Tonight, as stars draw nigh
And peer into the milky sky
To see if anything is new under the sun,
I pray that you will be in view for them.
And I pray, too, that you will dare
To steal fire again from the heavens,
Great Prometheus.

I will drive the get away
So that you, or rather, we,
Will not be caught.
For this world needs fresh fire,
But no one wants to be tied forever
To a stone where, eternally,
Eagles eat one's liver.

So this time we humans promise
That you will have aiders and abettors
And accomplices.

-jenn

When she died, she was surprised
As she looked down from a window in heaven,
That her husband didn't go to bed at eleven anymore.
Now he retired more early,
Seven-thirty or eight.
But of course his new honey
Didn't like to stay up so late.
Good thing when a window closes in heaven,
The good lord remembers not to shut the door
All the way.

-jenn

If it seems to you
That I wander through the day
Aimless and forlorn,
An unattended winterbourne
That comes and goes away,
A lazy row of unthinned corn,
A little boy blue with unshorn sheep
And daisies in the hay,
And little bits of sticks strewn in
Amongst the peat moss mix,
I say I'm doing pretty good
To keep water in a bowl
For wild game and fowl to come and drink,
For, I'm only six,
And wild birds seem very important to me.

-jenn

Once a sleeping boy awoke
And spoke about a cat who'd come
And curled up to take a nap beside his head.
And that, my love, is the breadth and brevity of life,
One statement, one half-awake epiphany
To divulge surprised in a sleep talking slur.
And then, right back to bed,
To heavy dreams and heavy breathing,
And leave the heavy lifting to the morn
Of another lifetime and another day.

-jenn

All my gears have been worn thin.
Now, all I do is turn,
But I don't click with anyone.
Nothing catches, nothing goes.
Even my spin has started to slow down.
I'm finally getting a look at what's going on.

Is this all I've been doing my whole life?
Just adding my two cents
To the daily strife and strain?
Ah.
Well.

I hope when some great someone sees
How unproductive I am now,
I'll be taken out of this weird machine
And thrown out,
And like all the rest of the garbage,
Maybe I'll wind up in the ocean.

And maybe, as I lie and rust
Some magic silt will nestle amidst
What used to be my teeth,
And I'll grow back with starfish arms and ossicles,
And be a part of a new hydraulic system,
Instead of a new world order.

-jenn

They've asked me to play Cynthia Rothrock
In the upcoming Hollywood blockbuster,
The Life and Times of Cynthia Rothrock,
The great female Kung Fu mistress of the silver screen
From the eighties,
(The 1980's that is.)

Because although Cynthia could play herself
She doesn't look like an older version of herself
Like I do,
Or at least like what her fans think she would look like.
She dies her hair brown now,
And has lost about twenty pounds.
Oh, and she's not willing to sleep with Harvey Weinstein,
Oh
(And he can't make her.)

-jenn

He limped into the Indian clinic
And then he limped back out.
He was there for his regularly scheduled dental cleaning,
And nobody asked him about that open sore on the back of his leg.
Wounded knees are hereditary around here.

But when they called him to remind him to come back in
Six months from now,
He had already gone septic and given up the ghost,
Like Jesus did,
Even before anyone could poke him with a spear.

But they just said, "Well,
That's one less NDN
To keep on the books here
For the feds to take care of."

-jenn

In a society addicted to flexion,
It's good to remember to stretch sometime.
In the midst of stooping and hunching, bowing and scraping,
Say to your self "Blessed are the upright!"
Then stand up straight.

Our cement is setting.
Our faces are freezing this way,
In sad, starved frowns and pained expressions.
We 're drawing up taut,
In fetal positions all across humanity
And it should not be so.

Let everyone else try to survive ,
But you, rise over all this
Socially accepted, politically corrected bereavement.
Rise up, out of the ashes of all these wars and hates and divisions and delusions
And LIVE, and smile, and lie out flat on the ground,
And stretch your bones up and out in honor of the Invincible Sun,
And be very happy !

-jenn

Just south of my sternum,
Instead of a belly,
You'll find a gyroscope.
It spins at speeds that create
Magnetic fields.
The schematic that runs my programs
Is more complex than the hadron collider.
Only tai chi can harness the power it yields.

