Excerpts from 100 Poems That Matter

Spring living is exquisite. Everyone
Watches the Moon before the pleasure goes,
Alone as them and incandescent then.
Wings sprout and attach themselves to each dream

That was a long time flaming alone when
The storm slit it like a knife pushed beyond
The limits of the ribs. Are love and hell
The same soul, leaving love the berserker

In the battle against heaven? There’s one
Of those two, those wings you may have heard move
Beneath your thoughts from side to side, ankles
Floating in midair. Each wing says, sometimes

I spring out to remember familiar
Nothing, the invisible doors in me,
Their carved calligraphy I save sometimes
As prayers and howls hidden in these feathers

You see as the f-holes in violins,
The years of slurring the sad I as you,
What better belongs in the world it maps.
And each wing whispers, I was never born

For all the bearing up of you I do,
For all the beats I’ve borne up under you,
Bearing up under poets forever.
Together, the wings sing, we ceaselessly,

Ceaselessly beat. We have come to love you,
To watch out for you and listen to you,
Our whole lives between your muscled shoulders.
And the dreams the storm released for these blues

Again asked for perfection from the wings
That carried them, despite their hate for them.
Nothing personal, hissed embodied dreams.
In exquisite spring, dream breathed, wings lift me.