It's when the tears dry up,
when the arms are no longer
feeling the loss, when unkissed
the days end that sorrow becomes
memory only and the flat back
of yesterday loses color.

Try harder to replace the moments
strangely forgotten, to remember
the trust, to relive.  Wrapped in memories that once slayed
the dragons of doubt only to
find the pieces of a life unloved
after all in simple shards incapable
of stinging that the ends of
believing are achieved.

This ceases to be a cause for
fear, this lost labor at last
unexpected but tired with
unstrain and blurred with
yesterday's tears.

To lose is always a shock.
To cease to be moved
is a thud in the soul of time.


Caroline Shank

I was alive when it was important.
Being a woman before it was undone.
The glance across the room, the
air laden with innuendo.

The bartender who lit my cigarettes.
Rob was his name. We met one
evening over laughter.  The tail
end of the evening and an hour
across a stripe.

My dress a little two short, eyes
brimming with signals of which
no gentleman would  hold me
to account.  

It was important to be a woman
before the androgyny of manners
became the moment  that passed
me by.  

It was only important,
before you took me in your car,
awkward groping, visceral noises,
importance worn down to small
sounds, after.

It is not important to be anything
since I am past 75 years
of age and my  ways
are gone and

you

can't see me wildly

search your face

for

recognition.



Caroline Shank

I don't have anything to hold
you to me.  No picture or voice.
Do not go, but turn
if you feel the draft of your
name brush against you.
Know that it is I who sent it.  

I am a listener these days.
Listening for your voice
that called my name.

I do not publish you but
gently unscroll the days,
those summer days, so
short, when you said

forever.


Caroline Shank

I used my last chance, a ride
on the solar system of emotions.
I fell off and sat for a minute
on the eyelash of memory.

The long rope of my only
last and forever temptation
unkind and undone.

It's not true.  It takes a minute
to unravel the sinue wrapped
around the idea of you.
Wrought around the music

is you struggling forever,
trying to unravel the speed
of memory.

The seed of yesterday,  The
bed of undoing.  Red and
ripped I cling to the
final appointment.

Tomorrow is the kaleidoscope
you feared. The colors
patterns solidify and the habits
reveal the dead solid center.

I surround myself with the
sunflower blanket. The
synapse of yesterday tugged

before I knew you.

and dragged
the moon's light mine.


Caroline Shank

I vape sometimes.  I am into
Self determination.  No drinking
I thumb my nose at the 50s.

I'm old now. I float you Mother
There are no cocktails.  You

were a dream of mid century
hedonism. I saw you as the
Cleopatra of Barberry

Drive.

My milk tastes of you.
I vape occasionally
and walk to the edge
of tomorrow.

Take me O Lord. Let me
not know.  Push my head
into nights endless abyss.

Let tomorrow anoint my
scrambled hopes that
even tonight I

dare

you to be

Real

My love


Caroline Shank
May 28.2025

I wait for the cold dark to run
like *** down my chin.

I wait for the sun to round
the side of my building
bringing tomorrow's promise.

It was always to be tomorrow
when I taste your licorice flavored
mouth again.

I wait like the Oracle said,
for the time when the gods
will bring you to my song.

I wait. Coltrane blowing
forever in my heart.  

Forever, the saxophone,
your breath,
in my hair.

I wait for tomorrow. For music.
For wine.  A song to
sing to the empty nights.
I drink to the miles into
darkness…



Caroline Shank

I will drink loneliness in my
coffee. The sweet is turned to
sorrow, the cream is the stir
of tears.  

I will not last this.
The table was set when you
strode into darkness.

I will pin loneliness on the board.
The same letters unwrite.

Half a century is not enough
to unbelieve.  The scattered
seconded invitation is
laid green and turbulent.

I leave loneliness a song
to the unbeliever.

You fold my intention like
a glove broken in.

Winter is always the last
cry in the dark sound
under the stairs.