I start tsunamis,
And I end them.
I churn the vastest sea.
I wiggle one toe,
And mythical kittens appear
To pounce on me.

Stratospheres ascend, descend,
And this Skyborg is gradually growing skin.
Maybe someday my artificial intelligence
Will come to life,
Or at least collide with a copacetic particle
Out there somewhere.

-jenn

My sneezing fit scared my cat.
He pouted all day long,
Avoided me, and gave me the silent treatment.

I wondered if an apology would make any difference to him.
I knew apologizing would affect me
For the worse.
So I didn't.

He quit sulking at suppertime.

I wonder what it will take
For others to forgive me
For the biological fits I've thrown,
Much less the unreasonable ones.

-jenn

Is it better to question
And find an answer
Than to have nagging doubts
That you refuse to see,
Chase you, paint you into invisible corners?

Is it better to try and fail
Or succeed
Than to let regret erode your soul.

(It is.
But why listen to me?
I truly was born yesterday.)

:P

-jenn

I brought my neighbor a leaf that had fallen
Off my tree and taped it to his door.
He didn't like it. He didn't thank me,
For he is in a war, like Don Quixote,
And leaves are his windmill.

Everyday, he's raking, raking,
Bagging, bagging,
Wiping his brow.
But everyday the wind is blowing,
His eyes glaze over. He cuts them around.
All his neighbors' leaves are falling down
And blowing right into his yard.

I think he should move to Piedmont,
Amarillo, or Santa Fe,
If he doesn't like the oak leaves
Falling in his yard this way,
This conspiracy of beautiful burnt orange oak leaves.

Today I saw an industrial strength
Leaf blower strapped to his back
Like an exoskeleton,
Safety goggles bulged like big bug eyes on his face,
And all day long I heard the monotonous hum
Of his good riddance song.

But tonight, the wind is blowing,
Galing, gusting, blustering about,
Knocking more leaves out of the trees
Right down in poor old Joe's yard.
And tonight I found this lovely crimson one,
And tip-toed right up to his door,
And taped it there, for him to find
In the morning.

Hehee

-jenn

Events create a recurring energy
That gives snowflakes their precise uniqueness.
Even the feelings and desires behind the actions
Will inform significant patterns in iron shavings,
Tea leaves, and life lines on your palm.

Or

Is it truly that the tea leaves,
The swirls and lines upon your palms,
Birch smoke rising, and laurel leaves
Predestinate upcoming events
By the words of a living plan?

-jenn

Recollect with me
The Ancient Peace,
And by doing so,
A Future Peace will be garnered,
Because every action
Not only has
An equal and opposite reaction,
But also a quantum entanglement
In a here-to non-local realm.

And so where any two or three agree in peace,
Prison doors may open for a Gandhi
Or a Nelson Mandela, or even a Phyllis Diller, somewhere,
And just maybe they will come for us,
And in turn, set us free.

-jenn

Facebook suggested I poke you,
And I started to,
But I remembered that meme you posted
About, "My face when somebody pokes me
At 3:27 am."

There was a beautiful chain letter
One of my friends had sent me.
All you had to do was say AMEN or type it, maybe,
And then forward the letter to all your contacts,

Which I never do,
But I wanted to send it you,
Because I want you to have all the good luck in the world
And none of the bad,
And I think they only said
Your socks wouldn't match
If you didn't forward it within 13 minutes!
And that's a small price to wager
In the face of all the good they promised.

But then I remembered that meme,
And that face!

So....
I'm not gonna poke you
Until maybe 8 am?
And.... I've still got 7 minutes to think
About sending that chain letter
Before something weird happens in my sock drawer!

So..... Don't you worry bout a thang, Baby!

-jenn

I wish you could hear this cat purr.
I wish you could feel it
Like the transcendent quantum waves of love it is.
My mind goes blank within it.
My thoughtlessness rides the undulations
To some great phantasmic akashic record,
A majestic zero point in the cat's cosmogony.

And as the vibes of instinct shake me
Loose into a sea of forgiveness,
I find I trust my beginnings and my endings all
To a tale of a cat and a mouse,
To a song that is never finished
And eternal lyrics that finish themselves
Then change and start again
In a beautiful complex loop.

