Happiness is Not a Warm Gun

Happiness is a tired heart

And calloused hands. It's pain

Relievers and aching metaphors.

Metaphors that breathe and sing

Like Northern Cardinals 'what cheer!

'What cheer!' The rhetoric

Of sky sounds that beat red

And pump proud, earthy blood.

Happiness pursues itself in

Worn soles and cliff dives into

Green blue seas.

Tight in the jaws of Poetry

A Summer Tanager croons.

There lies a green song

Hidden in the grass and

Howling like living color.

Happiness like the Mayfly

For two days strong singing

Matrimony every hour on

The hour, kissing hard.

Hard like the pull of the sun

On pale skin, a deft gripping

Like pincers to prey to feed

A family, or the lime innocence

In a fawn staring down a rattler.

Sunrise like the ecology of

Quiet men collecting moths,

Loving gently with pins and

Red wire frames. Capturing

Nothing but displaying decaying

Beauty for no one to see.