Category: Uncategorized

A glimpse into my daily life
divided into three clear sections
my kid, my dad, my own directions
duties, errands, worry, strife.
My daughter’s many maladies
Jumper’s Knee, Cheerleader Spine
a shrinking waist; cause: undefined
P.T. and mental therapy.
An aging father with declining cognition
alone in his house of disrepair
encased in mail & Mom’s affairs (final)
ashes to ocean nary come to fruition.
Teacher, on these summer nights
allow yourself to grieve, just bleed
keep the babies, but pull the weeds
read and dream and love and write.

The paths within shadows are bitterly cold. That day is deceased, let it decay with all that is
old. Nothing is achieved by feeling hurt. The past has gone, leave it kicked, ripped, let it
dwindle. Say goodbye to a whole childhood swindle. It was a period for being tricked.
Futures are forever, run to inviting, exciting, play to tomorrow. Life is the bending longbow
pulling back the arrow. It is now the time to be a hero.

Behind the shuttered doors,
the headline graffiti
saying Terry loves John,
there is a room,
two stories down
that housed student nights.
The inebriated DJ,
wanting to play the big clubs,
doing it for the laughs on a Wednesday night.
The stained carpet, not cleaned since 1983.
Mavis the cleaner will be in in the morning,
her trusty buckets and mop hard at work
before the students who made the mess
have opened their eyes.
This is the ironically named Halcyon club,
the place of thousands of wasted nights.
Shuttered down for fifteen years now.
The halls reverberate with the sounds of the ghosts,
the missed opportunities, the throats sore from shouting.
Middle aged people walk by, remembering their own youth,
their own wasted times, working in offices,
thinking that was the best time of their lives.
Knowing, that it wasn’t.
The DJ moved on, Mavis retired to a little bungalow by the sea.
She still thinks about those mornings, pillaged by teenagers,
thinking they were Vikings.

the
photograph
you left me
was torn
but not
where I expected
more of a smile than a

severance

in this digital age
as once
you took the time
to print me out

Heavy throws of her vacant arms felt
To pull soft the shadows on the keiper belt
Duty knows the way of endless orbit, anther
Imagine the way sisyphus looked up at his brother
Sweat drenched brow and a hand clenched boulder
For the sway of the wind
Is dependent on the whims of gravity
Hundreds of millions of miles away
The cosmos give no peace to the men that lay their hats on a peg in the sky
Hands of a gas giant, pulling out another day.
Knew that the red dot was the eye of a spy
Always watchful of the axis that the world liked to spin on
Making sure we are free of the snarling nether, 
And she weeps for us, helium, neon, forever.
(And the ground must feel so firm underneath their hands)
(And the grass must buckle and snap between fingers,)
How small we must seem to our friend
How vast the blue must look when it lingers.
(To stare up and see me in the sky,
To feel sun and the weight of a heaven
Enriched as we are,
together.)

Come, let me show you around this Lauderdale town of chain restaurants and landscaped intersections. Let me show you the signs full of letters and numbers that mean less than the mass of clouds hanging dark and ominous over the mall.

Put your coffee cup down and walk with me around the quiet corners where I stood and whispered your name. Let me steer you through my wrong turns and describe the missteps and crazed patterns my feet marked on these streets. Walk with me and smell the flowers I walked by talking to myself to not go crazy with loneliness.

If you don’t believe me, fine, I’ll call as witnesses all the mosquitoes that followed me through the swamp-thick air to suck the blood from my willing veins, and they’ll tell you every word is true.

Don’t worry, I know you’re not coming down to this seaside tourist town to sort the wreckage we made of what we had, just as I know you won’t stand with me in the middle of the interstate and stare into a hand mirror at the traffic piling up behind me—every bad decision I’ve ever made coming home to roost.