16/30: I Don't Love You Just a Bit

I don’t love you just a bit

Not a marble-sized amount that fits

between my finger and my thumb;

I don’t love you just a gram

Not a dollop in my hand,

a little bigger than a crumb;

I don’t love you just a swarm

Nothing fitting in my arms

like some buzzing happy thoughts;

I don’t love you like a map

that I could spread out on my lap

And mark in squares with pens and dots;

I love you more than I could show

by standing on my tippy-toes!

I love you more than I could draw

if the line crossed all I saw!

I love you like the great big sky

that stretches wide and stretches high

and wanders off to outer space!

Can you see love light my face?

for Chloe, who is three and a half

15/30: Birdsong in Fog

You’ll reach out blind

to touch feathers

but pull back only

handfuls of clear water.

Through felted-wool silence

the blazing notes

repeat repeat repeat

an urgent message

in no known language,

the inscrutable eyes

of a new lover.

11/30: Drought [drout] n.

Statistics about rainfall patterns,

sterile and chalky in your mother’s mouth.

A knowing growing gradually over your head

like the cumulonimbus that don’t.

Sacrificing the melon vines,

newly exuberant on their mounds of earth.

No more treefrogs at twilight. No frogs at all.

Tiny cracks in the earth. Foreheads

like cracked earth. Cattle with birdcage bones,

hips sharp like ploughshares.

They are not capable of blaming you,  

but you apologize anyway

from the window of your parents’ car

as the dust grits in your teeth like sugar.

10/30: Visitor

Erasure poem from Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

9/30: Alumni Employment Services

The trick is

to make the utmost effort  to be early

but not too early, because then it looks like

you’re trying too hard. Shoes are very important

in an interview. Your shoes

should practically take the interview for you.

The trick is

to maximize profit and minimize risk.

Line up your investors before you have a product.

Get pre-approved for loans, mortgages, heaven.

Have Melinda Gates bound in your garage as escrow.

The trick is

to build an online persona for yourself

that’s witty and polished and shows no nipples.

Be sure to spiff up your profiles

from time to time so they can look nice

for the NSA and your potential employer.

They liked your shoes in the interview;

it would be a shame to mess that up now.

8/30: Reckless

Joy is as reckless

as rage: the glad smashing tail

of a golden dog

7/30: Love Poem to the Minor Keys

Songs in minor keys:

The prayers I cannot speak.

You, too, search and never find.

Houses with open windows,

Rivers, not still ponds. 

Prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: Write a love poem to an inanimate object