The leaves are falling from the sycamore
Outside my window,
Collecting vastly beneath my pickup parked just across the street.
There once was a nest of robins that perched upon those mighty branches,
Then came a powerful gust of wind that knocked it down next to a pack of hounds.
They of course decimated the entire clutch,
And when the mother returned and landed on the now empty branch,
She dived beak down towards her nest.
Never once did her wings open before hitting the ground.
My neighbor came by next morning with an old cardboard shoe box,
It held a carcass and some cracked eggs.
I dug a hole about two feet deep near the birdbath I'd no longer need,
And placed a few pumpkin seeds above the shoe box and covered them up.
I water the patch every so often,
And the hounds howl when near the tree.
This morning I awoke to the sound of chirping,
Outside my window there stood a robin
Holding a pumpkin seed between its bill.
Spring is near, but first comes winter.
I hope, but that's really all I can do,
All there is to do,
Hope.

She was born in the times of Elijah
She grew up around the prophets who wrote the Bible
She dreamed of futures that never came to be
She lived for days that turned decades into me

She was a nurse and she was a muse
She was a mother to seven
and she was a dreamer of heaven
She only loved one man
who died and went there too

She lived one day ahead
seventy decades behind
And three thousand years more
The sands of time were placed by her
She was born with the sun
And she was gone within the final
whisper of a song.

When the time comes
That my heart no longer beats
my bones will rattle in a wooden cage
And my soul will still scream
I was once a Marine

If life takes me down dark roads
Or if I climb the highest hills
If I'm rich or I'm poor
I will still remember deep within
I was once a Marine

To Tun Tavern
And to Basilone
To Chesty To Smedley
To Mattis and the EGA
To the halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli

If for twenty or only four
It is still the birthday of our corps
To 247 I will toast and say
Raise hell and semper Fi
Do or die. For once a Marine.
Always a Marine.

The mirror weeps
The same old tears
That fell upon me
All of those years

My arms they've held
The lives now lost
I've lived their life
But at what cost

I'm not the poet
That I once was
I'm not the man
Of days now past

If loneliness is nothing more
Than a lonely robin hiding
From the cold inside a pine tree
In the middle of a frozen northeastern
Central park,
Then I'm the bark wood collected beneath
It's claws.