I leave the sounds of the
wheel under my
shoes, in Winter unsounds
tears that dry in eyes
of the unbeliever,

you, walk like steel cleats
over my poems.


Caroline Shank

I will kiss you last before
I shuffle off, though you
will not know it.
I write your name
with a cloud's bent rod.

You will not know me,
old and fat, but I
owe you an engraved
allegiance.

You left in the rain.  And I,
I ran home to bare my
pain on the palm side of
tomorrow.  Always you,
young and warm. Still
my old heart beats
with your

goodbye.


Caroline Shank
11.1.20

I write so you will answer me.
I see you sit, your confusion
curled like hair on a new poodle.

I write to touch your face with
my thoughts.  Know that my
fingers wrap around your sorrows.

I offer my hand in reply to
your silence.  I wait for

you
to touch

me.

Here I am.  I write words
in the wind

which brushes

by you.


Caroline Shank

I write to please the gods of
unloving.  The manuscripts
are read in the dark. Red eyes
pierce my dreams. I am a
pencil with yellow lead.

Only the darkness can read
the heavy lines of Purgatorial
rhymes.  I do not like rhyming
I'm not very good at it.

I am a mangle pushing out
sheets of my mind,
wrung for you.
Don't say that.  You don't want
to matter.  I have listened
to the susurrus of that tune

before.

I scribe my songs
on parchment skin…
I am a private person.
It is alone that I belong
to this notebook.   It's the
scores of fifty years of

watching for you.  Gone now.
Everywhere are the trinkets,
the baubles.  Even the cat is
quiet. Her quest
to find you is
exhausting.  

I write to the sound

of me calling
you
in the dark..


Caroline Shank

I write to know that I'm
alive.  Someone else said
that. I just can't remember
who.  I write the vowels
and consonants of the
swirls of my own life.

I remember in the first place
the keys that opened the
doors of wonder.  Not always
a good thing I can assure you.
Growing up was filled noise.

Secondly I remember the
troubles.  Years of pale white
when I witnessed my mother's
bitterness, my father's
kindness, the worldmakers
of our youth.

Number three taught me
to breathe in the screams
of my mother's midnight
rantings. This is when I
taught myself to smoke. The
cancer of her determination
was to ruin us all.

I stopped counting.  My life
after girlhood, cowl
of stillborn years, trod the
boards of marriage and
babies.  

You were the pages without
names.  Months of writing
torn from a book and
saved.  Can you find me
like a lonely letter?

I write to remind you of the
vellum we shared, so briefly,
to which this lonely passage
belongs.

Find me.

Caroline Shank

I write in flames of love
unallowed.  You who do
not know the pain fly on
Dove's wings

oblivious to the heat,
the colors, the bent
dreams as I reach

For the sight of you.
Fly away.  I will burn
here in the fires of

my hopeless devotion.
I am red with lost
desire.  Fly to the

land, light on the
water, I so long for,

You.

Caroline Shank

Relief from covid19. Jeopardy is
better now that Trebek is still
willing with us.  He wears white
wigs and speaks through chemo
sores.  What a guy to stand,
background to our greatest fears.

Women fight the public fight.
******* plop into pans.
******* skin is patched.
Men's breast tissue falls into jars.

There is no change in the drawer
for lost time.
I am not going into mammography
again.   I'm old and pain
yearly is not on my schedule.

My brother died of throat cancer
I think.  He was sick of an old
dream anyway.  Maybe it was
my mother. But I digress

Jeopardy is not relevant to
anything but it serves me well
in my aged isolation.  I'm not
sick of dying.  I am going well
into my old age, into
time future,
and into time past,
which is always now
according to Eliot.

I go into the night half clothed and
remember the words to questions
gone by.

I answer in my sleep,
and I pull my earlobe in homage.


Caroline Shank

I'm looking for my husband.  He has
disappeared into some place inside
his mind, like a sea creature slides
into a coral bed.

