No poems today

Hi folks,

There wasn't a poem posted on Friday or today because I was celebrating my fiancee's 28th birthday over the weekend, and we had too much fun. After going to a wall-to-wall trampoline facility and drinking too much Fireball whiskey, I'm currently too hungover to edit poems and I'm rehabbing my lower back with some yoga stretches and bananas. Once I can sit at the computer for more than a couple minutes without a back spasm, I'll post some new poems. Hope y'all have a happy Monday.

-A.L.J.

Steps (Don't Look Back)

Step one is circumstance
and knowing the difference
between the hallway you just got out of
and the long climb ahead. My advice,
forget where you came from - it can only haunt you
if you look back.

God of Morning

A man stands at the edge
of a river that appeared seemingly
overnight. However sourceless,
it moves east to west
following the downward slant
of concrete along the walking path.
The ants are living on borrowed time,
their dry refuge disappears into the river,
scraps of lives are swept downstream
and pour out into a wide field, green
and unfathomable, depthless.
A hand on his robed hip says I thought
this might happen. There is yet more work
left to be done.

Nomadic Tongue

I pass from one moment to the next thinking only of food, of sustenance and of creation. I dream of creating new flavors, searching cupboard and grocery aisles for sharp spice profiles, rounded bellies of sweet miracles yet unbirthed from oven. What better way to experience a country, a people, a past, a future but through the tongue, the teeth, through the dissolution of protein bonds and amino acids, through saliva. To experience cooked flesh of fish transformed to butter as it moves across ridges on roof of mouth, to digest in the fading sunlight, silhouettes of powerlines merging with mountains purpled by the passage of another day. It is a psalm, it is prayer, it is the denial of death, the truest form of faith.

More (Letters to an unborn son)

There has to be a whisper
of song in your soul
something greater (palm
leaves swaying kiss of
a sudden chilly wind
wet slap of flesh meeting flesh)

We are all more
than our obituaries (a brief pause
on our long traverse infinite)
and our regrets. We are more
than that last kiss
you wish you'd given them more
than our paychecks our alignment
our position in space.

The universe of your fingertips
your eyes is more. More
than this more
than anything can be
because it ekes from your soul
but
you can't take it with you
it belongs to us all.