Tag: #30Days30Sonnets

You wait for something you have never seen,
As though by looking you could make it so;
Your every sense on edge, and poised, and keen,
Your searching eyes still scanning to and fro

For in your mind he’s coming – coming soon –
For all of that’s worked out inside your head:
It’s any minute now, or night, or noon
The field of endless pleasure that’s your bed

You know he has to know the way you feel
For he has made you feel it when you sleep,
And when you wake, and all points in between,
The need you have is everywhere, and deep —

The hours drag, the outside world still hums,
And you wait for a man who never comes

Way back, when love was just an empty house,
The view was good and looked out on the sea,
And there, ostensibly, were you and me,
Each one supposed to be the other’s spouse.

Each morning came in course, the sun would rise,
And we would go about the things that made
Our days and hours go; the bills got paid,
And, sometimes, laughter rang beneath blue skies.

Our empty house did have its beauty, truth,
And felt quite open – breezy – in the main,
Until the first dark coming of the rain
That let us know we didn’t have a roof.

    It’s everywhere the same, in all its forms:
    Real love will give us shelter when it storms

Alive: and through the prism we must go –
  The variegated shades that we conflate,
  The wanderings that form our fixed estate,
The feelings that will ebb, and then will flow –
The pageantry and beauty of the show
  That proves itself ebullient, sedate,
  Or otherwise; as we our tales relate
To those who do, or maybe, do not know.

Awake: and into all that shines and breaks
  We rush headlong, and into fate and chance
We pull up, or we put down, all our stakes:
  We stare intent, or maybe merely glance —
We see the shifting lines: the loves, the aches,
  Those colored patterns – all our circumstance

Another bed, another lonely room,
And distant lights from people I don’t know;
A time to sit in this strange light, and gloom
Along the edge of fading afterglow

As silence sears into my sleeping soul,
Appropriate as only naught can be —
Askance is how the civil eye would view
Appellate wanderers who live like me

Attenuated to the moving thought,
At one with all that is or yet is not,
Amid the thoughts that never will converge,
Anterior to this, or any, spot

Applying all I have to try to rest,
Ascent and declination, I do best

Maybe I should have known the world had changed;
I knew the sign, I saw it everywhere —
Such portent, yes, is rarely seen, but still,
Could I have been so daft, so unaware?
A wanderer without a home or bed,
Let loose upon an unsuspecting town:
Cut free from all encumbrance and restraint
Until such time as time itself came down —
Laconic as I was, I had the words
At my command to set the world aright:
To take misfiring adjectives to task
In wrath, or maybe better yet – in spite —
On purple waves of sin and turpentine,
No rest, no peace for one who missed the sign

We have it and we lose it – it’s a crime —

  A shadow crawls across my bedroom wall
  That tells me time is passing, passing by –
  And I hear steps down some forgotten hall,
  Like time that’s ever-drawing, drawing nigh –

    For time both comes, and goes, in paradox:
    And we are fated to be watched by clocks.

  There’s time up on the wall, and on my wrist;
  There’s time upon my phone, and on TV —
  The oven and the microwave insist
  For they have their times, too, and so do we —

    For time is everywhere, and yet, nowhere:
    A thing we cannot have enough, yet share —

How much we all could do, if we had time