Quick now, here he is for a moment
or an hour.  Like a Robin bobs in
the yard, he is beautiful in his song
before he vanishes into the sky,
flying above or around me.

Are his pieces forever gone? Will
I find a kiss behind my chair meant
for me alone? Will my sorrow erase
the years of love?

I will be brave today.  Tomorrow
I will be the coral he needs. A small
animal in a very large and
strange ocean. .

Caroline Shank
5.4.20

Forgiveness (2013)


I learned as a young young girl that there are things that are unforgivable, things that are inconceivable, except that they happened.  I learned that
no one cares
whether or not you forgive them, or her, or him.  Forgiveness is a NON issue, actually.

Life moves on, with or without our sorrows or bitternesses.  It just moves on.  We go with it, unless we choose not to.  Should we choose the "absurd" path of going on with it, it still makes no difference whether or not we "forgive".

Forgiveness is for God, whatever your relationship is to God.  Our job is to reach through the minutes of our days and to be the best or kindest, or not. There is no choice but  to "fare forth".  The pain of abuse or insult rides with us.  It just does. It's where we go with it that makes us, breaks us, or takes us on our way.  We become our best idea of ourselves because we know the difference.  All learning is from analogy.  If someone hurts me, do I not bleed (etc.).  Do I not know how to BE in this world with kindnesses because I have known cruelty?  Of course I do.

I have known extraordinary kindness and love.  I have known these things when I have least deserved them.  I learned how to love from the amazing love which has been shown me.  I have known Gratitude and it is the Mantra of my life in my last act.

Deception, in whatever its form, cannot cut us, unless it matters so much we are willing to dwell in some mire of useless opinions.  What is important to me is contained in a really quite small circle.  "The rest is not my business."   T.S. Eliot.

It is irrelevant, this idea we have about "forgiveness".  It's arrogance in extremis.   If someone causes me pain I really cannot do anything about it except to remove the source of it.

I am, beyond belief sorry for the pain I have caused others.   All I can do is fall on my knees in gratitude that the next minute or hour has pushed me into the next minute or hour and if I hang onto God I will go into the next flowing parcel of time with wounds that are healing, with sores that, Thank God, show me the direction in which to go to find, again, a place of peace,
people who do love me and whom I love.  
I have lived to know many many Blessings and Gifts.  (If I had waited to feel "forgiven" I would still be mired in pain.  It is the gift of Acceptance, unconditional Acceptance which sustains me.)

Grace is not found in concepts like "forgiveness" but in the constant acts of love.

It is not my place to Judge.  God knows this.  He most surely does

My fingers separate the air
between us.  Spokes.  A draft
through each digit whistles,
and I fall through, let go
of my bones.  The sound of
crying splits into syllables,
a vocabulary of fine letters
spills on the soft brown
palette of earth.

Art oils out of yesterday’s
memory.  I leave, erased
from imagination, evicted from
form.  
thought from wonder.  We
meet on the flat sandhills
of reflection.

This thought, which by and
large constructed you, contracts
in sadness.  The distance
between us is spread against
the whitest sky.  Your image
forms like brilliance from
stone.

They blamed me too but

they would not say so. The end came startlingly quick.  Though 

it took your whole life to get there.


Not me. You.  I only followed

that slate path up to almost.

This is out of order Judy.

You took the pills out of the

white slide-out box.  I 

remember that part.


They blamed you too, didn't

they?  Did you miss out on the

hospital, the doctors, the oh

such a bad headache?


Your kids grew up without

you.  Frustration fingered

them.  They came to know 

the Magic, the Myth.


Pace Requiescat Judy,

over the rainbow, 

we all go somewhere.




Caroline Shank




The movie "Judy" starring

Renee Zellweger

I write this poem as memory.
The warm night we danced
over the pizza place to "Me and
Mrs. Jones." or the trip to the
museum.  

We were tan and
dressed in white.  Summer
was knocking and we
opened the door.

It was a fine door.  We didn't
know then that the wind from
Canada was coming for us.
We drank as we shared
your jacket.

