she wakes to the silent morning
slow hears the cars as they pass by
struggling to move pillows into place
now she recognizes
the sound of the furnace
and memories burn into her like
coffee on frozen lips
alone
with her thoughts
in the silent morning
(“silent morning” – 11-27-2014)
the earth is thirsty so am i
out past where we all come to die
alone and without celebrant
a wastrel bard irrelevant
the half-cocked eye the shaking lip
fair captain of a foundered ship
the desert plain of fated need
to thirst to ache
to drop
to bleed
An echo in the forest
From across a far ravine;
The last words that you said to me
In memory still green
An echo in the forest
That my lonesome ears discern:
The sound of your departing
Knowing you would not
Return
He told her, once upon a moon,
That “love’s a true-and-always thing” —
They watched the curtains turn to night,
And heard the song the first-birds sing —
She wishes now, upon a star,
That he’d float back on some balloon;
But all is loneliness, and cloud,
And once, was really once
Upon a moon
He looks at her picture
And wonders what it would be like
To know a night of wild abandon with her
Even though
She is asleep in the next room
Wearing the ring he gave her
The night was made for loneliness,
For sitting by the sea;
For watching sunset, knowing you
Are far away from me
The dark, it loves my aimlessness,
My visions that take flight;
It also sends these slow regrets
To nag me through the night
My mind me keeps turning back to you
And reaching for you there —
The night was made for loneliness,
And knowing you
Don’t
Care
She dreams of seeking someone
She’s never really met;
A surrealistic landscape,
A nightly novelette,
These all are but constituents
Of what is in her mind —
Except the stranger that she seeks
She never seems
To find
The emptiness that is my soul,
The hopelessness that lies this way,
Are each a temporary thing:
For moods are minutes in a day,
The day that life is in this span,
And questions come as answers flee,
As dreaming hovers, like the clouds
That swirl around us restlessly.
These chemicals that we call “us”
Are scattered bits of foreign stars,
With each a flickering, at best,
That maybe lights, or maybe mars
The footsteps of some other’s way.
This is the truth that solace knows:
That where we go, some other’s gone,
And someone in the future goes,
For we’re connected, though we feel
Apart, alone, and frankly, lost —
For empty roads and searching hearts
Both find the ones who life has tossed
About. Like you. I know it’s true,
For every bit of warm regard
You send my way, there is the trace
Of how well you know, “life is hard.”
But out there, on the road you’re on,
Are different detours and travails,
For though you’ve been rerouted, it
Cannot be truly said, “she fails –”
As long as you – and me as well –
Can be true to our loves, our friends,
And try our best from where we are,
And when we ought to, make amends,
Then barren times, and barren earth,
Need not dismay or set us back.
For every path is different, every
Surplus is a kind of lack
And it’s our choices make us, us.
Not circumstance, or skill, or looks,
What kind of car we own or drive,
How many cats, how many books —
Our character they say’s our fate.
I have not always welcomed this:
But I have seen the sunrise smile,
And I have felt my true love’s kiss,
So empty roads need not be so.
If I perspective take, and keep,
I can adjust to hills and turns
And when I stop, relax, and sleep,
And know, that though we be but mist,
We have a purpose here, today,
And that each cloud that wanders, will
Get lost, sometimes, along the way.
A lonely swan
With dented wings,
She sits and thinks
Till very late —
From what love was
To what it is:
The distance seems
So very great
