Cecil Vortex

My people

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We played with sticks for a while, my people
looking for wood that was strong and flexible,
turning it into specialized sticks.
Sticks for scratching
for digging out hard to reach
infected patches.
Then we made the Torah.

The pencil they gave me

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The pencil they gave me
was covered with paint. I scraped at it.
Artisan, whole-leaf paint chips
dropped off
in spidery clumps.
And now I can see, it is an artisan pencil.
Made by a man in the mountains of Peru.
Separated out from the base of a Peruvian Pencil Tree.
Peru.
It is a savage land.
And there’s my friend, the legendary artisan
with his Peruvian pencil-carving knife, its handle
snapped clean off
from the root of some
mountain vegetable.
Most of the knife is edible, in fact.
Even the blade.
But only if you cook it long and slow.
And who would eat such a thing?
Who would eat the knife cooked tender?
Someone with a pen, no doubt.
Or a typewriter.

Welcome

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Welcome
to the Golden Age
of me flossing my teeth.
An upgraded Age of Reason
and now even the common man understands
that the pale dots
on my bathroom mirror
are just pale dots and not some grim portent.
At night there is light
in this magical time.
I am guided by the soft reflection of
my polished mouth bone
and these gums
have never felt
so fierce.

They are slippery too.

by

Teach a man to catch worms and perhaps
he will be fortunate enough
to find some worms.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps
they will elude him.
Because worms are crafty.
But give a man a worm, and he can split it in two!
And then he will have
two worms!
I’m asking nicely now:
Won’t you give a man a worm?

Being a Goose

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do you remember being a goose?
do you remember flying in pairs
your neck pulled long and straight
warm feathering into the wind
your boney beak bobbing
far out in front to beats
pulsed sideways
by your partner’s heart?

Call the Water

by 
Is it enough
to call the water
black to talk about
the swirls, the crack in
the floor of this Bay
That steams up
sleep evaporating
soaking into
a newspaper headline
till it has mighty heft
Is now a good time
to chalk it all up
this swirl and this crack
this slow-dripping heft 
to some sort of
vague, tectonic displacement?
Some foamy kerning surge?