Tim Tipton

Stones 

(for my great-grandfather, M.B. Rising)

You stoop to pick up yellow pebbles

glistening wet.

Click them on your tooth to confirm 

with your ear what your eye already knew:

stone.

Amber does not click and it does not glitter.

It is filled with warm light.

Ancient fossil resin tumble up from the sea.

You do not find it, it finds you.

The warm light draws your eye.

Yet you keep searching.

The best piece you ever found 

was big as a knuckle.

Color of a dog’s eye, and deep within,

a million-year-old fly’s wing.

You were not even looking,

your mind was elsewhere.

When that light shone from a nest of shell

and seaweed, penetrating your cluttered 

thoughts through the corner of your eye.

Seeing it was like waking from a long absence, 

like discovering a poem.

Boredom

It’s a high crime night tonight

The moon is frozen still

Boredom was on, it had killed everything around me

While sleepers had beautiful dreams

Boredom weaved through me, It didn’t speak

It demanded nothing from me

Wherever I went it was there

I threatened it and all it did was grin

I took it for long walks in the moonlight

It dragged its ass, it stood absolutely still with its ears cocked

Its feet planted firm

Its eyes blinked

And every thought in my head disappeared.

There wasn't any doubt, only light.

A Poet, to Himself

Strange night.

No sirens.

Quiet streets.

No weather to speak of.

Good night to write.

But no, I can’t get up for adventure.

I feel a kind of dullness.

My head is in a puddle.

My neck turns.

My cartilage moves.

I don’t like the sound of my bones.

Strange, atomic night.

The dogs in the neighborhood are

going crazy, running in circles.

Loneliness, so alive, so big

that it is almost a creature on its own.

I have slept alone all week

reaching across the sheets

to find loss, not warmth.

I take myself into the night.

Walk the streets for rapture.

Early rising moon,

pour into me.

I can’t breathe without you.