BROKEN WORLD
for Kathleen and Matt

Christmas makes your year older;
New Years Day begins the end.
Today we celebrate the marriage
of our children and genesis.

1. When you ride closer to wall,
feet over edge, your jubilant faces
carry slight red marks more
than violent, natural green.
Here, heaven spits beyond
right or wrong as violet sparks
no one could watch at once
and how poet loves you.

I wish for your pleasure
all seasons in life so dirty loved pure.
Once, I watched twelve thousand turtles
lift under you as if their wiggle
blended universal laws.
I am yours for illumination
raised with stars; --
may the world seem safe.

2. Every year, tarnish bleeds makes stains
deeper, and trust, a broken ball with out hinge.
Architects draw wagons on the sky lift their
sails over the corners of stars as we pray
for deliverance and we caught at escape signal
forward to the last light that untangled dream
that floats as silver pearl with diamond relic.

The museum will be open today.
Dead soldiers gather with their families.

In that stockade, on the front porch, we
climbed over shoulders, bounced, announce
revival and "revanche" while we hoist
white sails cut to center without edge.

Last year, war photographed our hands
and other parts, said it wanted to keep
them forever as icon with a darker past.

After all, we had measured life's conquests;
but constants of glory dissolve in brine
with new strains of a great rush of bacteria.

No one on duty; we ran gauntlets with approximate
illusion. We did so much on the chance we were right.
Why did we fasten so many zeroes to humanity?
How does the virus called mankind live so well?

“May the world seem safe" we speak louder
now as terror smacks bricks, glass and spindled
first drafts into waste left behind long after events.
What we say records history and all the trillion yards
of paper and digital. They will not flutter as ticker tape.

Shall we make the Broken World one slight
ornament on a new Christmas tree?

When the tree is dust who will watch
New Year’s "rocket's red glare" as 4th of July
becomes "shock and awe" or other obscenities. 

How do we mark down progress without
opening graves? How can we forget
our 3000 children who loved America?

3. I watch photographs collect as Kathleen
and Matt build a house in Montana woods
with pine fresh, cut with sweat
and sawdust as revelation.

The mountain shivers not to frighten
but to heal. The Manitou is pleased.
She has given the straight trees
as her marriage bounty.

If we listen, we can hear cathedral bells
outside where time doesn’t mimic our rules.