New poem!

Solar Lights

You appear dormant,
Laced between the lilies
And coneflowers
But your surfaces coruscate,
Concealing regeneration.

Are you warehousing
Coils of daylight?
Are you replenishing tiny interior
Storage towers
With liquid illumination?

Studying your quotidian rebirth
I stretch on the grass
Aspiring to mirror
Your technique.

Tonight perhaps I will
Glow blue
From the inside.

So today was a pretty good day. The weather is gorgeous. The windows are all open, a cooler breeze passing through, rustling the white curtains. I’m hungry but I think I’ll lay off the food for tonight. Maybe I’ll drink some tea and crash on the porch.

This morning T and his sleepover friend E played on the computer while I sat on the back porch and read. Of course by noon or so the entire goddamn neighborhood under-10 set moved into our backyard. You can thank us later, neighborhood parents, for supervising your spawn fee-free. Oh well. After some initial sniping over badminton, the kids settled down to play without much drama. I read from that international poetry collection I snagged from the library and generated enough inspiration to rattle off the above poem without a problem. Later I refined the text some. I’m happy with the results.

After lunch T and I hit Shopko. Shopko is a shitty, shitty store. We raided their garden clearance sale but the cashier couldn’t figure out the correct pricing on the sale items so we eventually gave up and left. T and I had a good time hanging out, I think. He’s a good kid. The rest of the afternoon passed between the Brew game (we won, thank god) and the last hundred pages of “Boomsday”. Later I unpacked my father’s day present (three colored solar lights, total coincidence with the poem, by the way), set them up in the garden, and ate dinner. Oh, Shadow and I let out the neighbors’ dog a couple times, too, as they were stuck in Chicago with car problems. That’ll teach them to leave town.

I feel more at peace than usual. Maybe I’ll sit on the front porch and meditate. Something big, important, is happening with me. I’m gaining new language and understanding. I’m calmer. Usually. But I’m grinding my teeth. Hard to explain. I’m sloughing off old skin, and that’s scary. More later.