And now, I trust my universe
May be just as beautifully unimportant
As the ones created and beheld
By the om of this cat's purr.

-jenn

Suddenly I felt a great transference,
Like I was the rational one,
Like I had all the power,
Like I was the river the car had driven off into.

I was filling the car with water.
I was pushing it down into the silt
From which it would never return.

I didn't know why I was doing that.
Was it my fault?
I didn't understand
That this is what deep rivers do
When some fool goes and drives his car off into them.

Water is ever true to its own mysterious nature,
Its cohesive polarity.
Water sinks, and it sinks anything else
That might take it on or allow the deep
To penetrate its buoyancy.

-jenn

My Lancelot, my Lancelot,
I'll change your name when we leave Camelot.
We'll disappear into a sylvan dream.
The castle, with its high-walled gates,
Its ramparts, its fancy plates and designated places to sit
In the mead hall will be no more
Than the memory of some rotted thing drudged up from the stinking moat.

And if we live in a cave or a hut,
We will call it Halcyon,
And kindle the hearth of Love and Peace
In the quiet home of favored bliss
Within the orb of our tangled arms embrace.

But what shall I change your great name to?
Is there something more lofty than Monta-goo?
Or even Lancelot?
And what is in a name, anyway?
What word could dare speak of the worlds I see in your face?

-jenn

A big she-bear sleeps in a den she dug
Under a sycamore deep in the smoky mountains,
And I am just one of the cubs she bore
While she slept in a state of hibernation.

My brother and sister cub and I
Sense the rich colostrum
Up high on our mother bear,
And even with our eyes still unopen we know
That we need this. We struggle to go to where it is.
Our great mother succors our every need,
Even as she sleeps.

Mother Bear dreams, and we do, too.
We smile alive and full and know
That as we dream and wake and nurse,
Our mama bear sleeps, yet cares for us
Well into springtime, when everything will change.
Yet, mama bear's care will be fiercely the same
When she wakes.

-jenn

Every time I think Ive found myself,
I find someone who's more me than me,
The me I want to be.

Makes me want to change again,
Readjust my course,
(Tho somewhere deep, I know it's only ashes to ashes or dust to dust,
And what course I take to get there matters not.)

I'm starting to feel that all this talk of diversity is a lie.
We are all more alike than we think,
Maybe more than we'd like.

But maybe, if the pursuit of individuality
Has overshadowed the pursuit of happiness,
Then we torture our own souls
Trying so hard to be different,
Trying to be something we're not.

-jenn

An olive branch gets shaken down.
Olives fall upon the tarps
That have been laid out on the ground.
The olives get the squeeze,
And virgin oil of the highest purity flows.

And I am falling unprepared,
But I feel free, and I'm not scared.
I hear the branch and it's clattering leaves
Call out to me,
"O live! O live! O live!
Live and write your poetry!"

-jenn

Every time I think I found myself
I find someone who's more me than me
The me I want to be

Makes me want to change
Readjust my course
( There somewhere deep I know it's only ashes to ashes or dust to dust
And what course I take to get there matters not)

I'm starting to feel that all this talk of diversity is a lie
We are all more alike than we think
Maybe more alike than we would like to be
And maybe if the pursuit of individuality
Has overshadowed the pursuit of happiness
Then we torture our own souls
Trying so hard to be different

-jenn

A song I don't like is on the radio.
I want to turn it down but I'm talking on the phone.
I hang up and start to turn the dial,
But I hear the first few sounds
Of a long lost chart-topping favorite,
And now the volume isn't up enough,
So I crank the music high.
One-sidedness is everything,
And everything is relative.

-jenn

I am a warhorse marching down to war.
(I fight a battle for my own spirit.)
I hold my head up, unafraid and proud.
(Fear and shame have no place on the battleground.)

I fight a good fight. My mighty chest
Expands full of crisp air, my lungs, my breath
Intuit the freedom, the change of direction
My heart can take, after I've won.
There will be peace beyond the horizon.
Green pastures await my soul
Just through the other side
Of the triumphant arching gate.
Victory shall be mine.

