Quitting Coffee

Honey freefalls down the curves
Of the crumpled plastic bear
Yellow top hat inverted
A silent, respectable old man flipping his top

There is beauty everywhere
In the viscous sugar dripping into my tea
The voice coming out my computer speakers
In the waking sunlight filtering through the kitchen curtains

Enjoy beauty, seek it out, create it
This is what I’m reminded of
The quiet early Spring morning blanketing me
The remnants of a cold scratching my nose and throat

Spiritual wholeness comes from many sources
The kind you make, and the kind you accept
Beauty is God’s gift
In too many forms to count

From Sea to Shining Sea

Sometimes you think
Hell rained over
Dripping amber waves of salt
Onto the kitchen linoleum
The morning news full of so much heat
Hot machine-gun fire and blood oozing
From the hearts of foreign babies
By the time it reaches my table
That angry fire and pain and wet tears has dried out
The blood aged, turned to rust
Dehydrated tears, piles of salt
And don’t you know?
Both sugar and salt lower the freezing point of water
But I’m not concerned about a sea of sugar
It’s the salt, piling up on those purple mountains
I’m not worried about the world melting, either
Ice cubes do it all the time and find their place

Battery Graveyard

Batteries fill the ground
Between the shiny steel rails of the subway tracks
Hundreds of tootsie roll-sized canisters
Caked in the oily dust of a billion footsteps
As if everyone in the city had reached West 4th and Washington Square
When their CD players stopped singing and cameras stopped seeing
And they flung their batteries off the platform
Retreated above ground to find easy replacements in the delis lining 6th Avenue
But wait, I think, peering at the chunky black muck between the tracks
Do these devices even use double A’s anymore?
If not, then where did this colony of Energizers come from?
Were they carried here through the subway tubes?
From some great underground dead battery reservoir?
Ferried by hordes of angry killer bunny rabbits?
Oh, didn’t you know?
Yes, New York City is crawling with killer bunny rabbits
Much meaner and vicious than rats
With their green eyes and little drums
Beating their way through the thin walls of old apartment buildings
Gorging themselves on discarded pizza and Chinese take-out
A forgotten band of furry percussionists
Keeping poor city-dwellers awake at night with their bad imitations of Stomp
But, wait, I think, looking into the dark abyss beyond the light on the tracks
These batteries, the ones in the crack of the subway tracks
Perhaps the bunnies have tricked us
Rigged this stop with an electromagnetic field
So that singing and dancing dolls, walkmen, and cheep GPS devises stop here
So that the tide of riders thinks it has no choice but to toss those useless used batteries
And go upstairs for more
But really, the bunnies have only momentarily sacrificed the lives of those toys
Have stockpiled the silver pellets for a time when they’ll rise

One night we’ll wake
To the beating, the pounding, the twirling fancy footwork
Of an army of fury robots
Demanding their piece, demanding their place
And what will we do? What will we do...