Sabado

In patterns on your back
Your fingers outsides
Left gaps in sunscreen
With no rhyme or reason –
Just where your reach
Couldn’t achieve complete coverage.
Somehow the sun designed
A dolphin.

***
At the end of a cloud-stretching tether
Dangles a tourist…
White-legged, white knuckled.

***
Those braids, darling –
Vacationary nightmare
Temporary tattoos
Allow the traveler
To cut loose.

Puerto Vallarta, i

The Mexican sun is a crazy star
With an untamed whirling mane
And the maddest, laughing eyes
The most beautiful part of any flower
To my eye, a burning calyx.

Neck-lace
Is an ugly word
Hard and soft in all the wrong places
Chopped loudly from the throats
Of wandering vendors –
They follow, expectant faces
Like boats I tow behind me.

This sun and these words,
Things that bite and sting,
This skin that burns:
An afternoon in all it’s complicity.

Letting In

We are not terrible enough
To qualify for godhood.
Maybe for minor demons
we could pass...
As we go our bad proliferates:
A willingness to
Drink entire oceans,
Push under entire lands.
Prerequisites to the trade:
Letting in a little good -
Mercy versus a change of mind.
So, divinity evades.