It wouldn’t do me any good
To carry money around.
I’d only give it to the bums that stay
On 22nd and Grand by Trosper Park.
I see the winter landscape by the pond.
Over toward the water’s edge,
Ice is starting to form.
Some of the cattail grass is turning brown,
And some is not,
But nothing here is richer,
Nothing poorer.
-jenn
Something broke me down.
The world crashed in
Through the broken lens
Of my Kaleidoscope.
Tears damned up for years fell through
In sorrow and in rapture.
The blues and scarlet-crimson hues,
The violet, ultra-ohhhhh so,
The vermillion-pinks, don’t you know!
The yellows, that rained,
Like broken stained glass window panes,
The pangs of love and joy I knew,
When, just last night, beneath the waning moon,
I heard him call me “Baby.”
-jenn
How these aloe infused socks
Came to be made in China went as this:
The socks were made and then infused as such,
In that their mothers’ feet were oiled
And the socks put on their feet,
And thus, they sat or walked about
Or slept or stood with these socks on
And oiled, but good, until the socks were steeped
In the four postures of the zen mothers.
And then the socks were brightened, like teeth,
And packaged and sent around the world,
Bought and sold, and worn by you and me.
And while some will not agree that this is good,
And don’t want to be sold pre-worn socks
Of any kind, may I remind you
Of the mother principle,
Which lasts a very long time?
And might I say one thing more,
How great it is for mothers with sore feet
To have them rubbed and oiled every couple of weeks
And get paid for it?
-jenn
They’ve put me in a dungeon
And demanded that I spin gold out of straw.
Someone told them that I could.
But I don’t know how.
I love windows,
And there are none in here.
But slowly I begin to twist,
To make a mountain out of my molehill.
My soul protracts images from the walls of my prison cell,
The stories that the shadows tell,
The characters, their roles.
I pull the rays of an unseen sun into my heart.
I’m happy here.
And now the straw emits a light
So attractive.
It drags my love right into its core,
And as I stand, and turn, and dance,
And pull it so gently,
Somehow I see, I’m drawing out its gold.
-jenn
He likes being held
Like a hostage
And on snowy Christmas Day.
He likes the notion
Deep in his mind, that
Maybe he can’t get away
This time.
Maybe the spirit of something past has him.
Maybe, without a care,
Or a chamber pot to piss in,
He has something NOW after all,
This something that has him.
So Merry Christmas, Lover.
Your promises are vain.
But I’ve told you
I have something for you.
So hold me to it,
For that’s not a promise,
But only a threat,
Like clouds without rain
Or smoke without fire.
Your gun’s for hire,
But I only kill for fun,
And only ever on Christmas Day.
So which of us is better or worse?
Who can say?
And which of us
Will make the naughty list,
If it were written, today?
Who, the nice?
-jenn
A songbird calls happily out to me,
“I see you! I see you! I see you!”
The bird did something I couldn’t do.
It found me in my natural state,
Un-pretensed out in my orchard,
And now I must go and find that bird,
To find out what it heard me saying,
Heard me praying for.
My mind wanders after it.
The morning is cool,
But no wind blows.
So many various birds I hear,
Their coos and chirps and melodious calls.
Somewhere out there, quietly,
One warbler hides,
Or maybe he is in plain sight,
But has changed his tune
To disguise himself?
I wander on in search of it
Through the mysterious trees.
Lulled by the peaceful, charming ways,
Life draws me along,
Page after page,
Through this daydream.
-jenn
In the great book of inside jokes,
Someone pressed me like a flower.
My colors have bled into 42 pages
And I have dehumectified.
I saunter now from pen to pen
To clean the animals’ cages at the zoo.
The big cats, with their sticky poo,
Prickle my nose with ammonia.
My mind has become as the dung of gazelle,
A dry turd that doesn’t attach to anything,
An odorless, tasteless void to carry ideas
And drop them unchanged along the way.
I created all the authorities that ever lived in my head,
And I pretended to obey them.
