My first root canal,
The dentist said the tooth
Could be saved, but --
It would take care.

I was cleaned out,
Drilled through numb,
The a temporary filling.

"Bite down. Chew. Bite down
Again".

It never fit quite right,
Not noticing the crack
That ran straight to the gum.

The tooth was pulled --
My first one.

My hands have closed
Around your frame, and you
Have let them own you
For a time.

Parting the curtain of your skin,
Light revealed you to me as a room.

A gentle candle flame burning on your cheeks,
On the sun-red-already and freckled cheeks,

Running water under the canoe looks like glass;
We are the only boat on the creek.

Take your pictures at night, of trees behind light posts,
And bother not with sleep.

Talk and talk and talk and talk and talk
(But take a special care not to speak).

it is perhaps something in
your skin,
(your skin the inside flesh
of almonds) or in the subtle of
your lips which
pull-and-press-and-speak—
no,
whisper—words my inside beating heart
alone can hear
,that make me think of this:
Spring is in you (and too
has found a home in me); yet a thing is
missing—

the urge to kiss was meant for kissing

Partly Cloudy, or: Mostly Sunny

Words come and go in waves. They lap at the waters edge of my mind, a tranquil pool disturbed at times by an unseen wind. This is my spot for respite. Only here can I be both master and student. The wind feels gentle on my face like a summer dusk and the fading glow of sunlight.

I must not put reality into little compartments. I have had the past tendency to package things up in boxes and store them in the attic of my awareness. I am now opening boxes like it's my birthday, and it just may be that every brand new day is, and the gift too.

The ears and eyes of my heart are open, filling with the God-sound and God-light.

Shakespeare, 1604

Take, O, take those lips away
That so sweetly were forsworn,
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn;
But my kisses bring again, bring again.
Seals of love, but seal'd in vain, seal'd in vain.

To Read Upon the Death of Beloved Friskey

Tragic a death so young,
Oh, so young,
She was nearly twenty-one.
Brought home like Jesus
In a towel, like my brother and I
Had won, duped our mom,
Our kitten relieved her bowels lightly
In my arms
As if she had known them her whole,
Short life.

She spent her later years
As a fractured cat,
On as many medications as my mother,
Having survived several illnesses:
Kitty diabetes, the way she got so fat
When in college I would stay away
For eight months at a time;
Kitty arthritis, how she battles daily,
Outlining every movement
With a tired feline-line;

There were the years we could not let her outside.

She soon lost her hearing, felt life
Through vibration alone,
And my brother found it darling fun
To raise his voice to her, close by her ear,
As an ignoramus speaks to a foreigner.

At the very end you often saw her
Cat-pawing around the dining room,
Carefully inspecting the floor
Like searching for defects in wood-grain.
Eventually she found a spot,
Hunched her back and,
Looking up, just peed
And scanned the room as if
She needed arms to rest in.

My two great loves
Married this summer.
Not each other, but each
Respective groom just does not meet
my standards.

He is not me!
He is just he,
His own spirit found hold
In the spaces my admiration
Carved out.

My two great loves:
The first and the last.

I have never loved another
Feverishly like her, my first.
Gropingly with clumsy hands
I undid the button of her jeans
And fondled her budding
Womanhood in every idle moment.

And never another after her,
My last, whom I never touched.

Cheers to lives
Lived without me.

the rain has just now stopped
and allows the day to begin all its light-shining,
to carry on, for rain deserves the night time.

you see: these grays were always blues and greens,
as the morning paints all the day's scenes as
the rain has just now stopped.

All these brand new leaves!

Internet Yearbook 2005

Having been away she in a hurry
Checks her emails and updates her
Browser. Now how's her MySpace,
Any adds?

A digital friend is for forever,
Finding even whether one remembers
Monica or Heather--all the better.

More often than any can know,
A human touch sits on the other side
Of a keyboard; a computer fits
More easily on the lap.

Some we know more of than ourselves
for we have held them,
measuring the space of their life in a breath.

