Seeking beauty and finding it

amidst the impossibly thick greenery

(still wet from months of rain)

pink and white, yellow centered beauty

you practically shouted to me,

"Look! I am beautiful,

stop looking at all that needs to be done,

and admire that which has been done

for which you can take no credit

nor have you labored to achieve"

It's beautiful but I just want to go home

I thought I was the big adventurer, the traveler.

inhaling every new scent, site and situation.

But I'm not, it's beautiful here, but I 

just want to go home, to the messy house,

and the dog walking, to times of boredom

and 

hugging my friend, Julia,

and working on a problem with Yulia,

coffee in the morning on the back porch

and facing off with a month of "plants in the wrong places".

I want to go home where I don't really do anything,

because it's easier than not doing anything

far from home.

and my flute, the piano and guitar will all be waiting

for me and my clumsy efforts - I may even procrastinate

because composiing new music is hard.  

It's beautiful here but I just want to go home

where my brother is, the one who left for

months at a time.

We will walk and talk,

walk and talk

We'll both be home.

What I actually wore

a scribble captures the moment, although mediocre

Although mediocre, the quiche satisfied the need

to sit and follow the Opa commandment to eat.

I have purchased hundreds of pens and notebooks

to support museum shops and I see the vestiges

of writing as I open them randomly at home, looking 

for an empty one, and finding a page or two 

transporting me back to that moment in a cafe

where the food was not great, but satisfied a need

at that moment, to sit and to eat.

Unrequested

Unrequested

Bread, cheese, ceviche, olives

tantalizing but at what cost and what rules

thrown in the trash if not eaten as we would do in 

America, the "land of the free and the brave"

we ate and it was good

in this land of Lisbon, and we ate more

after pointing to unknown words like peixe

and drinking wine and we paid our bill

scribbled on a pad by a man who barked

"no English" but he did

I knew it and I smiled at him.

words are loyal

I've taken to 

the words of others, loyalty to another writer,

the loyalty of words, shared, as I write of theirs

Let's write of chafing, or bonding and their tired relationship

as a wife and her husband hold hands only to run from each

other for a breath of fresh air, then coming together

again,

Synonym. 

Advice to myself

Only read poems that speak to you.