The Perils of Picking the Wrong House-Sitter

The roses are dead

and the violets are, too.

A thumb that's not green

Leaves vacationers blue.

Alanis Morissette Would Dig It

Roses are red.

Violets are blue.

I've been known to write poems;

I'll write none about you.

Collegial Conference

Three eminent young scholars (or students, anyway)
Engaged in heated argument, sans evidence, debate
About digital expression, and specifically what face
One should show to those who've seen it (also, the NSA).  

Springtime in Anywhere

Spring is freedom if you hate school. To me, it's being left

Socially and spiritually, intellectually bereft.

Though it's not a social matter, nor the people I miss most.

It's not surrounded (in Church or otherwise) that I've known the Holy Ghost.

I'm simply an animal that requires inspiration –

Intellectual stimulation–to long continue respiration.

At a time when excitement and nostalgia are in order

I come down with a reverse seasonal affective disorder.

If I'm not being creative, or at least academic,

Then I start getting depressive, or even just plain sick.

If I'm not writing or teaching with my life, then what am I doing?

I hate spring.

To an Ingenue with Nowhere to Go

It seems you can't go home again

For the risk of slipping on your solitude

and becoming mired in muddied memories.

It seems you can't go home again

While the sky cackles in triumph at your loss,

Raining in sheets to mock your mere drops,

Saying, “even your tears are nothing

To the rest of the world,” which has it all.

It only seems you can't go home again,

For Zeus profits nothing by your losses;

You were made in God's image, not Jupiter's.

You will breathe and live and love

Long after the thunderhead's cloudy countenance

Is a skull stained by rainbows, bleached white by sun.

God has the rest of the world, and has it all–

Even your back–

So go back.

Home is where the heart was,

and can find its way to be again.

Four Wheels Good, Two Wheels Better

Deciding how to please myself and my earth-mother,

I can't us'lly do both, and pick one or the other.

Always choosing between my wallet and my heart

Which, on sports ticket and employment, are miles apart,

I should unlearn my American training that bigger is better.

I don't want to drive a greenhouse in all this hot weather.

I solved all that with a cut back to two wheels, from four.

I opened the cage, freeing not just a solution, but more.

I don't need to grow wings and a tail, since I've learned

About tucks, wind resistance, and banking my turns.

I've always wanted to, and thought I wouldn't, go through with it,

and now, having started, I don't want to quit.

Countdown to Sunday/Fuzzy Math/Eight Ways a Week