Q: How do you celebrate the morning?
I tape dandelions onto my red plastic hard hat,
chant Navajo teachings. Each day our sun is new,
new wheel-spokes of light, new rooms of torched ash.
Q: Do meadows flow within your heart?
Hog-nosed skunks. Broad-winged katydids. Rainbow chanterelles.
Brown-headed cowbirds. Crocus bulbs. Blue dart frogs.
Black flowers, black flowers.
Q: Truly?
Try as you might you cannot make me feel
embarrassment at what I find beautiful.
Q: What have you lost in this lifetime?
Cassette tapes, furniture, two pairs of grandparents,
one childhood, some punch lines, fistfights, key rings,
afternoon migraines, neckties, my mala bead necklace.
Q: Are you an heir to The Lineage of Wanting?
Each of us are blown over in these winds.
Q: Is this why you get angry at flowers?
Once, I punched a hornet’s nest at the botanic garden:
under my skin a sting-bruise made a blue pit swell.
Beautiful, I thought, an uncanny, beautiful moment.
Q: Aren’t honest words better than a red face?
Okay. But doesn’t anger make the colors richer?
Sometimes I clinch & burn, scheme to freak
out & punch the light out of a bully.
Q: Is this how you empty your balloon?
No. I sing one ditty or another. Today I unloaded
“Sexual Healing” into the showerhead,
my throttle stuck in the howling position.
Q: So what of all of your singing?
It’s my meditation. I sing out,
loudly hum when no one’s around.
Q: Does this unlock oceans within you?
Five oceans are drunk on the tip of each hair.