"Listen" you warned me you
were leaving, calling me to wrap
your fleeing shadow around
the mannequin of July.  "Listen"
pounding in my head.

I write you into poetry 46 years
later.  See, I hold your flame in
my hands. Drops of ash in
a goblet of memory.


Caroline Shank

Would tonight be a good
night

to go?

Bare Spring, buds and
daffodils.  Hasta’s shoulders
peek and I and my
friend share the
evenings
braille messages.

Our heart's alert ,
fingers reach,
Maybe tonight?

after you leave?

The rain begins.
Shares the drops with

tears.

And I look at the
empty bed.

Night Lights hang on
neon signs,

And the guitar sings
of blue beaches.

I want to leave but

quietly.

Saturday erupts .

It won't hurt…



Caroline Shank
May 2, 2025

I'm oh so far away from
where you are.

I have climbed your mountain
and found only scree and granite
at the top.

Others have been here and left
a stone.  I have nothing to leave
you but an empty dish. A cold
meal once eaten is like a frozen
embrace.  Empty is empty.

I am walking away from your
promise like a cat leaves a
deserted dish.

No! Do not touch me.  
Touch only the breeze as
I leave.  Do not speak to me

I lie
in the air,
crying with the
gulls.


I mourne
Kaddish.



Caroline Shank

Karma brought me here.
I meditated long enough
to realize the sun beyond
the gloom.
I found in the **** heaps of
a life only crippled a piece
of light.

Karma is a whisper.
caught and warm.
It is the song
through which I dance.


Caroline Shank

Old and timewrinkled.
Thoughts ripened,
fall from me.  

You lean
on my vocabulary,
I felt your initials

carved on my fragile skin.

Torn syllables
scatter.  The floor is
bone and blood.

It rearranges and
once shapes are
spill
into a forgotten

well.

Syllables on a clean
tile. ,
writhe.

Caroline Shank
10.3.2023

Storied history.  Water the
color of your eyes.  The
various blues and greens,
the browns are all reflected

in my soul.

You stand in the cold
shallows . I saw you there
a long time ago, freezing
knees and lips.

I had to kiss you so long
on the blanket we wrapped
along your lanky body.

Lake Michigan.  You called
it my bathtub because I was
so eager to get there every
summer.  

Fossils like smiley faces
washed up into my net.
You helped me collect
them along the brown
shore sharp with the

memory of thousands of
years of brilliance,
Of radiant Joy when
the birds arrived, when
the glacier morained
and you and I fell
in love

on the shoreline of
a great adventure.

Caroline Shank

Let me go Lord.
Save my memories in an old
coffee can. Tie it with string.
Give my bed to a homeless
woman who hasn't reached
the turning.

Take the white out of my hair,
and take my blue eyes too.
I have seen pain's
kaleidoscope. And
I was afraid.

Return what tenderness
survives to the flowers
lest I wilt them with
careless whispers.

Take me out of church
before the offertory.

Scatter the ashes of
a life sorely led on the
edge of the pond where
memories, like
sargassum, trap me.

Bring to me a dram of
whiskey.  Mix it with
the remains of my
life's last call.

Time Gentlemen.

My song is done.
Let me go Lord.
I am an image
wrapped in
Saturday.
.


Caroline Shank

Let Us Go

At great risk we go
through certain half deserted
streets.  The lights burn holes
in my contemplations.  The spine
of poetry is fallen and lies
spattered on the ground

Go with me. The vocabulary
inspired by the sea air will
carve runes in the granite.

We travel light. Our skin, like
canvas ingrained with words,
bleeds.

We drop to our knees in
silent supplication.  Sounds
paint where rhyme
leaves
trails.

There is no tomorrow.  


Caroline Shank

Lie To Me 2021

2020 leaves with the devil
whipping it on. But it's not going anywhere.  It is full of sound and fury.  

We scroll through the signs.
We think we will enter into
time's free zone. There are no
promises. Death drapes
from the sky.

