A little girl’s bike
Has lain, stranded,
In the secret garden
For weeks…

Lonely —
longing for lanky legs
to return —
So it can reclaim
Its purpose,
Joy actualised!

To end there...
would be foolish,
What's happened to that little girl;
is she hurt and in hospital?
is she stolen, stapled to a wall by a stranger's stare?
is she warm at home enveloped from the frigid air?

Inanimate object --
Where we hold the multiple meanings.

I search the online news
and stray streets for any clues,
little girl I hope you're okay
and your smile wasn't stolen or snuffed without your say!

Joy interrupted...

A man alone is not a man just a force without a purpose.
No one to protect, to guide, or provide for,
just a force without a purpose.

A woman alone is lost, no one to nurture, or nourish,
no one to teach or cherish.
A woman alone is lost.

Of course my view is wrong,
perhaps sexist or chauvinistic,
but the differences are plain to see,
and to me the differences are complimentary.

A man is completed by a woman
and a woman is completed by a man.

Two halves that make a greater whole
two pieces reuniting one soul.

I am a man without a purpose.
Will you complete me???

(from "To: Mimi Romanelli"

~indebted to suggestion of
https://hellopoetry.com/MacGM/
for filling me up one of the trillions of missing datapoints
in my slowly diminishing insights & missing knowledges
<>
"I am happy, Dear, to have walked with steady faith on the waters of our uncertainty all the way to that island which is your heart and where pain blossoms. Finally: happy."

from the poem by Rilke
"To: Mimi Romanelli"
see notes

'~~~'
so worthy of my/our attentions,
his reflections on loss, grief and mortality,
for in the natural course of this poet's story,
the interplay of this shopping list of preoccupations,
foremost on this temporal frontal lobe in these waning days
of my perhaps, last summery summary,
that falls upon your eyes with
my guilt that you have clicked upon
this e~pistle, in and un~
tentionally & tensionally
thus demanding & tendering post-haste
my apology

so be advised, be learned, and query why
an essay on ending mortality should be
be finished with a concluding a
"Finally: happy."
by breaching this poet Rilke essay,
one discovers
this poet sees through the storms of his preoccupations,
"the red of his blood,"
because he loves
another human, being,
so many would agree,
yet so few are so certain,
as Rilke,
and yet,

"It is still always that death which continues inside of me, which works in me, which transforms my heart, which deepens the red of my blood, which weighs down the life that had been ours so that it may become a bittersweet drop coursing through my veins and penetrating everything, and which ought to be mine forever.

And while I am completely engulfed in my sadness, I am happy to sense that you exist,
Beautiful. I am happy to have flung myself
without fear into your beauty just as a bird flings itself into space. I am happy, Dear, to have walked with steady faith on the waters of our uncertainty all the way to that island which is your heart and where pain blossoms.
Finally: happy."


<>
Writ the last week of August,
and the first of September
2025