Sonnet #371

 We used to live without conditioned air

In every house and building we would sweat

In summer, and burn the fireplace to eat

Remember winter when the barren stares

Of hungry children forced a reckon ing

Separated from this we gaze upon the past as idylls

Simpler times, and they were simpler. Being

Dead is very simple. Living is harder still

For we keep alive by poisoning the tank we breathe in

The ground is scraped into a thin smear

And we live our complicated survivalism

Where every stone is bent to pillows, all tears

Become an echo of hardship past, and mortalism

When it appears, rends harder where the ground is tender

Sonnet #370

 Reasons not to write a book today

Include the barking dog that needs a walk

The children in the house that want to play

And certainly there’s you who needs to talk

The dishes in their heaps attract the fly

So wash them with your wild and precious life

The windows are dirty, so are toilets, and we try

To hit the gym and live a little more, meet a wife

Perhaps she will become one, and time spent

Interviewing and preliminary hiring all potential

Brides who may or may not help you pay the rent

Seems mission critical, plus the leeks are turning

Didn’t you want to make that recipe you used to love?

Books can wait. No time. Find a box for art. Shove.

Sonnet #380

Follow water to the low places, and swim

Let your sweat and tear drops seek the bottom

Dwell where they pool, caught in the shadow's rim

between the groundwater and the echoing golems

that march beneath the earth, all blind and lurking

and marked by word of god upon the brow

to walk these darkling trails, and with their jerking

footfalls carve the trails where water is low

Follow water into these ancient pathways of gloom

illuminated only by the shimmer of the water

and the glimmer of electricity in the stones

March until the steam begins, the magma shatters

the stones and becomes the water and all golems die

where clay dissolves. In this place diamonds rise.