How do you express the perfect moment?
How do you encapsulate the surreal beauty
Of a warm June’s afternoon
With a cerulean sky so big and so clear
your words get lost trying to border the vastness
When the dappled golden rays of everyone’s sun
Filter through the precise leaves of trees
whose names and stories you’ll never know.
What words can possibly describe the feeling of unadulterated, enviable, world-destroying love.
love that is shared on a freshly power-washed deck,
backing a house full of memories -
of chores complete,
of lives commingled
and of secrets shared.

How can express it when you are reeling in awe?
when you are left stupefied, dumb and humbled by the sheer impossibility of that moment.
When you stop to consider how somehow this cold and uncaring universe rolled the dice so precisely in your favor.
When you realize how a single life choice, or random occurrence, or harsh word could have turned this precise moment into so many others.
How do you hold something so fragile and ephemeral in you hands?
How dare you try to limit it with words?

The Northern Lights dance in unreachable ribbons
above the head of a dead bull moose.
Stuffed and mounted on wall of tacky pine,
positioned above a false granite hearth,
He’s forced to stared out double glazed windows
and forever watch the shifting skies,
while the winds susurrate solar cinders
and stream like a Styx of souls -
slain by excesses of encroaching sportsmen.

His tufted brown ears perk up at the howl of the huskies
but its only wire forcing form into his preserved pelt
with his thick brown fur stopping abruptly at the neck.
His killers in their regicide cared not
for the long legs that carried him thousands of miles,
nor the broad shoulders that pushed down trees,
in a passing attempt to scratch an itch,
His only crime was his broad branching antlers -
His crowning expressions of sexual prime.

His jaw is pearled with gentle round teeth
ringing a false mouth that hangs slack in mid bray.
He tries to greet the shimmering skies
to bugle forth one more call of clashing battle
as if he could rear up on hind legs and clatter his hooves
to declare this territory, “Mine!”
But that plastic mouth was molded in Texas
And mass produced into expressions of realism
speaking through acrylic gums and tongues.

His glass eyes cannot perceive the heavenly hues
as they cavort above conifers encrusted in ice.
He cannot see the silent parade of his scion,
marching by in a secreted trail known only to natives.
His great grand son following in his hoof steps
through the woods of an inherited kingdom.
In another two seasons this one too will be dead,
by a paid and pampered safari of some rich hunter,
who slept warm inside instead of looking up in wonder.

I ride in the sanctity of the morning,
During the swapping of the savers and the sinners,
Colored by the sun-risen pinks and purples
As this city reloads.

What’s a Parthenon to a Persian rapist?
Or an Pantheon to a marauding papist?
A sacred site constructed in god’s will
A once timeless tomb now reclaimed landfill.
Historical heroes vying for timeless vestige
All knowing their legacy is a pointless investment.
Beneath their crowns the inkling rides
Reflected in their gilt mirrored tides
That at the end of their succession
They’re little more than a pub quiz question.

The old Khmer empires did it right.
One god king would tear down another’s might
And use the bones to build something better.
War waged and winners weathered
The new Khmer harnessed only destruction.
And can only manage gilded stuppes
And dirty waters.

Imagine all our monuments broken down.
Chipped and smelted.
Powdered an wilted.
Some new upstart with an eye for redecorating
Marching armies with standards high.

She locked her hands on my elbow
As I packed away my chrysanthemums
I nestled their pot in a cardboard box.
And fixed stems where her thrown shoe had landed
“I can’t bring these. Customs won’t let me.”
Then softly she whispered, “Don’t go.”

She nudged the box with her big toe
She wanted them in case I might return
I said my mother wouldn’t neglect them
She promised to remember the water
But her dead soil never nourished me
Still, she sighed and cried, “Please. Don’t go.”

She reached for the box when I walked past
And said she could keep them for me.
I deferred that my mother would not neglect them.
She argued she had never killed anything.
I said she had never helped anything grow.
And, yet, she said, “Don’t go.”

I left her the sleeves of CDs
Our sounds had become too mixed.
I could not pull my rock from her pop
My Bach from her Pussy Cat Dolls
She threw them at me when she refused
And still, she said, “Don’t go.”

When I had packed my last bit of baggage,
She said she would not see me to the airport
But insisted she wanted to call me.
I turned my phone off until the plane landed
So, the first thing I heard in my new world
Was a message saying, “Don’t go.”