seeks other

comfortable
knowing the respiration's of another
breath soft downy feathered owlet,
go up and out,
draw in,
up and out,
draw in.
revel in another's life,
alive in the inhale. 

a Congo rages inside
alive with many tropical birds
and many rivers
and many banyan trees. 
won't you walk inside me? 

the bomb that almost went boom

He kicked a grenade.  I wasn’t aware of this until after the fact, until after I watched him sprint, hiking boots beaten and swollen from where his ankles bucked and yawed against the sharp and shifty lava they traversed each day, soles nearly scuffed out of existence, his baggy blue jeans ripped in the knees and the wand of his backpack sprayer trailing like a tail scared of being left behind.  He didn’t shout, just sprinted, like a scream would slow him down, or perhaps there wasn’t enough breath, perhaps there was no room for excess, only energy enough for muscles pulling at tendons pulling at bone pulling at survival.  He kicked a grenade on purpose, he later admitted.  Obviously nothing happened or else I couldn’t be writing this.  The unexploded ordinance, or UXO, was a timed grenade which responded to a particular number of rotations.  At its birth, the nascent projectile catapulted through bright Hawaiian skies, ticking off each rotation much as a click of a trigger in a Russian Roulette playing revolver.  Perhaps the soldier responsible for its deployment had dust in his eye or maybe someone bumped him, perhaps the ground jumped, whatever the reason, the grenade touched down before it could complete its rotations.  So they supposed it was a dud or maybe they just forgot about it, either way, the volatile little thing slept in the dirt waiting for just the right amount of movement to awaken its mission.   

He thought it was a dud too until he kicked it and revealed that the little guy was far from dead, rather just hibernating.  Even if he did shout, it wouldn’t have helped; we’d be dead anyways, nothing more than projectile plasma over some jagged rocks, as liquefied as the herbicide on our backs.  Isn’t life a miraculous thing?  What if he kicked a little harder?  How many more rotations were left on the little guy?  You won’t believe what I get paid to scoot around bombs; I’ll tell you it isn’t much.  Not worth a human life.  Or maybe.  What’s the going rate for a human life these days?   

Sunflower Eyes

You are spinning face-

flush
to the sky.
Arms spindling outward
from the center of my eye.
Wrapping everything in your whirlwind
tattooing tree bark on my skin.
You make me see differently
sunflower eyes.