Author: Michael Angelo

  • Day Again

    Day Again

    Early morning—building creaking, alarm
    in hallway, broken, going off.
    Winter whispers through a slice of unclosing
    window and goosebumps respond to its call.
    Cars honk, angry men honk louder,
    voices rumble and blend together,
    an ambiance that says “alive.”
    Morning has arrived,
    though some are no longer here to greet it,
    some have faded with the prior night—
    it’s all bullet shells and rockets blazing,
    fangs tearing and beaks breaking;
    it’s all an ecstasy of perfumed sighs,
    a veiny gripping explosion of cries.
    Moons go down and ignite horizons
    all over the great body,
    while buses nearby trace it
    like geese in the distance.
    The body stretches, creaks, and yawns.

  • The Myth of Falling

    The Myth of Falling

    I fell, but then I was standing. How many falls have you taken? Really, how many? And you’re still here? Upright and alive? Notice that when a tree collapses it actually rises, it becomes a towering castle for chipmunks, a mountain peak for fungi, a floating planet for ants, and a universe for poets searching to transcend the gravity of their lives. Falling is a change of form, but not substance.

  • A Bad Day

    A Bad Day

    It can be a bad day,
    a really terrible nasty day,
    the kind of day where the sky is a blue bruise
    and the air is a raking of nails…

    It can be a bad day,
    a truly unbearable day,
    where gravity bulges into obesity
    and shoulders slump and drag against ground…

    It can be a bad day, but
    all it takes is a single moment:

    a word of buoyant gratitude,
    a glacier smooth smile.

    A bad day can remain a bad day—but
    the shroud of clotted clouds
    can been sundered by a blade of beaming luminance.

    It can be a bad day,
    but the eyes can still shine.

  • Moth

    Moth

    This is okay,
    lying here,
    being the night,
    being the breath
    and the rumbling wind
    outside the window,
    outside the body—
    I have no body.
    I am nobody,
    only fantasies fluttering
    and dusting
    milky blackness
    in a bedroom.
    I cannot be shattered,
    or have thoughts pruned;
    no voice or word can touch
    me, the stillness
    of mind and life.
    I am the womb
    of night,
    mother and babe,
    father and son,
    dreamer and dream
    with knees pressed to chest,
    and arms folded tight—
    Truly, I have no limbs
    only light
    wings
    that cut no air in their flight.