Time past and time future
are only pages and lyrics
sung from one year into the next.
We will all cancel hope
by March.

I hear the witches chanting,
"By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes."


Caroline Shank


Notes:
The Four Quartets
Macbeth
Faulkner

Lineman

You ride the poles of my
electric memory.  I feel
your grip on the wires
of my need.

I mourne at last your
absence.  The pulse
Is faint now.  You will climb
the last time soon
to dry the lines, wipe
the torn wires

and stop the
pulsing
of
your

aching name.

The pounding code
of a life

overturned.



Caroline Shank

Is there a line in the
lives of you and me

which

when Crossed is like
the Rubicon?

Is it when
stumbled and
bruised

the phone
dangles,
held by conversation

that one is compelled
to wonder did I say
too much?

Love newly turned
there in the lathe
of indecision

‘Cannot bear
very much

Realty.

Mr Eliot talks of
lonely people.

Do I dare to Believe
That in you
is

Grace.  You shelter
Me.

Love lives after all.

Speculation saeculorem.


Caroline Shank
December 11, 2024

Long ago, miles and miles
ago,  you'd think I'd have
forgotten.  I remember so
many things.

I've learned that a tree down
still remembers its first leaf.
That the moon remembers
its first sunset.  I've learned
to understand then, that the
first beating of your
existence on my heart
remembers you.

Send me a signal that I
may see the first fragments
of your hand in mine,
the first dance in the
dark, the first look
we knew as always.

Let me not go without
one signal that you knew,
once, the colors of my
name you whispered
on my skin that night
you said goodbye.

The years have frailed me,
but not so much that I
could not relive that
sole and singular summer.

Caroline Shank

Long days.  Night slithers through
the door and I reach for you.
I believe in the wisp of
twilight, the smell of dope
and your arm around my
shoulder. The cross we bear.

The map of night is written
and I must go.  Never, the
tears.  I stare at your mouth.
We kiss the chalice of each
others love.  The mass of
yesterday sanctified a long
litany of love unanswered.

I hate the sound of the bells.  
I am brought to my knees. An old woman genuflects, A tear falls.
I confess my sins but never
you.  

You, you belong to the
dusking dreams.  

Caroline Shank

Realization begins with a grassy
patch on the cheeks.  A loosening
chin.  Our eyes tear
a little in the woven years.
We get older, better.  We stop
weeding.  Time is represented
by the passage of linear
rows.  Memory, imagination and
the strings of movement flare.
Answers streak the imagination's
runways.  We used to be whatever we
were in those early youthful afternoons.
Now the flowers are loose and confident.
We plow the past in conversation.

Look at us.  Our age signs
the geography.  We rise from
a packed landscape, determine
the motion of the earth.  The
winds of the last forty years
blow from behind.

We form together.  
Clouds gather us in.
We raise flags.
Our answers are on the
breezes of the past.

We sing.
Our anthem is
a song
for the ages.


Caroline Shank

I'm looking for my husband.  He has
disappeared into some place inside
his mind, like a sea creature slides
into a coral bed.

Quick now, here he is for a moment
or an hour.  Like a Robin bobs in
the yard, he is beautiful in his song
before he vanishes into the sky,
flying above or around me.

Are his pieces forever gone? Will
I find a kiss behind my chair meant
for me alone? Will my sorrow erase
the years of love?

I will be brave today.  Tomorrow
I will be the coral he needs. A small
animal in a very large and
strange ocean. .

Caroline Shank

Does anyone know

Really

That the ends of life are….
Rattled with dried

Labors

Notes left to oneself
Be true
Good

Play dead.Suffer little children.
Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow

Suffering into the light
Heal
The last time was so close.

I don't write what you want.

when I was young
Is a song.

I, however, a l …am a broken slab.
A well of  drenched
marinade.

You could save me

Yet…you

Fold my poetry over
Into

Daylight’s

Hampers.

