November 13, 2009

I woke up my wife before dawn with more than a desire to clean my office on the roof of our
home, facing Mount Makiling in the Philippines; the rumble of earth, shudder of limbs pushing
clumps of cloud into mason jars my grandmother left behind in her apartment before she was
shipped off to a nursing home posing as the Club Med.

We celebrated the new year one and a half month's early, planning for something no one gets to know about, in case you're a peeping Tom.  I've been sitting on my ass all day composing poetry and the above haiga, haven't eaten breakfast or lunch, and it's almost dinner time, and . . . oh dear, I forgot to take my PTSD meds! What's the world going to think, that Beanie and Cecil have risen from the dead? Crusader Rabbit and Rags the Tiger were closet gays?  George Bush's heart bled for the needy and poor?

The Wonderland Amusement Park: illusion or real? Made-up or hallucinatory? Myth, legend, or a sick man's need for attention?  Enter at your own risk. And don't buy the popcorn.  They're leftovers used to pack the chocolate Chip Cookies my mother used to send me in care packages when I was in South Vietnam watching the rocket's red glare, the thud thud thud of incoming mortars, and feeling bullets speed past me less than a half inch away like gnats on a mission.


motorists . . .
a blossom smiles
sipping sunlight


a runaway
girl washes her master's
clothing                                                                                                          
in the warm tears of
maria makiling


lusty moon . . .
tonight i'm closing
the curtains!


i can
only be the breath
of what's sensed
when elephant grass
whispers through stars


christmas lights . . .
a wallet waiting for
a young girl


alice, if
only there isn't an
end to the
hole we jump into . . .
heaven's river


above the
chow king, dark gray clouds
without smiles


late again . . .
baklas at the beauty
salon
pull customers into
a world without end


unpainted
buildings smile at an
awkward moon


in ten years,
give or take, i'll
be a leaf
decomposing in
a sleepy urn


give me a
child to brighten winter . . .
long nights


to fly past
the stars into
darkness
swept clean daily
with prayer


chasten me
for what, a weathered
tree limb?


i smell the
scent of bulalo
and know . . .
the sea will bring us
together again


music and
the chatter of
daffodils


like stars
we sip this month's
latte in
designer mugs
made in china


nara tree . . .
teach me what it's like
to be barren


plaster me
on post office
walls . . .
a fat egret
moored in deep mud


blinking lights . . .
aurora, the name of
a bar girl


will my poems
do more than satisfy
the dreams of
an old man wanting
to be remembered?


eating lunch . . .
the scent of orchids
kissing dawn . . .



we float like
balloons without
direction
into the sum of
another's equation

sundown,
a young girl washing
melons


i'm not a
cloud floating at the
whim of an
overweight egret
flapping her wings



robert d. wilson
©2009