I’d love to sit and chat
Listen to your advice and “just relax”
Reclined on the sofa
Midday lips around your hookah
And talk in lazy tones about this and if and that
Our days, the prices paid to disobey
Unhurried, in the now, knowing
Reading by feel the cracks in the lies
And maybe how we make others pay to fill our pantry
Despite our best effort
Because the system, shit, and radical monopolies
Because you can’t spend all day gardening but you got to eat
Because you can’t spend all day hammering and nailing, molding, placing, sawing, sowing, erecting ceiling walls and flooring
But you need someplace warm and safe to sleep
When it rains

I’d love to sit and chat
But I have like maybe twelve good hours this week to do all that:
Piles of laundry and dishes and groceries and cooking and cats
Regular meals to take with all those acquired over the years vitamins
And eke out a foothold to climb up the triangle
To meditate and stretch and breathe
To exercise and write-it-out and visualize
And read up on the holy word spell dripping off the specialists lips
And friends and the never ending links they send
Goddess bless ‘em
And click on it until the hunt to get well makes me sick
Searching with glare strained red, myopic eyes
Because there’s only me to blame if I don’t try
To eke out a foothold and climb up the triangle
And read the news
The real news
Written on the back of burning toilet paper
Strewn screaming from the mouths of passing eighteen-wheelers
Caught in the gears and ripped
Shreds stuck on the high dry bramble flowers
Kindling fires on the side of the freeway
I pick up the pieces and make a map
To find my friends and people like them
To conspire to create some space out of the petrol filled air
To knit a home from the marrow sucked dry of broken bones
To thwart your words
So that the hurled slurs fall short
And rain sweet tintinnabulations on the roof
Like a Caribbean steel drum
Stars on our heart
We build our own sun
Chimera shining in the glare
I’d love to see it ‘til it’s done.

I’d love to sit and chat
but I can’t because this poem took up most of the morning
And spat out a shrill early warning
The clocks ticking
Any second, any second now the pain will come
And the laundry and the groceries and the bills and the litter and the meditation and the yoga and the revolution will have to wait ‘til later to get done
Blessed later, mythical later, panacea goddess of the well and able
Always there to greet them on the other side of whatever vacation, setback or sick-day they’ve taken
And yes I know again for me later will come
But come late, too late for me to salvage all the things I’ve begun
For later ain’t as soon for me as it is for some
And sometimes later finds me searching back over millennium
A million miles and horizon lines
Behind heat shimmer mirages dancing on desert feet
Bent on burning hands and knees
Sifting the sand
Searching for my keys.