Night flowers bloomed
in moments to rare for words.
It is morning,
and they have still not folded upon themselves
but turn to face the day
unfurling more beautifully
than before.

It is night. We are sitting on the steps among fallen leaves, looking out into an eerily empty scene. Pale blue light shines on the weathered concrete where a single white car is parked in a forgotten spot. It's strange without people, the bustle, constant hum of voices, engines, the occasional horn.
     It feels more alive to me now. The place in and of itself alive-- as it would have been if man had never existed. If our existence had been lost somewhere up among the few stars that now dare to shine through. Those few (happy few?) who dare to look upon the tragic, transient, mortal beauty of men.
     The familiar symphony of night sounds can be heard in the little line of trees before us. The wind is plucking leaves from branches. They fall brown and lifeless at our feet. I wonder if trees miss their leaves, or if, perhaps, they have accepted the perpetual cycle of loss and renewal mankind has yet to make peace with.  Each year shorter than the last, each day longer than the first. I have always loved the melancholy of autumn, its bittersweet solitude, the leaves as quiet reminders of  mortality-- tiny deaths to foreshadow our own. No, I do not wish for death. I have, but not tonight. Tonight the air is soft and cool, and the air and sky are clear. I am finding peace in the mundane chaos.
     He is next to me, thinking. Solemn, with a tinge of sadness, but for what I'm never sure. He laments the loss of our child-like wonder, and I question if it can be regained. I would like to think so. I think somewhere, inside all of us, our childish hearts remain, molten core of memory, identity, the first, the fairest of us. Who we were before the world beat it out of us.
He has a soft, deep, murmur of a voice. A tiny gap between his two front teeth I notice when he laughs. A lovely laugh that shakes through his willowy, wiry frame. His eyes are kind and thoughtful, yet serious. When he looks at me, it feels as though he is trying to stare right through, and I turn away. For all my wanting to be known, perhaps I am not ready--yet. But parts of my spirit which have long lain dormant are surfacing again, coming towards the light. Timid, they step out, unsure of where they are, what the footing is here. But so far, solid.

I am driving home under the melancholy grey sky that reminds you of the empty spaces in your chest. Sickly yellow street lamps are coming on, one by one, highlighting the potholes and cracks in the road. I can't help but picture what it might have looked like in the 60's. The still all American heartland town, when the rusted buildings were new and shining, when the once grand houses had fresh paint, well manicured yards, un-littered by fake deer and old tires. I remember old news papers from estate sale boxes, pictures of women in smart dresses with cinched waists, sitting prettily in the society section. They are probably dead now. Buried in the cemetery on a hill that overlooks the city, and down onto the tiny matchbox houses now boarded up or falling into disrepair. Still yet it seems maybe it was never new. There was always the dust, the smudge, the ghostly fog on old mirrors. I wonder how it will continue, or if it will at all, perpetually rise and fall, as all things do, or simply fall, the lifeblood of youth trickling out and down the freeway, or soaking into the already saturated ground.
     Hopeless seems so dark a word, but the truth was never pretty, was it? Perhaps, here, is the hardness of truth, in its grit, its blood. The pebbles that stick in your palms and skinned knees. They once said the depressed were the most realistic of us all, that it was the perpetual state of the human mind-- everyone else in optimistic denial. I was inclined to believe them. Our rose colored glasses taint the world cotton-candy pink while E-flat minor and discorded harmonies echo somewhere in the mountains, longing, hard, sad.
     What haunts you? I want to ask the old rail road tracks. Who died here? I say to the gaping cinder block house. Do you remember what laughter sounds like? I know you remember the bark of dogs, the screech of tires, gunshots or fireworks, who can tell. Dust the memories off the way we dusted sawdust and insulation from the boxes in the hoarder's attic-- find them suspended just the way you left them, open the room-- unchanged since the children left. The toys lie on the floor where they fell from small hands. The safest memories are the ones unremembered. The more they are recalled the more corrupted they become till we are painting our own picture all over again, and we are Van Gogh on a rainy night. Is that what happened? You remembered them all too often. You stared at the sun till you were blind and wondered why you could not see the stars. Yes, that must be it. You clutched those slips of laughter so greedily-- recalled them again and again until they faded, till now you hear nothing but the wind, and cough nothing but ashes.

Sometimes I apologize
to silence
for the wrong
notes

Something broke inside me.
glow-stick soul
snapped
one too many times.
There is nothing here
but broken glass
the darkness remains
undefined
un-defied.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

I hold nothing against you.
These spines are in my chest
clutched like a sacred heart grenade
with fingers too close to let the blood through.
Driven in desperation
cyclone of nonsense and the neurotic
marred by nothing and marred by all
and the red dash trenches
with no man's land slowly decreasing
but too many futile-over -the-tops
for far away victory.
Fruitless as the wavering charge
one step forward
two hundred back
Stalingrad psychosis.
Shell-shock guilt and the stark reality
of one's own mind and the prisons it builds.
Peace is a forgotten word
not even whispered in dreams.
Freedom drowned in the mud.