Like a hypocrite,
I give validity to my lower self.
But when I drop all of that,
I see my lower self is just a phony, too.
There is no zookeeper following me.
There’s only one me here.
I empty myself of everything else
And here I stand true,
Purely coded,
Like a fertilized egg,
Attached only to the great womb
Of the cosmos
And growing.
Growing,
Waiting to be born again,
As I go from pen to pen
Cleaning the animals’ cages.
-jenn
He’s worked and deserves this really big raise.
A step up the ladder, and now he has
A really big Yang, but then again,
He’s in line to receive a really big Yin,
He just doesn’t know it.
Show it to me, the bowling trophy
You won on Halloween,
The big blue ribbon you got
For your biscuits at the county fair.
They go so well with my pumpkin pie.
My kidney pie is to die for, too,
And if you stare into my eyes,
You’ll see beyond the limits,
The really big Yang I hide inside,
And the really big Yin that resides
There with it.
-jenn
The anti-cat takes a string
That’s stretched out ‘cross the floor
And rolls it back into a tidy ball of yarn.
She un-charms birds with her mouth full,
Drops bits of kibble on the mat.
The anti-cat is in full swing.
The anti-cat walks like a dog,
Smells like a dog and quacks like one.
She sleeps like a log as she suns her belly,
Purring cynically.
Ant-cat goes away,
But future-fakes with the best of them.
She dangles the carrot of wonderful
Times to come,
Instead of just cuddling up with me now
While I’m young(ish).
The anti-cat promises to return
On the clouds like Jesus,
But I know she never will.
She never will come home.
I bring in the unwelcome mat,
And shake its dirt out on my kitchen floor.
I won’t think about the anti-cat,
Anymore, today.
But hey, that gives me
Much more time
To un-wonder about you.
-anti-jenn
The second crime I ever committed
Was convincing the other cheerleaders
To moon the referee.
I thought he would want to see,
But he did not.
Sexual harassment is any unwanted sexual attention.
But how do you know unless you try?
And herein lies the double bind:
For any first attempt is still
As “any” as “any” overkill you’d ever do,
And so it’s better if they come to you,
And then their attempt can be construed
As wanted or unwanted.
So, you’ve heard about my second crime.
Do you have time to hear about my third one?
-jenn
I found a little niche in the city
A side street where nobody goes
Where the smell of vegetables
Roasting on charcoal
Rises me up
I go there
But only if it’s snowing
Or I’ve forgotten
Who I was
The Christmas lights are blinking
And one lonely bell
Rings to see if anyone can spare some change
Rise up
My bells have sung for the needy
But now I seek charity
Only loveless love
And loveless lovers find me
Rise up
But tonight while snowflakes fall
The stars shimmer
They seem frozen as if time stands still
I allow myself a space
To understand Winter
The love I seek is possible now
Rise up
Rise up oh sun
Forget about your sleeping
Awake in me the springtime of my love
Catch my breath as winter bells are ringing
Bring me peace
For my hearts on the run
And longs to run to you
Rise up
-jenn
The wind is cursing a gale this morning,
Accosting my ears with his whuffs and gusts,
Calling it every name in the book,
His job.
“But the world must keep on turning!”
He mocks. “What if it didn’t? Huh?”
I pull my hat down low, over my ears,
So I don’t have to hear it so well.
I muffle the swells of the senseless rage he’s blowing.
Why does he seem so mad at me?
I’ve been coming and going for centuries
Without a word, a job to do, too,
Dropping these shells and sand dollars
Out of the blue for lonely tourists to find
As they walk alone on the beach.
Maybes he’d like to trade places some day,
And I will blow, and he can swell, and wave
And drop low tide for awhile,
And see how he likes that?
-jenn
In the time it takes to fly
From London to France,
I stroll around my village, here.
I’m not getting anywhere in my wanderings,
But zero displacement carries me
Back to some tea that’s been
Steeping, all this time.
