season cycle

Morning Ride To Old Mission Point Lighthouse, October

North to the lighthouse

the world distilled

to a drop of amber

sailing along

the singing rim

of a sun blown glass

full to the brim

a sin

to sip when

I can drain it dry

in one long pull

up the molten road

a golden toast

drunk

to relentless waning

light

shadows long licking

the last

of the grapes

south of Mapleton

clustered translucent

summer beads

in one final flare

combine with the glint

from the shards

of the empty glass

smashed heedlessly on

the verge

of road

unfurling

presenting itself

for the sacrament  

the lighthouse

balanced lightly at

the tip waves

breaking

on the shore

in endless supplication. 

Cycling on the Serpentine

Prayer For A Serpent

A severed finger on a layer cake or

a loaded shotgun resting on my pillow pack

a punch, numbers sixteen and twenty-seven

respectively on my list of irrational fears

trailing high narrow ledges and total

financial collapse somewhere in the top

ten but for shear ability to paralyze

nothing can touch a snake, whether it’s the

copperhead my dad dispatched with one clean

swipe of a hoe, casually tossing the

headless trophy onto the sizzling hood of

a Jeep, the unlikely presence of every

Snake of North America together in one

lush forest scene on a colorful acetate plate

in Encyclopedia Britannica

practically crawling off the page into my lap or

more recently the long black one negotiating

the warm gleaming blacktop late one afternoon

headed, I suppose, for the safety of the lake’s

marshy skirt looking exposed and

vulnerable, damned forever to crawl upon

his belly after that nasty business in

the Garden, a fate undeserved and way out

of proportion to the alleged crime, a caper

Adam and Eve, the original one-percent,

would have gleefully committed on their

own, all this as I gave him a wide berth and

peddled away offering a prayer of deliverance. 

cycling without punctuation

cycling without punctuation

seated on my bike the steady push and

pull a constant application of force

jackknifed straightforward integration with

the art of pure function an elegant

solution to the vexing problem of

power transfer and balance will subsumed

in service to forward motion seamless

merger of thought and action until thoughts

vanish into the lungs inhaled exhaled

higher brain bypassed rendering moot all

intention a machine without purpose

January Cycle

January Cycle

Deep winter, two wheels,

clear road, shadow clock marks course,

cold rapt cadence, home.