-jenn

I'm a horse with a blanket coat
Wrapped across my back,
Strapped easily around my speckled belly.
I feel the double love.
The sun the universe sent to me
Shines above my head.
The blanket that the human brought has stopped the wind,
And I am warm again.

The human will bring alfalfa hay,
And I have dry Bermuda grass beneath my feet,
And in a while, the human's child
Will bring me carrots and a sugar cube
And scratch the star of white that blazes out
Between my eyes and up
Under the shock of my black mane
That hangs down between my ears.
He will rub his nose to mine
And breath deep the smell of my sweat
Mixed with my chestnut hair.
And time and life will come and go,
And that child will grow into
Who knows what,
But one thing is sure,
He will always love horses.

-jenn

I've found my river.
I go easily in its flow.
It's got the same speed as me,
Though it pushes me some,
And sometimes it slows me,
But it is home,
And yet, it runs away with me,
Down to our common destination,
The everlasting beauty of an amaranthine sea.

The Aegean strait that waits for me
Leads me from its lowly place,
Draws me from my high.
Open arms at sea level and below
Will and woo me as I go.
The Aegean Great sums up all the rivers' flow.
It would have been my fate
No matter which river I'd have chosen,
But I can glow in this river,
And I will go free and effervesce
With this transcendent river.

-jenn

He tried to carry too many things
To his car in just one trip,
And I fell out of one of the sacks
But he never even knew.
I rolled like a can down the hill
And clonked into the curb.
There, I decided to make a left
And roll a little bit more.
Now I lay, sprawled in a way
That may seem awkward to most,
But I feel fine, and I am lying
On the sunny side of the street.

-jenn

If all the world is cheese whiz
And pork rinds
Then we have at least a 50 percent chance
Of casting our pearls to swine

I'm going to hold on to my pearls
Like an expensive rosary,
And pray to the gods of some other dimension,
And hope that they aren't piggies, too.

-jenn

Orbits are like addictions.
So if you want to capture Mercury
And get it out of the furnacial heat
From its closeness to its star
So that you can study its properties,
You better take its orbit along too.
Put it in the bag to take back to the lab
Where you are comfortable.
Take your time.
You might as well.
But you will see no rhyme or reason
To the many ways that Mercury tends to misbehave
In the comfort of your climate controlled conditions.
Mercury not only can stand the heat
Of the Sun's great kitchen,
But also prefers it.
And while you take the weekend,
Mercury will slip off and put itself and its orbit
Right back where it longs to be,
Where, even its misbehavior is seen as behaving properly.

-jenn

The wildest creature I saw at the zoo
Sported six-inch heels and I could see through her floral mini-dress
That she wasn't wearing panties.

Her husky mate ahead of her
Pushed the stroller,
And when he turned around, I saw
The word "Faith," emblazoned on his black t-shirt
With the "T" in the middle
Looking all two-edged sword.

It may take more than Faith, Hope, and Love,
I thought as I walked by.
It may take more than being in one Accord, too.
This might take a Pink Cadddilack!

-jenn

When I have the urge to skip the night,
Have breakfast and go on with day,
Remind me that even the light can be nocturnal,
And that my journal is incomplete
Without the sweet rest of day---darkness,
Where I put my feet up,
And put my head away for awhile.

Remind me that's it's better,
This ounce of prevention that I take,
That, odds are, I won't die
Before I wake, so it's ok to sleep.
Then I will lay me down,
But I may keep one eye open
Til morning light,
Then run all day,
And still think about skipping the night,
Have breakfast for supper then churn
More butter for later to feel I've earned my keep,
And wonder if ever I could do enough
To prove my worth to you or feel
I've earned a good night's sleep.

-jenn

I have meat, and I have drink
Waiting for me at castle blue.
And I will eat when I get home,
Back to my home at castle blue.

Persephone ate a pomegranate seed.
She was far away from home
In an underworld where she now must stay
All fall and winter, and she can't roam.

So too, I know that I can't eat
This dangerous food in this hasty place.
I will wait to be consumed,
And to consume in a better place--
My castle blue.

And I don't speak in this foreign land,
Except to encourage with psalms and hymns,
Riddles for those with eyes to see
And ears to hear,
And sometimes, I might talk to you,
Can you hear me back there, in castle blue?