It’s strong, lukewarm,
Just like I want it to be.
It has no qualms to share,
No excuses to offer,
And none are necessary.
I find no shortcomings in it,
Nor it in me.
Now that’s what I call good company.
-jenn
They wanted to poke fun at the young girl’s lisp,
But it wasn’t there anymore.
By the time they could point
And laugh, it was gone.
The zit on the boy’s face
The day before,
Now his beard is groomed,
His muscles bulge.
Where is your misplaced scorn for me?
I, who change like mercury,
Like a fire burning blue
And white, vermilion, red.
Every fault and every worthy attribute
Can be found in me,
As I live and breathe.
-jenn
I’m alone in the moonlight,
In a place where the city lights failed.
Tonight they would pale in comparison anyway,
In the fullness of the moon and that one star.
I pledge myself to be complete,
Just as I am without one plea.
We’ll see where that gets me,
For now I’m wise enough to know
That even the Moon goes away.
It wanes,
But it always comes back.
It waxes full,
And fills my heart with love.
Maybe that is enough.
Maybe that is really all
I’ll ever need.
-jenn
My cousin cooked fried bologney and coleslaw for me.
I was five.
My Mother had left food ready for us to eat,
But my cousin, eight years my senior,
Who’d been left to babysit me,
Decided to cook something.
I watched her, all of thirteen,
Lighting the stove burner,
And taking a sharp knife
Out of the silverware drawer,
And using it deftly to cut up the meat
And the cabbage.
She had brought a big bag of dresses for me
That didn’t fit her anymore.
I tried on every one of them
Right there in the kitchen,
While she told me a lot of important things
That I was too young to remember.
I’m too old to remember them now,
But I will never forget, how
After our supper,
She pulled a big stack of books
Down off of a shelf
And read me stories,
About witches and elves,
And houses made of candy.
She taught me to read
Before I ever went to school.
And I don’t know if she ever got paid
Any wages for seeing me through
The dark nights when my parents
Had better things to do
Than stay home,
But I certainly hope
Lovely cousins like her
Receive a double, or triple reward
For being bright lights
In a little child’s world, like mine was.
-jenn
Butterfly effect!
Help me! Help me!
Help me draw my coveted neighbor
Next to me!
Flap incessantly for just half a minute
About the flowers growing in
The volcanic soil near the pacific rim.
May the winds stirred by your breeze
Flourish up warm into the cold air
And create a cyclone
In a nightmare of weather.
Let the power outage be
Sufficient for me
To reach him, true,
While the internet is down,
And build a fire between our grounds
And share the warmth
Of human company.
May “Love Thy Neighbor”
Be more than an epitaph
For you and me,
And we can say
It’s all because a butterfly flew
Somewhere over Hawaii.
-jenn
“Can you order this book for me?”
I ask the man at the public library.
It’s the only request
I ever have for him.
One at a time,
Books arrive
From exotic towns like Urbana-Champagne, Illinois.
I don’t know why they never seem to have
The book I want, here, resting on
A convenient shelf, in this,
My hometown library.
But I always bring them back,
Without the need of a fine,
And each good book inspires another,
So I return, with a clever grin,
And a request,
“Can you order this book for me?”
I ask him sweetly,
And he never turns me down.
Last night I dreamed
He turned to speak to me,
But I awoke before he finished
What he wanted to say.
It started out, “If you promise...”
But faded with either, ...”never
To read them to me,”
Or “...ever to be near me.”
Either way, I’ve just finished the latest book,
And have my little satchel packed
To go and see him today.
And I will smile, and ask him extra kindly,
Extra sweetly, if he can order
Another book for me.
-jenn
I read the stars at night.
Are they more rational than tea leaves?
I used to have questions
And wishes.
I used to have so many things to say.
The stars would never interrupt me,
But I never seem to want
To tell them anything.
My horoscope said not to admire
Anyone who was not happy.
So I look up to the stars,
And sightread their happy melodies.
-jenn
