Tag Archives: life

A winter quartet

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I

Daybreak
Orion long since fled,
The new moon cradles the old,
With Venus, that old voyeuse,
Standing watch,
All the sky ablush

II

Temperatures drop slowly
From the unblue, steel-gray sky,
The promise of snow revoked
In response to some
Imagined slight.
Across the low-slung day,
Footprints.

III

Finally, snow,
Fierce and bitter
No longer willing or able
To hold its rage against
The lingering autumn,
At the tress clinging absurdly
To their dead.

IV

A Sahara of snow,
Windblown and duney,
Bereft only of camels,
Piled like so much longing,
Like so many
Cancelled appointments.

Let it go

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5

All the suffering
The joy
The pain
The ecstasy
The misery
The loneliness
The exhilarating feeling

That you need someone
That you need no one

Let it go
Release it
Fling it away
Drop it on the doorstep
Forget you’ve ever
Forgotten it

Think of nothing
Think of everything

Let it go
All the injustice
The vindication
The brutality
The losing
The winning
The flattery
The comeuppance

Let it go
Even in the end
The letting go

Ode to coffee

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1

There’s no bottom to its murky depth
No end its ribbony aroma
I swear it gives me living breath
And revives me from my coma

Alas! There’s not enough of it
In my one and lonely cup
I search in vain for the final bit
But nothing’s left to conjure up

And now I read there’s fear of drought
To wither up the smallest sprout
No plants, no beans, just wretched doubt
My stash of coffee’s running out

A ghost appears in a dream

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Who are you? I say.
I am no one, she replies,
and everyone.

I ask, What does death mean?
It means a life
and nothing more.

I ask what she misses most
about being alive.
Nothing, she says,
except everything.

I ask if all the dead
become ghosts.
No, she says, many dissolve
like tears in the ocean.

I ask if the dead
count the time.
Time, she says, is the
Landlord, you are
a squatter.

I ask if dead
souls live forever.
I will ask the fire,
she says, if the ashes
remember it.

Epitaph

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I was a captain of the sky
clouds around my head
like a laurel wreath

eyes fixed on the cresting moon
elbows dancing, and then
in the spark of an instant

lost, all lost,
just a vague memory
until time scrubs the words

from this stone