Poem: January 15, 2020

This Is What I Want To Build

Summer camp, but for educators.

Not in media centers or cafeterias,
but out in nature with sunlight
and breezes and sleeping in cabins.

With fires and stars.

And no outlined agendas or
PowerPoint presentations.
No sit and gets. No rows.

No learning in lines or inside boxes.

No Keynote Speakers,
full of expertise and fixes.

No maps. No demands and
nothing mandatory. No protocols
with Post-Its and chart paper.

But then, plenty of chart paper,
and Post-Its, and Sharpie markers,
and glue sticks and pencils,
scissors and stickers and LEGO bricks,
scrapbook paper and fabric scraps,
and cameras and iPads and scanners,
microphone stands, printers, paint,
power tools, robots, video games,
green screens and costumes,
and musical instruments.

All free to use, to make, to take,
and to get hands-on, design, create.

And space for activity and
space to escape, for self-selecting-
up early, up late.

Days of exploring what we want
to explore, and days to restore
what we need to restore: our
raison d'etre, our sense of play.

And opportunities for celebrating
what matters in our work, and seeing
ourselves in that mirror, and saying
out loud, You know what would be cool?

And chasing that. Taking the time
to chase that, and to sustain
our collective wonder, to find the joy
that's hiding in our shadows.

With time for talent shows and
hootenannies, and team sports,
and yoga and writing poems in the shade.

Time to both eat and digest,
to stretch and to rest.

To unpack the taped-up boxes,
and untie our balloons.

To walk our winding paths back,
and knowing what we know,
to return to learning happy,
and on our own terms.

Poem: January 14, 2020

Present

This is the breath
I pull into my lungs,
the air cool in my mouth,
my chest expanding forward.
I close my eyes, let go color
and form, and in darkness
I feel my bellows empty.

These are my two feet.
Left foot. Right foot. The two
places I touch to the earth, two
points of contact, two upward
weights I lift and put in place.
I lean one way, then sway back.
I feel the weight straight
through me, and I kiss the ground
again and again to move.

These are my arms,
my back, my shoulders and calves,
the parts of me that spread
and stretch, as I twist my torso,
as I reach upward or
as I bend forward at the waist.
My skin tingles warm and
I push outward to my edges.

Poem: January 13, 2020

Thanks, Phoenicians!

Almost
Bacon
Collaborate
Dreamy
Ease
Fulfilled
Gather
Happy
Intelligence
Jazz
Kept
Library
Mild
Naked
Orange
Pillow
Quiet
Reach
Sunlight
Tend
Umbrella
Verse
Whiskey
X-Acto
Yes
Zesty

Poem: January 12, 2020

This Is How We're Supposed to Be

Even trees are more air than tree,
but don't they seem to fill their spaces,
reaching out all at once, breaking out
into every direction, and opening wide
with leafy palms to breathe and feel
the rain and sun, to be as big as they
can be, and to cast a dancing shadow
that grows larger than themselves,
arms up and out, an athletic stance,
and don't they dig themselves deep
into the ground, spreading their roots
all around, out as far as life allows,
going where the soil goes, searching
for their edges, stretching with their toes,
and don't you love that even though
there's so much earth and so much air,
it still seems the tree is everywhere.

Poem: January 11, 2020

Flabby

So easily it comes to this:
rotund profile,
straining at the waist,
and just a little more winded
when walking up the stairs.

So easy to forgive yourself
a second serving of potatoes,
another handful of salt,
ice cream and brownies
again tonight.
A bigger dish, a bigger spoon.

So easy to sit and to forget
to stand and walk around,
to forego the stroll,
to fail to go spend the hour
sweating at the gym.

So easy to just grow and grow
and ignore the aches
and trouble bending down
to reach the thing there
on the floor.

So easy to accept fatigue
and boredom, to choose
the couch and refuse to reach
for something more,
and to let exhaustion fill
your hours and eat its way
into your core.

Poem: January 10, 2020

There is a Room

There is a room I've constructed
for the thought of you,
a quiet place of great white windows
through which sunlight shines
and cool air brushes the curtains.

This is where the thought of you
finds books worth reading,
puzzles to solve, a deck of cards,
and cats that stretch
and flick their tails,
and coffee with cream to drink
in slow and peaceful sips.

And the thought of you can sense
the nearness of the ocean,
the suggestion of salt and ebb and hush,
close enough and always so
the thought of you knows
there is no need for rushing out

because the walls recall so much here,
memories of kites in Spring and
Christmas mornings and all
our ancient monuments, no need
for hurrying when the linens
and pillows are so clean and soft and
lend themselves to sinking in.

I love the way the thought of you
lingers here, and every year,
this room, a little larger.

Poem: January 9. 2020

Jousting at Windmills

I used to crave magic, something
I was sure was there, somewhere,
sprung to life, but somehow

missing me.

Take-charge heroes, dragons,
really anything Medieval, gritty,
larger than suburbia, critical.

I was certain that a life
ought to be driven and dangerous,
strange and in the wild,

that the truth must be that

love aches and catches in the throat,
that goodness shines, that evil crawls,
that friendships are tested and hardened

in a crucible, and life

is grim and hearty and reveals
the arcane and mystical clues
that we might use to understand

the divine.

