I sleep with the window open
The air, now chilled with autumn, rushes in to sap away my resolve
Waking me from troubled sleep
Covered with only the thin blue cotton sheet from my college days
Comforting, though it’s hard to gauge when last the warmth of another supplanted the foothill of blankets amassed beside me
The loneliness of night:
When only cars pass below
Sounding like freight trains as they clamor over the slab of steel prostrate on the ground
Protecting the suspensions from the pockmarked face of asphalt
Each a brutish chime filling my apartment
The stark vulgarity lashing out
A garbled cry, anguished and dejected
Dragging from my subconscious
Memories of a different time
Now free
Jostling for position and attention, as though I am the jester king
Holding ghostly court
Clad in the stark regalia of bitterness years in the making
Pour me a glass of that vintage and to what shall we all toast?

Once there was a threat of summer
And rain showers dared to live, hungry within the clouds
And dying, the raspy gasp from the blackened asphalt, coughing
Lightning, fireworks on a funeral pyre.
Childhood incarnations of paradise usurped by time, the thickened
aromas of a faded season. Portraits flavored in now, rewinding to birth:
Dusk, midday, the cool of morning.
Hair darkly swept,
Red radiance burning the blurs of grey, the chalk outlines in the skies.
Finally the eulogy, a Writing
In the air, speaking, perhaps,
But who knows?

I hear distant thunder, an echo of a heartbeat
Buried deep within the youthful breast of a forgotten lover
How quickly we push aside the nervous panic
The palpitations at the slightest touch
As words sweeten as each year flows onward
Until we all are poets in our own mind.  
I can feel the wind, pulling up the smothering humid air
A lustful Southern breath, faint with smell of azaleas and car exhaust
Somehow choking and teasing me with each breath
An addition.
Does love take sanctuary from such frail copies
Hiding in the shadows, waiting to step out into the light
As passions flash and spark, burning out underneath the mid afternoon swelter
Biding time for the cool of eve.
And still the storms approach
The laughter of the leaves fills the air,
The creaking bones of the branches, sinews straining
Reaching out in anticipation, anxious to capture the intimacy
And I am here
Waiting for the moment when cast upon the ground, a silhouette
Swallowing the world, and I am reborn

The moment before sleep
That instant when time is frozen
A slow motion picture playing out
Caricatures of the world alive in the shadows, swaying
Is it in reverse or forward?
Somewhere in my mind I can hear the sounds of places long forgotten
A whisper, quietly sings through the haze
And I strain to hear every word
The tones
Flowing around me, a cloud of warm air
Swaddling my dreams

It's quiet in the afternoons now
The stifled laughter from the other side of the wall
Has died down as the morning shift
Worn from the day,
Has resorted to finalising any lingering task,
Or, more likely, staring blankly at a computer screen counting away life
Before joining the funnel out the revolving door.
This was the time when if things weren't busy
(And face it, things never are THAT busy)
I would walk across the hall to have a quick conversation
Usually about nothing in particular
As we both pretended to not know the pretense
And little jokes took on life
To pass the time before 5:15.
But now the hallway is untraveled
The empty desk tomb
Where before secret laughter was born
Only serves as a lingering reminder,
A jagged edge fang
Embedding deep into my mind
Tearing out memories with intentioned pain
Each time I cast my gaze
And see the ghost of you.

I sit in the winter air
On the worn metal park bench
Where we watched the wind blow the last leaves across the grass
But there's no life now nestled amongst the pack of lonely trees
Like hunger driven carnivores they huddle
A dying breed

I sit in the winter air
A long sleeve shirt and my black athletic shorts
You always hated how I dressed.
I could be another runner, but I sit and feel my legs and back slowly go numb where the metal hugs my skin
The bench is always cold,
Few rays of sun break through the tree limbs

I sit in the winter air
Could I move, stand up, walk?
But I came to be cold, to shiver and breathe deep the poison that stings my lungs
I came to forget warmth and soft smiles
The heat of another so close that it is as if we are one body
Until then, wrap me in the arms of the frozen

The news report on the radio mentioned something about sun
And all around, revelers, bob between waves of light
Shadows playing eternal catch up--
But somewhere along the way I missed the word
And clouds, swaying from the hidden winds, form sunglasses,
In shaded vision I walk
Dragging my heels, the many fingers that crunch and snap beneath the weight
Fallen from the silent giants that dot the roadside,
How reckless, absently rejecting the parts well-worn
The memories
Litter the concrete, a gravesite, a memorial to progress and growth
So much for holding onto the past.
I’ll take a branch and be on my way through the shade
And, smiling, whisper to nothing but the wind:
One day we all become twigs.