Some we know only of:
A distant glowing city may be spotted by its smoke,
like exhaling winter onto a pane of lighted glass.

Your body is a warm furnace seen through a window.

I suppose deep down I hope,
One day, to have Garrison Keillor read a poem
I have written for my father, only when
He and I have had time to really hash it out
after he is dead: I will write
With sadness a verse about that winter you waged war
With the thick ice
The plow could not scrape up, and how I would find you
in the corner of the driveway, dutifully spreading salt
As if scattering ashes.

I am housesitting in Stone Ridge, New York. My friends Matt and Alyssa left for Lake Ontario with their one-year-old Julie. They left me their home, and their cats, as my own.

I am floating.
Not listless but wistful, I stand before two weeks of possible solitude. Ride my bike. Strech. Breathe.

I read an ancient Chinese prescription for healthy living: begin every cleansing with a ten day diet of brown rice.

Beginning August 9th I will ingest only brown rice until I feel normal.

let's ride bikes.

So what is this? What's going on?
I'll tell you.
Yes, we are older. Of course. No reserve of youthful energy can slow the frantic pacing of modern time. And life, it is always everpresent and always everchanging and we just have to deal with it. Really.
We are little bodies. Look at the stars! The first dream of flying came from one organized batch of cellular tissue, one brain, infinitely smaller than the idea itself. But beyond the tissue, what then? Was the dream an incidental chemical exchange? This is the realm of the mind, our only key to accessing the present moment.

Cities make me sad.
Maybe I just hear too much. Do you believe some of the things you catch slipping off strangers' tongues? Or the people who have so much fear, so much they want hidden, all you pass on the sidewalk are candy-wrapper people; even what is inside (if they ever let you see) might still rot your teeth.
But then again, you know, maybe I'm just the fucked up one. I need to jumpstart my career! Time to get materialistic! Don't shy away from want, it's what keeps old Atlas from shrugging! Why walk down the street and feel sadness? Let's go shopping!

Let sadness come.
Let sadness pass.
Breathe.

I have built a fortress of red earth, myself made of clay, and I stand inside it and it inside me and I am the fortress, but what do I do? Do I hole myself up inside, shaking--no! I play and smile on the ramparts! I scream and laugh for all to see, and the great oaken doors to my fortress are open!

Stretching

Stretching is always good. Spread those muscle fibres apart and let the blood flow in, oxygenate those cells. Breathe deep, fill up your belly like a decanter with red wine then pour from the bottom out.
I stand between two trees every morning and join them. I plant myself in the ground, two feet at first then only one foot is needed and I breathe in the wind and sway with my breath and reach up, look up, catch the sun dancing through the pin oak canopy, and exhale. The trees breathe in.
My upraised arms form a canopy above my head and I respire with the trees.



P.P.: NEW SUMMER HOTNESS = Gold Bond in yer undies!

OK GO

So now it's officially hot out. I don't usually complain about the heat, either. In fact I remember the exact moment that my ambient-temperature-tolerance flipped polarities. It was Tennessee mid-July that did it. One moment I was complaining about the moisture and heat bonding denim to my inner thigh, the next I was embracing it. Oh, it just couldn't get sticky and wet enough down there!
In Tennessee.
You know the point where something wears you down enough that your mind fools itself into thinking it a good thing? Think cigarette advertisements and teen-aged peers.
Well, the sun is almost that relentless. And all it really means is a great excuse to take your clothes off and jump into something wet.

So

People ask me all the time, "Joshua, how is it you have your life so together?" Well, let me tell you, oh missy! I just live it and love it all the time! and--woah, wow--here I am all grown up and on my own in my own little world spinnin' ever so fast.

So.

People say to me all they time, "Oh hey, Josh, how have you been?" and, I say, I'll tell you: I should have been born a scythe, and laid bare all the world as a field of wild grasses.

So!

Which describes how you're feeling all the time:

I'm fine.