Life felt like it should be like that-
romantic, sorrowful, magnificent.
But life is mostly not like that.

Life is long and little and easy
to pass through, and the cruelties
are human and often removed.

And the dangers are largely known
and manageable, and hardship is
more irritating than hard for many.

And love is pleasant, isn't it?
And adventure is either planned
or out of reach, and

our comfortable dust has settled.

Our days are well-kept and happy, so
really there is no need for heroics, and
no reason to stir up any trouble.

Poem: January 8, 2020

Mr. President

Bellicose and corpulent,
puffy, crass and petulant,

city bred and country fed,
an orange and artificial cad,

his weathered hide belied, belied
by snowy white around his eyes,

veneer of lies and lies and lies,
as flaccid as his power ties,

such little wisdom, such childish cries,
a nation's tantrums realized,

a hammer of anxiety,
a hateful cup of weakish tea,

bloated sushi stuffed with shame,
chaos sport, envy game,

mind full of scraps, friend to bomb,
source of waste and shattered norms,

obfuscation and Twitter storms,
contracts torn and soft core porn,

such woeful aches of slow reform,
as our nation wakes to cage and harm,

and democracy's structures procrastinate,
shocked and awed. Too late, too late.

Poem: January 7, 2020

Easy to Forget

I want you to love this work
despite all that refuses to recommend it.

I want you to see past the rows,
the cinder block and snotty noses,
the stacks and stacks of boxes to be checked.

I want you to refuse to see any tool,
any map, any protocol or strategy,
as a solution to your complex problem.

There is no solution. There is no problem.

I want you to spend these precious days
in the company of young souls,
in the presence of hope, unscrewing
the caps of jars full of wonder,
rediscovering surprise and wide-open eyes.

I want you to kneel before the mysteries
of blank pages and the open doors
that form the beginnings of all these lives,

and I want you to cry joyous tears,
surrounded as you are by the carbonated
alchemy of mind work, the magic of synapse,
the ancient artifacts and lore and mystic dance.

I want you to adore your holy rites,
your proximity to the pulsing human core.

Poem: January 6, 2020

Uncorked

Dirck bought me a bottle of good whiskey.
Hand-numbered. Amber. Smokey when you get close.
And you know we opened it. Two old friends.
Two rocks glasses. Two long pours late in the evening.
Nothing that good should be allowed to last.

Poem: January 5, 2020

House

One wall, of course,
is money, or more
precisely, its scarcity,
and so we make choices
about what we can and
cannot have, where we
can live, the size and
shape of our lives.

Another wall is fear,
which keeps us safe,
but which also sands
away our faith, and
waters down our tea.
Fear makes all our
stories end the same.
A windowless wall,
painted white and straight.

Our third wall is noise-
all the distractions and
empty calories of now.
The thoughts that have
been thought for us, all
the opiates and lies. A
noisy wall of poison gifts,
bees and condescension,
dry pills and definitions.

The fourth wall is time,
shifting and deceptive,
that slides away and
hides itself, right there,
in plain sight, like it is
permanent and solid
even as it flies away.
The impossible promise
we make to ourselves,
not even ours to waste.

And covering all, this
dark unknown, a roof
that leaks, and broken
attic stairs, a barrier from
all the bare elements-
gods of burning, shock,
chill and rushing flood,
a filtering not of else, but
a filtering out of ourselves.

Poem: January 4, 2020

Poem Before Bed

Hello, dear sleep.
I welcome you tonight,
every night the same.

I am grateful to you
for this dark shifting,
this folding inward
to the open other,

the slow of it.

I am grateful for
your open gate and
the widening spaces
between my atoms,
this form of fading.

My eyes are grateful
and the muscles in my neck.

My lungs and legs
appreciate your expanses

and the softening of
daylight's surfaces,
the graying of the colors,

I invite you in,
remaker, release,
and rising tide.

I hide myself inside
your flesh

and accept my rest,
subtracted from hard edges
and falling farther away.

Poem: January 3, 2020

Cruel Garden

Email climbs the walls like ivy,
like an invasive species, a weed,
climbing, climbing and draping
itself over everything, making
a mat of the canopy, blocking
the sun, choking anything else.

Its roots sink deep into the rich
subterranean reaches of our
personal, professional, commercial
soil. An ancient weed, as old as we.
A voracious consumer of time
and human pleasure. A sprawling
nothing that crawls and binds.

The best we can do is clip it back
with our daily shears and machete,
or else burn it to the ground with
a single, careless, nuclear click.
But of course, the roots, the roots
are always there and urging up,
and we know this only ends with
our own ending because we'd
break our own backs in the pulling.

Poem: January 2, 2020

Run, Forrest

You know that scene
in Forrest Gump 
when Tom Hanks
takes off running
and just keeps going?

That's me.

My own wind-up toy,
I am full of my own
forward momentum
and mysterious purpose
until, one day, I'm done.

Poem: January 1, 2020

Inhale

Today,
New Year's Day,
I will be

light gray,
like linen,
like cool ocean

spray, faded,
ethereal,
worn away.

I will be
a deep breath,
at rest.

A thought or
a prayer
that drifts away.