Trying to Understand Is Worth It
Do good things come to those who wait?
Or do they waste their days
And months and years in wishing
For the slightest of displays
That what they hope for might come true?
It’s hard to make a rule —
That one could then encapsulate
To teach at home or school.
But this — this one idea I have
And you helped me to birth it —
I waited all my life for you
And wow
It sure
Was worth it
Inspired by this prompt.
(“This One Idea” – 11-16-2014)
a love a business long forgotten
many tables many lips
the world is made of failure and
the landscape of arrangements
few will see and even sooner lost
forgotten
There was a final time: the stall set out,
With jewelry and fabrics in a line —
The next day, and thereafter then, no more;
No more, and soon, no one with memory
To paint in images or words the scene
That once was daily, year on year on year.
The mundane, the quotidian: our lives,
Not big events, but habits of our days,
They soon lie empty on a sandy waste —
The firebird heads into the unknown,
High o’er the mountains, just past where we see,
To leave behind our stalls for someone else
I woke. My people turned to trees.
Then wondered, if I had the chance
Could I, too, with the cold winds learn
to dance?
It is the grove that gives us life.
The sun, the soil that we share,
The tears of those who watch o’erhead,
their left-by mulch, subconsciously aware —
I sleep; my people growing tall.
Now am I just too fast to feel
The slower dance that’s only dreamed,
but far more
real?
I sat and watched the burning ones.
They came in twos and threes:
The night was their intoxicant,
And ardor, their disease —
I see them, too, in memory,
They’re everywhere about —
For when you are a burning one,
You’re destined to
Go out
Here is the end of all of this:
most of us, one day,
will lie in a room where the shadows grow,
with memories crowded out by pain,
knowing, only then,
why we lit so many fires…
Just to keep these very shadows at bay.
Days we spend as interlocking cubes,
silver and shiny, neat and trim,
lost in the patterns of our illusions,
pushing chaos beneath the surface;
but look — down a hall you’ve already walked,
there’s a bed and pillow you’re going to use…
And you’ll be joined to all the people who used it before
The life that I remember
Is like a falling star,
So brief, and so ephemeral,
And only viewed afar —
The life that I remember
Had meaning, I recall —
But flashed so short, it seems
Like it was never there
At all
