The Art of Floating

A bus glides past pushing flowers through the night,
and they swim into my world,
chipping chaos off my mind.

The irises the daffodils flooding like moonlight,
brush against my face,
cats plow them down the drive.

Son of a Scoundrel

Little Landon Lee was born today
six weeks early and upside down,
but strong and healthy nonetheless.

He was born 23 hours shy of 9/18/09
to a daddy with a scoundrel’s eye
and a mom fighting to make herself a life.

At half and four pounds soak and wet
sixteen inches long he’d stretch
and not quite reach Cloud City, not just yet.

And today I pray he never knows
the betrayal of his father’s foes
or the darkness that seems to come and part again.

Instead my trust runs deep with force
and speed of falcon’s past retorts
and hopes he grows to charm and chance.

But if revenge is found on tongue
diplomacy I pray will run till
grasp of steel warms cold in fist.

Ode to Pimento Loaf

I bought bologna today, the cheap kind with the red plastic ring. I haven't had it in years, but used to eat it all the time when I was a kid. I’ve heard fried bologna was good, but haven’t had it. My favorite was always the bologna with the green stuff in it, not the pickles but the olives. Pimento loaf I think, and it was my dad's favorite too. He would bring it to work sites on the weekends that he had us. Sometimes he’d have demolition jobs on the weekends. Nothing explosive, but the kind of job where you ripped everything down by hand and tried to salvage anything you could. He'd give us some basic task like chipping mortar off of bricks and palleting the good ones. 12 bricks long, 6 bricks wide, 10 bricks high, keep’em tight. May not have been much, but at six years old it felt empowering to do a man’s job, and I hated it. I wanted to go bowling or play video games in an arcade. But then there’d be lunch. Dad would give me and my older brother 5 bucks and send us to the nearest gas station for a case of soda. There would always be extra, so we’d pop quarters into whatever arcade game they had inside. When we ran out, we would head back to the job site, and build bologna sandwiches, 2 pieces of bread, yellow mustard, slice of pimento loaf, can of Mountain Dew, Doritos. That's the last time I actually enjoyed bologna, as a kid eating it with my father and brother at a dirty job in a city I barely knew, working for free.