.
Candles light the way to my worn
torn books.  I read every night.  The
covers loosened from the binding.

It is a fragile thing that I have come
here to write you.  I am a little out of
shape.  The company of great
writers intimidate me. I am wrapped around the stylus of an idea.  

In some way think of this as an
entry into my thoughts.  Are you
interested in the nocturnal rambling
of my old, my favorite phrases?

Something in me likes to hear you,
in your deep voice, read to me what
I write.  My imagination startles me.

The candles are burnt enough.  
You will not return to this library
which you began so long ago.

I write to you in my diary,
Harker, words you fling from the
runaway carriage window.

I will never die and I will look
for you in my books forever.

I listen to the wind through
the pages.

Caroline Shank

Time eclipsed.
The hours
dose the day.
I am ungood at social
graces.

For what are we to do?
Knowing this?

Apologies skip stones
across thought. I drown
in regret. I am older
not better.

I chase all the live-long
day, calm the tired
minutes
Frown the ridiculous
heart.

But,

I bloom for you.

Caroline Shank

There is  something in the
air that moves me forward
always off balance, as a
thought glances by me and
is quickly forgotten.  

There is a law someone
never told me.
When I was younger I lived
unbothered by the whims
and movements of change.  
Now I cling, precariously,
to a life untethered.

I see my lorn form
change in the whisp
of a moment.

Regardez moi,
je pleure



Caroline Shank

You left her
on the pale of an old wound. Just When She Needed You Most. It's
true that the world is a flat rockfilled
place.

For years she worked a new garden.
Now the songs
are warped and the plants
won't grow.

Her ramblings stutter.
But  offer
a small breath in her direction
and she dances.

Combien Monsieur for some air
you breathed, for a flower you
grew, flesh to the perfect
old dream?


Caroline Shank

I have rebuilt so many times. Every
love is a dispair.  I have room for
none but the lonely, the broken
pedestrians of time's sidewalks.

How old I am is irrelevant.  I
am tuned to the rhyming night.
I listen to the frogs mating in the
swamp, the crickets and, in
season, the cicadas who do not
love but for a breath.  

My house is now a ramshackle
of old memories, songs that
burn my fragile skin, and the
sloe gin of my youth.

You retain me, and in the end,
the currency of my life
is writ of you.

I have rebuilt so many times,
love's fires ring the sidewalk
around my memory .
I write of the past that
is in runes.  My thoughts enact
in me that youth that was always
yours to have and to hold.

We are all phantoms of our pasts.
We are rubbed with it. For you
my skin sings of the tight tan
you knew

once upon a time.

Caroline Shank

She drinks more coffee now and has
found new TV shows.  The figures
have melted into blurs of color.

She misses your sweetness and
your smells.  The kiss on her
cheek, the hand on her breast.
All gone.  The times they hsve
a changed.  

Music is her companion.  Bob
Dylan sings in her bluetoothed
ear.  She thinks of you.  She sends
her lonely love thru a mask of
gauze and presses her old face
against a window.

The virus that kept you away
holds her hostage to a long
wind.

She throws
a silent kiss.

And waves
thru her tears.

Caroline Shank

Your epiphany renders my life
mute.  You walk through a
cloud of happiness I cannot
share.

I don't want the remnants of
your friendship.  I pick through
your past digging for you.
You left me alone and I can't
dance to our song today.

Life was wrong to plant your
belongings in my torn house.

I will forever disremember you
as if you were a song I never
understood.  You are ephemeral
as smoke on glass.  The sun
no longer streams from you.


Caroline Shank