Where you go in your dreams
Is best walked barefoot.
Feel the surface you trod,hard or soft,
Rough or smooth,
Hot or cold.
Learn the truth, grounded and sure
So lies cannot find you unaware,
Unready, unable to discern
The truth you need to know
To find your way on ground that is real
And leads to the place you need to go.
A place you neither want nor expect
But need to be. The temple of honesty.
Barefoot. Grounded. Free.
Filed under POETRY
Bodies tell stories.
The boot is on the right foot.
It lifts up the right side.
It tilts the body left.
The left leg shortened,
for a short while;
long enough for the right
heel to heal the heil.
The right heel steals balance.
The right heal steals my right
to take walks, plant seeds,
to talk with ease, laugh aloud.
The right heel pains me,
isolates me,
leaves me motionless.
Soon, the boot will be off.
Therapy will begin to complete
the healing needed to stop
the pain in the heel, and heal the heil.
The extra weight will be lifted.
Both feet will balance the gait
of a body ready to move forward,
beyond the lies, beyond the hate.
Time to heal, if patience allows.
I ask so little it seems;
and yet, too much for now.
Now, when words destroy bonds
formed from shared adversity,
in fear of diversity and loss of power.
I stumble through the day, booted
by the weight of the jack boot
on a leg that has born too much weight
of too much fear, too heavy a hate.
And still, despite the added weight
and uneven gait, I march on,
in my own, stilted way,
on this President’s,
not King’s,
Day.
Chronic pain is a thief
which stalks every bone and muscle
including the skull and brain
locking the flow across every sinew
of blood’s strength to reign
with ease and grace
across interstitial space.
Legs and pelvis lock in place
and the body can no longer race
along the path around the ponds.
Knees can no longer bend
to rest upon the earth and pull the weeds
nor plant the seeds
where the garden should grow.
Pain even steals words from where they reside
within the brain’s locked space
where dreams can no longer take hold
since sleep is stolen leaving behind
only grief and disgust at losses too great to abide.
The theft is its worst upon the face
where smiles are forced to hide
behind grimaces and half-closed eyes.
Laughter is the only relief to frozen space.
A sense of humor is the fiercer power
relieving pain hour after hour.
The deeper the laugh the looser the lock
that pain has placed upon the body clock.
Time passes with the pain as laughs invade
the place where pain thought to remain.
Laugh at pain and watch it rush,
pushed away by jokes and a comic crush.
Filed under POETRY
On the street where I walked
held tight by Daddy’s hand
fear brought us to a stop
as I noticed the words of a man
on the sandwich board he wore:
“The world is coming to an end.”
Daddy quickly gleaned
what had stopped me in my tracks.
The weight of concern at such scene
felt in the tension of my hand.
“Is this true?”
I asked the most honest man I knew.
Daddy never missed a beat
as he urged along my feet
glued to the sidewalk by the man’s chant.
Daddy said, “This is nothing new.
Every generation has said the same
since the world began.
It is up to us to make it untrue.
And, we always do.
“When you grow up,” he continued,
There will be a world for you.
People always find a way
to save what they love.
So, just keep on walking
and do what you can do.
And never give up.
The world is too fine
to let a hopeless man define
the future that belongs to you.
Just keep on walking.
Keep on walking.”
He did. And, I do.
Filed under POETRY
annarino writes 
Morning Walk
I walk along the paths intersecting the nearby ponds; their waters green and brown and cold. The trees are bare now, enabling an appreciation of the variety show put on by the dancing branches.
Tiny birds hide in plain sight like pibe cones strung along bare branches. Their quiet chirps give them away. I stop to be certain if what I see. I delight in their creativity.
A black squirrel, his mouth stuffed with a ball of dead grass clippings and leaves, scampers across my path and scurries to the top of the pine tree to my right. Temperatures plunged last night, and his nest is in need of more insulation. He lacks my gas furnace to warm his home.
Two Mallard pairs swim with pond’s wind-whipped current. The brightly colored males bright against the grey sky and brown water. Their brown and grey-striped wives seem tiny and complacent by their sides. Some things are the same in every society; even within the duck society.
The Canadian geese are absent from the ponds today. They have taken up residence in the intersection of nearby streets, reducing traffic to a crawl with their unconcern for moving vehicles and sounding horns. The water is warmer in the shallow puddles and they are thirsty. They are breakfasting on the berries and blown to the ground by yesterday’s heavy rains, and on the bugs burrowed beneath the leaves left lying in the gutter to decay.
Quiet has descended here as a blanket to our cold thoughts. Cooled by the icy winds drifting south across the continent. Creating discontent in the grey dawn. I walk on.
There are no others on the paths today, not even a single dog walker. I linger in the cold, alone and watching for signs of life other than my own. It is here among my sister earth and brother clouds. All is well. Time to go home.
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Tagged as cold, morning, nature, walking, weather, wind