i moved!

i am moving this here poetry blog to WORDPRESS!
blogger just doesn't cut it for me.

http://ableparris.wordpress.com/

see ya there, yall!

click here to hear my new music

is it nylon from the sky?

The end of a rope falls closely to my face
whenever I wake up too early.
and for those nights i can't sleep, it's
bread and milk and the forming of words

I was the best man in a wedding where the groom
was given an IOU for a collie, and never
heard from the gift-giver again.
It didn't seem strange to him

Paint on the inside of a cover of a book
with yellow and red and blue.
work it across the page with a pallet knife.
A cut-out of Christ to remind me of holiness

Fifteen years and I was throwing darts
over my shoulder at photographs of young
women I had stopped talking to. These
actions seem never to really end

I climg at the same rope while finding
my way through the hallway. Using my phone
for a flashlight I swallow a cough. Leave
the solving of problems till morning

While Always Having Loved

A squeezed orange colored the sky.Vinyl scratches. The scent of evergreen fading to exhaust pipe, the one tied up by a wire hanger. I bought my first car at 19. Thursday evenings at YJ's for Pad Tai, followed by a walk around the four corners of Westport. Portland by my side. Scales of a piano, and a good many questions ending in, "...do you know what I mean?" History is written in fragments. I remember more since she said yes.

A door soon to close

I opened a door
Lit a candle on
the third match

Shuffled my way through
caution and boxes of summer clothes

Each day I hold hands
with insecurity
Like a tarp stretched
between two buildings

My candle casting
blue shadows on places I might
have gone, blessings
I could have spoken

I find laughter
at the end of each city block
My stride widens
Taking flight Hope

Up here, without worries weight
I take breaths from a funnel of Love

Lungs expand, heart, expands
Victory sounds the conch

Those I had forgotten
become close to me
They lay like stones smoothed
by a river, young
mountains growing towards clouds

ten round

persons of an imaginary tale
lately seen in the flesh
recognized between the elm-tree and the stream

with a gleam of yesterday gone away
no more narrative
not even truth inwardly

say more if wished to say more
it was enough bridge-water and image
a white rippling blur

propagations

destroyed domestic birds yesterday
while meantime ponders its options

the woman at the well

the willow whispered its secrets to the rose bush
"it is not that i do not wish to be pure
i like the sky, but i have eaten dirt all
of my life; what will Heaven have of me?"

to a young lady

dip a japanese brush
in blue India ink
from behind your back
you have written you history

for a young man's turning

i closed my eyes and spit seeds
to find roots in broken soil

but my blindness turned the sun
to shadow my indifference

earthworms have found their way
as angels thunder dimension

poetry

writing everything
in few words
or less