Wherein I  lie.
Crimped
edges of a

Masterpiece


Caroline Shank
March 25, 2025

It was in the early spring, as
I was just waking up, I realized
that the day had lost its colors
and I was blinded by the loss.

There were shades of gray,
many tones of dun and some
paler lights where sunlight
tried to pierce my eyes, to
no avail.

I mentioned this to you as I
turned to face the empty pillow.
You were gone and nothing
I could do would bring you
and the pallet of colors
settling back in place.

I walk the city streets
unidentified.  I am unseen
in my gray dress.  There may
be activity but there is no
sound.  I float like a ghost
past your house.   I remember
when we lived there, before
the catastrophe.  

You asked me if I loved
you and I, rendered mute
by the enormity of your
request, could not mumble,
though I longed to shout
YES YES YES.  You took
me for a fool in my unthroated
response.  I became a ghost
then doomed to walk the
city's streets, a ghost of
unforgiven silence.

There is no one at home
today.  I lie supine in
my sorrow, in the bleak
gray, and all my tomorrows
crawl flatly to my grave.

Oh do not be tricked and
think me abused for my
vocabulary.  But think
of me unbounded by
the light.  Extinguished
by the loss of a sentence.


Caroline Shank

I'm going now,
you can call me
at the number
here.

I am one with the
once me never
again remembered.

I'm the mother, the
grandmother and
the, now, widow.

Whoever said i should
give thanks left no
calling card.

No hello, no goodbye,.

Buddha, he of no
regrets, spent his
life ignoring the pain

of even the women.

He did not say give
thanks, he said be
still.  For eight
years he sat.

Christ said He was
not of this world, so
no wisdom from
the Christian Miracle
of the World.  He is not
talking to me now.

The Rabbi stays alone
In a Shtetl, or however
it is spelled.

I lived sans companion,
no being to give me
permission to inhabit
this or any body.

My music
was lost. I played songs
over your name.
I dont know what
that means
My love.

I  lay in
this tangle of
placques
and convolutions

on the grass
of your words.

You tell me
now

that love always

was your

Song.



Caroline Shank
11.8.2024

Love melts like chocolate on a face
on a hot Summer day.  You can't
capture it because it drains down
your lips to tomorrow.  

Love falls to the ground and colors
the grass a burnt orange.  The color
of my  heart when you left me
without sound.  

Words unsaid smear.  
Unrecoverable sounds of
midnight kisses elude.

Love remains in me,
before you ever left.

How do I say goodbye
to nothing in my hands?
The silence of
your leaving drips
as you
melt away.


Caroline Shank

It's not the fault of the stars,
literature or my mother,
The vague statues
The crenelatted fringes
Of half remembered
conversation that rest
in my imagination .

I look for, in you,
the long shadows of
memory scrolled on
the sands of literature

This
poem,

These choices,
       unfold.

         Love

recapitulates.


Caroline. Shank
10.28.2023

Your crotch seared into my
afternoon.

If you must wear shorts on your
fat legs please pity the members
of your audience.  

Restaurant's wooden warm
summer tables,  A patio for
my pleasure.  When in you
came. I never saw your face
until the squirming crotch
across the nearby table,
where you sat, friends like:)
you who couldn't see the
dance of fat falling out of
your shorts.  The camel
toed and the chats of friends.

Poured & drunk with no
where through the
sorry exhibition.

Caroline Shank
July 23,  2023

(A portrait of a Lady
brushed across time.
A fragment of life one
afternoon in a poem.)

She drops through your
memory like music from
a farther room.  Her death
is filtered.  Colors
are flowers on the grass.

You are a prism or a vessel.
You come and go.
Time goes into stone.
Pain is a fossil.  It will
be here a billion years.


Caroline Shank

Mary looked up to see tears
on Joseph's cheeks. She.
was exhausted.  The trip that
ended in the birth of her baby
was a flight out of Egypt

Tomorrow she would be in
quarantine. The contamination
of her body must be resolved.

