Makeshift Heart XI: Joy

Joy is everywhere undeserved
A face a stepmother could love and serve
Mark the billboard’s smiling power
Verse the quatrain’s unplanned bower
And swerve.

Making some kind of sorrow right
Paradise in a couple of heartbeats
Hush the pesky natural twitter
Bend the screaming slippery carp
With love.

Black magnolia bud wrapped tight
Holding off fruit and dismay together
Pay what you must to remember it well
Egg the dog who slinks by the fight
Don’t survive.

But the elver returns from the west
One more time through fishing hands
Burrow in my beating tissue baby
Release, please release that pitiful crab
Just wave.

Peppertree cover me my memory is baking
Alien come again in innocence like before
Kind of kinder in the order we want to mean
Blessing less the happiness than the sense.
I am a meander made of untradable words
Enamour meaning amiable by understood
Plain and poor not unattainably more like
Effortless calm salience gliding home.

A bottle rolling down an empty beach –
Roaring tide takes the answer.
There to bend and could we reach:
This gift has no measure.