I consider myself a writer for the screen most of the time, and when I'm feeling especially powerful - straight fiction. But sometimes memories and feelings mix in such a way that you have to express them through a medium that you're not comfortable in.
The first one is a mix for my mother, the second for my father.
At the Edge of the Dock, Looking In
Those hands are boiled tough,
brushing soot off an old steel grill.
The breakwater, blue and teeming,
is a forest of sunken pines and flaring moss.
Everything churns to softness,
muddied under the cool surface.
Working
to keep the hands
warm in the morning?
My mother glares
out to the waves
shivering the surface beneath me.
I don’t go in the lake when it’s cold,
her voice skims over the planks
to my feet,
I’m waiting
till we come back
for summer.
The Perch
The wind kills the tickle on my face,
my tree perch creaks.
Air hisses through the naked canopy
carrying silence on its back.
My father’s face, stone-chipped and mossed;
his gun slung, a sharp slim branch across his chest.
We wait in the swaying tree
for some burning life below to brazen by us.
I breathe slowly through shivers.
A leaf leaps down to my shoulder,
staunching glowing breath.