Theirs was a strict following.
Her blood must never touch
hallowed ground.

The baby boy slept, unaware
of the Laws.  

Mary felt the sweat of her labor
dry stiffly around her forehead.
The World would wait.

Jesus's was the singular cry.
The long last breath of Hope
sweet on her face.  The
foreshadow of someone's
salvation loosed.

Mary sank into sleep
safe that she and the
baby could begin the
long journey to Calvary.

Did she know the last
of a mother's desperate
clinging to the moment?
Jesus smiled at her.
Cry
Mary brought light into
darkness, fuel into a cold
night and a will of

determination to sound
down
the Corridor to
this

Magic reenactment of

Religions signification.

Mary rested with her baby
for oh so short
a

Time.

Caroline Shank
12.24.2022

The snow goes away.
You call me out to play Lord.
I feel joy at last.

Temperatures rise,
Spirits dance in the daylight.
You catch me spinning.

Tomorrow gives way
to a dream. A warm balming
wafts my soul about.

You melt my winter
like icicles in the sun.
I run toward spring.


Caroline Shank

You’ve spilled like light through the glass. Your
poems are in front
of me as I write.

I break through.
You are the Spring
in which I have grown
green.

Your poems are fertile
lines growing in
through open windows.

I write because your
poems show the way.

You are the teacher,
I am the scribe.  
My poems are born

and

I write while your sun
beams light
on my page.


Caroline Shank

Midnight slouches to
A Manger in a cold straw
barn where He is born.

Caroline Shank

She is not gone. You have not
lost her.  She is transformed
into shine and glow and into
star stuff.  You are part of her
in some way that glistens in
the Universe.

Death is only a segment of the
cycle of which you are the
best part.  Her laugh rings
around you. Her love
transfigures you.  Listen.

The tinkling of star songs is
for you.  The sparkle in your
eye is her. Be aware that
death is a tap over your
shoulder, a smile in your
mind.

You have touched a miracle
of which you are a player.  There
is no way into tomorrow.  Today is the way to love her forever.

Today is always.

Caroline Shank

Morning drips in like coffee.
I think of you. It is the
hardest time.  I begin the
day in sips. My tongue
burns with greed.

You seep in through the
slats of my sleepy windows.
The day starts with memory.
Your red hair curls
around the sun.  I reach out to
touch you.  I want to kiss
the blue of your eyes across
the table.

I, sadly, drink the dregs of
my morning, wash the azure
off my face and dry my tears
to carry me through to
tomorrow.

Mornings drip in like coffee.
I think of you.

Caroline Shank

Morning has broken 🎶.  The song
of a single bird brings down night's
shadows, chimes the diurnal
trill of a new day.

The same shiny blue glare
everlasting.  

Gathered moments.

Groceries for the soul.


Caroline Shank

"Morning has broken". Every **** day.
Branson is about to fly into the sky. Fauci
tries to get politics out of healthcare.

But you, you are young and strong,
fine and holy in my eyes.  I am due
to leave soon. You are forever 22.

I saw a picture of you recently. It felt
like withdrawal.  Don't look for me  
I am unrecognizable
In my old age.

I am my name spelled backwards.  
My broken mornings travel and
I am uncircled.  I have chosen not
to be and at some
point won't.

If you must come to me, come in the break of morning when the cat is
kneading me and I long for you.

Caroline Shank
7.11.21

I did not do that. The blotch
is the size of the sun
Methods of communication.
Failed mornings.

You saw the results of my
conversation before I did
Information quarreled with
meanings.. What should
be is not a reason to be.

Again the day begins with
prayer.  The end of prayer
cannot be its beginning.
The early morning empty

verses die of loneliness.
I die of repetition, of
stomach crunching fear.

I cannot find the night
in the car, the ******
shorts, your silence
drills me a lobotomy.

All this be the ends
of days and thought
moves slowly
backwards.

Caroline Shank
10.9.2023