-jenn

They sit together even if they do not talk.
They're social like that.
They look into one another's eyes sometimes,
And sometimes, they can't,
And it's not because they've told one another lies,
Or done some shameful thing.
It's just that there's a time and a place
For soul searching,
And a time to look away,
And let everything just be.

-jenn

You can make your own luck.
Drop a penny,
And pick it up yourself.

-jenn

The most interesting thing
I saw at the zoo today
Was a touring group of Mennonites.
A little boy, almost two, toddled to see the chimps.
He wore jeans and a short sleeve shirt of dark plaid,
And blue suspenders, just like his dad's.

Several lovely women wore plain fine dresses
They had made themselves.
They also wore small white hats
Bobby-pinned to lovely locks of long, undyed hair.
None of them wore a stitch of makeup,
And they didn't need to, either.

Children of all ages and older married couples strolled together,
The newlyweds lagged a bit behind. Yes, you can just tell,
In any religion or cultural setting,
For they are still in love.

-jenn

Know thyself,
My loving friend.
You are a complicated
Chemical compound
Whose very equation is complex,
A mixture of brains and brawn,
Heart and soul and spirit,
Love and sex,
So knowing you is sometimes hard for me,
But so beautifully intriguing
And so worthwhile.

But please understand,
Knowing yourself
Is even more difficult
Than possibly we comprehend
At the moment,
Because if knowing you is hard for me
You may not see your lovely forest
For all your lovely trees.

But you are so worth knowing,
My loving friend,
And there is a mighty kingdom
Full of glorious treasure
Within you.

And so my chant
To me, to you,
A mantra
That we will ever be true to ourselves,
And that we will know ourselves,
Know ourselves.

-jenn

You want to get Lady Luck to disrobe?
A nice warm room with a rosy glow would help.
The sweet smell of oranges,
Nightbirds' chirp,
Knit her a cashmere sweater of heartfelt love words,
And drape her shoulders with it,
And she'll unbutton the one she wore in, herself.
And now, wouldn't that be better?

-jenn

1
The sky is a giant 3-D printer.
You can have whatever you want,
If you can look up and see it in the clouds in the sky.
Someone's getting a new rib cage--
Right now as we speak!
Someone---getting a new spinal column,
Included: a new spinal cord and spinal fluid.
Someone just wants a little red wagon.
Here it is!

And here is a very special dragon
That a very special someone has wished for
And now has seen it in the sky!

It's all yours, my child!
Look up,
And behold what you will!

I keep looking for a new heart,
But all I found so far
Are heart shaped leaves on the ground,
But even they remind me, "Look up! Look up!
Don't look down!
Look up to the sky!
It's all yours, my child!
Look up,
And behold what you will."

2
Well today I saw a heart in the sky
Or maybe it was just a dotted "i"
Or a dotted lowercase "j"
Or maybe it was an umbrella
That I borrowed to jump off the barn as a child.
The anxious whoosh of the approaching ground
Broke it spines and turned it forever upside down

It's constant smile eerily derided me
With a continuous, "Good Job!"
For all these years.

I think I'll throw it out today,
And ponder what meaning there might be
In a lowercase "j"

-jenn

You want to be native?
You want to see
The utter futility
Reserved in all things?
In building houses?
In planting crops?
In putting stock in the buffalo?
In moving west
And making room peaceably
For others to come
And build their dreams.
And with their square white picket fences,
Cordon off the simple winding trails
That you and the rabbit followed
To good spring water back in the day?

Their gospel says this world and everything in it
Is reserved for fire,
And maybe, all human beings would do well
To look forward to the humility
And the futility
Of all things.

- jenn

It's not better to give.
It's necessary.
The human condition
Undeniably exists
To perpetuate itself
With the gift of life.

And regardless of your lofty estate
Or lowly,
You will find your heart has burst
If you miserly only take
For all of your years.
Why don't you open your ears
To the music of love
And the generous buzz
Of atoms all around you,
Full and replete,
And share your sweeet heart
With someone who wants you, today?

-jenn

"I used to dream of hunting down grizzly," he said,
"Or maybe black bear, or brown,
But now, I could never bring myself to shoot one."

In my heart I knew
The cherokee story of
How the black bear grew into being
From the cherokee people,
And is considered their close cousin.

