She swayed as she read
She looked strung out
Her brain a honeycomb
of words strung together, 
her hair a halo around her 
moon-face, pale, holding 
all meaning just beneath 
the surface of her skin. 
I’m in pain, she said,
as she kept swaying
like dandelion fluff
that might blow away.
I’m in pain she repeated. 
We would not fall for it. 
This poet put it on big. 
Like an actress playing a part.
But she sounded like 
hell-fire. She sounded
seared, her skin pollinated
under some black dahlia
spell she might never 
return from as we watched,
and listened, trapped in 
our chairs. When she 
finally confessed
she’d been stung
by a bee shortly before 
she’d begun, she did not 
say where on her body.
It could have been
anywhere. For all we knew
she could have been lying,
or believed her own lie.
Or telling the truth. 
Her swoon a kind of
venom filling the room. 
Call it style. Call it
a singer whose ghost
was a missing guitar.
So this was poetry.
                        

Corrections needed discernment,
misspellings, missing commas, lack 
of agreement between pronoun 
and antecedent. The long list
travels backwards at the speed 
of light to thousands of mixed 
constructions in the land of errors 
where homonyms on holiday
happily take a break from all their 
subtle and not so subtle distinctions. 
In the house of do-over dreams 
the writer sleeps on pencil shavings
and eraser dust, unlearns standard 
grammar skills, relinquishes any
obsession with formal elements 
of syntax, diction, parallelism.
In this world, only meaning
counts. In a world of content 
hands relax, manuscripts fly 
un-stapled in peace, unnumbered, 
untitled, unfinished. Papers flutter
folded-over into origami birds 
sun-struck with photosynthesis, 
return to their original ecology 
of wood and forest. Branching 
trees hug you for leaving them 
rooted among a million ferns 
in untampered soil, sending 
out new buds like messages
each April, every one of them 
singing a little song to itself 
before it was a poem.
                        

Take these hip openers,
eagle arms, backward
hand clasps, cat/cows,
downward- and upward-
facing dogs, my lips’ 
attempts to curl 
into a smile, 
a disciple searching 
for legendary teachings
hidden, left under 
rocks for future 
generations, my eyelids 
heavy as Himalayan 
curtains, my S-shaped 
spine elongating into tree 
with every breath 
and twist, each contortion 
an offering to the room,
to the troubled world,
my heart opening,
opening, and still
I see no sign of Buddha,
no sign of Second Buddha
no third or fourth or fifth.