazy mob runs me over
And I slip on a slimy veil of superficiality
And smuggle myself through the world of surfeit
Make believe that I care
Make believe that I dare
The world, the you, the us
With these words that are rants
No prophetic chants
They are my soul spewing
They are the water in the well bucket
Eternally dropped and pulledup
Slake us slake us
Don’t take or break us
The world has seen that before
And is too busy getting the agency to get
The clean up crew back to aisle 2
To get the mops and clean up the bones and goo
And while the splatter scatters onto matters of surfeit
Of sickness and what
I just stant there, a witness
A fucking photographer, clicking the moment with
Words with letters on a labtop made in ___
Shipped with, by oil
Opened up by the hands of a woman paid less than a mans
Put on a shelf by a part time Latino who cant ask for more dough
In a store lit with electricity through a wire through coal burning somewhere
In a country hissing ENERGY CRISIS FOOD CRISIS MORTGAGE CRISIS WAR CRISIS like it’s the time and this raging inertia rubs too hard and chafes our eye lids
And
Will I think about the moment the tree was cut down to
Be energy for me, to give oxygen to my needy needy lungs
And my steady heart that just keeps going – hey, thanks heart
From some tree that was chosen by the consumer gods to be energy not paper

I think I don’t want to do anything anymore for you academia
You have squeezed me dry
I am a juiceless grapefruit, lemon, lime
Picked by the hands of a child, held with a smile
Sitting at the base of a tree, peeling the rind of the day
Sitting, fixated and gay in the moment
In love with all regardless of …
Without face, with a respiring story
Of hope of human connection- reaching upward is looking into the
Ocean of your eyes and walking on the wooden boards of your soul
Through time, space, ocean waves and sand grains
Into euphoria the moment an apogee, a sacrosanct crest
The moment
Ah
I breathe
And transform my world