The story of how some of their kin grew tired
Of living within the confines of the tribes,
Went out on their own,
And slowly but surely,
Den by den of anti-social men
Grew coarse fur, and grew hearty and stout
And evolved into what we now call bears.

I could see the sad eyes
On this grizzled man,
And I see him moving his clan
Further and further
Out and away from society,
And I have a feeling,
A new kind of bear evolution
Is underway.

-jenn

When I have a special function to attend,
I often leave my pants unzipped.
I'd like to think I did this purposefully.
But, even so, maybe subconsciously,
A statement has been made.

And if such a passive stance of
Displaying my yonic underpants,
Can cause such a fluttering disturbance,
Imagine, if all our bootless worries
Could hurry off to tattle
And leave us alone together
In the shade of this chestnut tree.

-jenn

All dogs go to heaven,
And so do all men.
It's women, so tangled by original sin
Who are accepted, excepted or denied
Based on things....ummm... I'm not quite sure what.

Maybe it's breast size?
Maybe it's how tight her twat is?
Maybe she's born with it.
Maybe it's Maybelline.
But I'm starting to line up more with
Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer
And think that with all the people I know
Who are so sure they're going to heaven,
Maybe I'd prefer to go to hell.

-jenn

What is truth?
It's saved away.
A barn full of peanut hay,
It waits to be hauled out someday
When it is truly needed,
When the wheat's gone by,
The grass is brown and cold and dry,
And cows need to eat something
To nourish themselves
And the babies they're heavy with,
The ones they'll bare
When springin' time is here
And the wheat is green again.

What is truth?
It's locked up tight
In the china cabinet .
When the occasion is good enough,
And we can appreciate it,
It will come out
And shine it's light on our wishes,
And then we 'll know,
But right now, we're too lazy for the truth,
Too lazy to do our dishes,
So we just throw 'em away.

But someday,
We 'll be thankful for peanut hay
And good china,
And Truth.

-jenn

Sometimes I pretend I'm married to roger mckickough.
He wouldn't let his wife wear makeup,
And I don't feel like wearing any today.
And sometimes I feign marriage to brent bartau,
Who never let his wife wear a bra.
That appeals to me some days.
And sometimes I pronounce me
Married to myself
And do whatever the hell I want,
Whenever the hell I want to.

-jenn

Men can discover,
To their surprise, they had
A long lost son, a long lost daughter.
That's how it is when you're a dad,
Sometimes, I suppose.
But a woman dang well knows
When she's become a mother.
And this is just one of the many ways
The sexes differ.

-jenn

I walk with a wild man.
People stare at him.
He wears no shoes.
His hair is long, unkempt at times,
But something about him shines.
Like Merlin, he is magical.
His smile, mischievous, and powerful,
His eyes are alive. He sees all things
Like a child on Christmas Day.
This world is his oyster.
He opens it from within,
Somehow,
And then the day begins to go his way.

And now, I'll go and walk with him,
With my hair combed,
My shoes tied up
Around my feet,
My smile just as mischievous,
Albeit, a by-product
Of his contagious grin.

-jenn

Two little kittens,
One's a male,
He comes up and kinks his tail
And stares directly into my face
And wills me to pet him.
He settles in as I rub his back
And scratch his chin,
And he purrs without remorse,
Loud as a galloping horse
That wins by a mile.

The little girl slinks quietly in
And rubs her body on my shin
And furtively looks around.
She rolls like a ninja on the ground
And up into a ball.
I stroke her soft fur tenderly,
But still, her myow, so plaintive to me,
Seems to be a cry out over second place.

What is it about our estrogen
That makes us less confident
And feel we don't deserve?
That good things are only reserved
For the men?
Maybe because that's how it's been
Since the earth took a swerve
And began revolving around the sun.

-jenn

My cat looks in the mirror and sees
A woman singing lullabies
And playing the guitar.
I look in the mirror and see
A tomcat napping,
Dreaming of scrapping
And finding his amour.

It was almost trained out of me
To the tune of "You're a lover, not a fighter."
But now I see, I'm really quite a bit of both.
And so, I see the cat in me,
And to "quoth the raven,"
Nevermore will I be untrue
To who I really am.

-jenn