Pandora’s Box of Love

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Love feels like Pandora's Box of contradicting experiences
Love alights you upon a mountain top of elation
And sequesters you in a dungeon of anxiety
Love can feel like Elysian Fields
And Dante's Inferno
Love can make you feel like an accomplished genius
And the village idiot
Love gives your soul wings
And your body two left feet
Love makes poetry of your dreams
And salad of your words
Love inspires amazing highs
And devastating lows
Love is celebrated when it arrives
And mourned when it departs
Pleasure and pain separated by fate's coin toss
A game of chance we cannot stop playing

-gws

Spring

The days grow longer
Promised manifestation
Renewal and hope

-gws

Cartwheels

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I want to revisit the joy of cartwheels in summer grass
Serenaded by the wing beats of bees and the chorus of hummingbirds and sparrows
I want to drowse amongst dandelions while playing 
Warshak games with passing clouds in azure skies
I want to hide beneath curtains of willow branches
Making friends of the trees with whispered secrets

I want to run time backward
To when summer days were never ending
And daydreams frolicked in the warmth of long lazy unburdened afternoons
I want to sit suspended in the amber of youthful memory
Its glowing lens casting every scene in warm nostalgic hues
Golden hour light cast upon fading Kodachrome images 
That compose dust mote-filled summer slideshows of my heart

-gws

On Becky’s Retirement

Your hearty chuckle we will miss
Your quirk and humor too
A life of leisure and of bliss
Is soon awaiting you

No more price checks for you to chase
Nor contracts or email replies
It's time to fill up that empty suitcase
And share your cheerful goodbyes

May retirement be all you hope
And these halls but just a memory
We just ask that you not gloat
As you enjoy your unfettered reverie

-gws

Ode to the Couple on the Corner Compulsively Compelled by Their Compact Computers

The digital divide is a divisive devil
Erecting electronic edifices
Severing sacred spaces
Intended for intimate inhabitation
Subjugating and suffocating
Candid considerate connections
Exsanguinating emotional efforts
Ridiculously replacing rapport
With mindless meaningless memes and
Endless eager empty emojis
Segregated strangers staring submissively
Into inexorable insipidness instead of
Havens of humble human hearts

-gws

I Loved Myself Plenty

I loved myself plenty
I spent so much energy on him
there was none left for me
But the echos of my knowing
The spark that was always the heart of who I am
Could not be extinguished 
No matter how hard he tried
And he raged against
My defiance to submission and subjugation
And when I could endure no more
I was done
I breathed my flame back to life
And I am once again its keeper
Ensuring it is fed and protected in any storm
I will not be dimmed or diminished again

Done

“I am done,” is the quietest, most power-filled sentence in a woman’s lexicon.

-gws

Friendship Garden

I am lucky to have cultivated a lush garden of beautiful, meaningful friendships throughout my life.  I am luckier, still, to be planted in the deep soil of my friends’ gardens where they shower me in love, and light, and their amazing company.  To exist in a well tended garden cultivates a gratitude so profound it can only erupt from me in joyful colors painted with hugs, laughter, and happy tears like sacred rain upon parched earth.

- gws

Not It

“Not it!” I say
Not I
Not me
Not this time or any will it be

I cannot take your heart from you
I know not what to do with it
I will not take your heart from you
Please do not make a gift of it

I cannot be the one you seek
There is no love in me to reap
So I will go and let you keep
The heart you meant for me

-gws

Write a Banned Book

Aspire to write a banned book
Describe the human condition
So thoroughly
So honestly
Others find if vulgar
Tell a story so devastatingly true
The pearl-clutchers swoon from their shock
Real life
Real experience
Is not sanitary
It is not "golly gee!" and "oh, my!"
Real stories
Real living
Is dirt covered
Blood stained
Disturbing
Realness is a dystopia covered in expletives and epithets
Characters spitting fiery words like
"FUCK!"
"SHIT!"
And "You God-damned, MOTHER FUCKER!" 
While thumbing their noses and erecting middle fingers
In real stories the hero's journey is never facile
It's not sanitized or resolved in three acts
In real stories antagonists are 
Insidious
Oppressive
Outrageously powerful
The game is rigged
Injustice systemic
The ruling class held aloft and apart
Tucked safely into their delusion of their goodness and security
Benefiting remorselessly from the oppression they enable
In contrast the rest of society scraps and scrapes
Dreaming of freedom unattainable
Reveling in whatever joys afforded them
Praying that they can meet the next hardship
Survive the next day
Provide a better future for their progeny
I implore you to write a story that reflects hope in survival
Pen a tale that may not have a happy ending
Hold a mirror up to the world in which we live
Let those who would look away 
See their villainy reflected back at them
And let those who are not seen
Be held glorious in the spotlight 
Because their existence matters
I hope you write a disruptive book
An honest book
A book full of the truths of living in an unbalanced world
I hope you see it move from the bestseller feature table
To the dusty banned books shelf
Then you will know you understood the assignment

-gws