I want to know the way you hold your lips in deepest concentration, and
in deepest slumber.
I want to hear the sound of your quiet breathing, and heart beating, and what catches your breath in wonder.
How do you like your eggs, and would you stop everything to embrace a moment’s distraction of love passing through your kitchen.
I want to know the twinkle of mischief before an eruption of silliness, and how you shake your tush in happy dance. I want to know that you’ll play with me, engaging the inner children of our hearts, and never falter.
At the end of a long day do you retreat to your cave? I want to know by the way you move, without a word, if you would like some company.
When everything seems lost and all hope has fled, do you still greet each day with a made bed?
I want to know the warrior side of you that stands for all things good and moral, and does not suffer fools yet seeks to uplift and enlighten them.
I want to know how we fit, cheek to cheek or hip to hip. Where you bend do I flow, where you seed, do I sow?
Should I come to you with doubtful fears, do you know the way to dry my tears?
When the children come to you with questions, I want to know that you will look them in the eye and speak to them as the glowing stardust they are.
I want to know how your eyes soften when you watch me or our babes, and think I don’t see.
I want to know your strength wrapped around me in the abyss of rapture, and as the breath of new life breaks forth.
As thunder rolls will you look at me with knowing, take my hand and tumble into bliss?
Will you see my heart for what it is, and rising, match it with your own glow? Curl your yin around my yang and let the puzzle pieces of our dented faith restore the peace in one another?
In darkest night, with Luna bright, I want to know the way you sigh when turning, find my heart nearby.
I want to know each new line beside your eyes and trace the years in the silvering of your hair and the ageing of your body.
I want to know that never again will either of us wonder if we are loved, dearest friend of mine.

k.d.w Oct.17 (raw)

Mama never said there’d be days like this:
my seratonin imbalance is louder than my faith,
the voices in my disordered mind
drown my ancestral wisdoms.

Mama never said there’d be days like this.
Mama said: I won’t help you if you won’t help yourself.
Mama said: Are you bleeding? No? Then you’re fine.
Mama said: Eat your green beans.
Mama said: I don’t believe you.

k.d.w. Nov. 17 (raw)

The voices in my head are not a symphony finely tuned and precisely executed.
My brain is a bowl of mashed potatoes. Deliciously carb-loaded. Dropped on the floor.
My sanity is the bowl. A million scattered pieces of hand thrown pottery in goo.

k.d.w. Nov. 17

Hope is a graveyard littered with fallen maybes.
Here lies a good ol’ boy, taken too soon,
and there the Lady Grey, see how she moves?
Her grace is the sway of the moon.

k.d.w. Oct 2017 (raw)

Marbles in my mouth, they clatter, tumble,
Soften their edges on my teeth
Spill over like a million bubbles of truth.
Pour from my pen as honeybees in summer:
Burbling and busily exploring.

K.D.W.
Sept 22/17

The Inuit have a hundred words for snow and I
have a hundred more for you.

They spill from my fingers, unchecked and protected by
distance and fibre optics.

Your name is a grape in my mouth, sweet and full and juicy
should I bite.

We are but a moment’s flickering hope draped in stardust
and snow.

kdw Sept 11/17 (unedited)

Wear your body like a cloak of many colours and none. Paint your face or strip your hair, poke holes in your skin and all it does is tear yourself into a million scattered pieces of a never written love letter Papier-mâché mask for the world. They ‘like’ your profile and ‘favourite’ your bust for their own base interest but never your mind your spark your humour your giving and bleeding heart. Never your midnight milky way auroras. Keep hoping someone will show up, step in, step up, and stay. Meet you halfway. Touch the cracks in your walls and learn them like the ancient map written in a dialect only discernible by they.

k.d.w., June 2017

Lost boy, we failed you

In our blackest doorway we could not see the way through to the light we needed  in our times of harshest trials. 

Lost boy, between the bloodline cracks we lost you.

You, who needed us more than any other child safely harboured under our wing, you were the one that we needed most as well.

kdw (unedited) July 22/17

She is eleven and one-half years old, that half-year designation crucial to her pre-teen budding self awareness. She stands between the kitchen and the bathroom, hips slightly tilted as to maintain her balance on the slanted floor of the farm house that, like her, has all but given up hope and is slowly sinking into the silt of age too soon thrust upon them. But not yet… no, not yet. She leans against the counter behind her, the sugar apple in her hands still sunshine warm, fresh from the tree she scaled to claim it, oversized in her child’s palm. It looks bigger if she takes off her owl glasses. Bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller. Glasses on and off until they tangle in her ponytail, waist-length and sunkissed gold-brown in the filtered summer light. She smiles and closes her ocean eyes as the first fresh, sweet bite crunches between her teeth. It tastes of summer, innocence, and freedom.

She smells him before she hears him. He stalks her on a wave of stale Pilsner, rancid middle-aged man sweat, and cheap home-rolled cigarettes. Her eyes fly open. She stops chewing, opossums, and waits. Maybe this time he’ll do nothing if she makes herself invisible. Freeze and flight war within her. Opossum and it will be okay. His lips part in an almost smile under his ever present salt-pepper-paprika coloured moustache and she knows something is coming. He never simply smiles. One weathered cowboy hand snakes out and rests on her low belly, hot on the soft roundness of her body. “When’re ya due?” he taunts, then cackles a laugh that starts out with a rattle and ends in a wheezing cough. She’s lucky today. He walks away pleased with himself. The scorpion poison settles low in her bones as she chokes down the half chewed apple now bitter and curdling on her tongue.

Kdw (unedited) June 25/17

Should you want this heart of  mine be prepared for a fight. She does not love easy, but she does love hard.

I have known my share of demons, watched them drown my poet’s faith, plucked the pieces of crumbled hope from their dripping yellowed teeth.

I do not fear the darkness, I have held its wizened face in upturned hands of grace, poured oceans of forgiveness into it’s gnarled might and leashed the beast that prowls my mind.

Should you want this heart of mine be prepared to find the light. She greets each blessed morning ready for the fight.

k.d.w.
Jun7/17 (unedited)