Cutting Mother's Meat

You read your menu upside down.
Complaining of your body's toil.
Skin once fertile soil in pots
is washing out with higher tides.
It was a giant among symbolic acts.

Cutting your meat,
watching it bleed on
linen napkins near your plate.

Spying rareness,
crimson water, ooze
into the spreading cracks.
Fleshly fabric, all its
strong elastic gone.
Lies are louder now
echoing lost artistry
so near a chapter's closing page.
Stains of pain unwashable for
simple deeds of dignity.

Eyelids crumble,
turn to salt and blowing sand,
dregs in bags of stale pretzels
meant to hold the trash of time.
I lead you through the parking lot
cupping china elbow knobs,
pretending that my passing youth,
a magic potient for the freeze,
can change the texture of the sea
away from waning miracle.

Edible Time

You're near that age
where death's a fact
as simple as a climate change
or graying hair, first the tarnish
then the bleach you've dyed
all spectrums lent to Autumn leaves.
Morning paper bleeds on palms--
another friend has "services"
you won't discuss and won't attend.
You know you need a hearing aid
but love the silence more than noise.
Slingshot jokes, firm dismissal,
stand like painted totem poles
we dance around in vagurie
when topics creak their open doors.
The final ax above the rooster's

spindly neck and ruffled feathers on the block.
As much a part of muggy sky--
mosquitoes in a jungle's net.

Things I drop upon a page don't rectify
but illustrate unwillingness to face
the tar-less, rocky road
of olding's fraught menagerie.
It's time to talk of selling toys you cannot drive,
of building rooms upon our house
where you can spend your final years.
Coddled, duly coveted in patchwork quilt
of wrinkles stitched around earned scars.
To let your children be the gods
and feathers of an angel's broach
that you have flown through freezing rain.
To let your children pass you
mounds of whipped potatoes,
recipes of edible time
with butter in their cavities.
Let them be the trump you've been
in draws of disappointed cards.

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