Once I saw not color.
My dreams were black & white.
The days, it seemed, were endless
and void of light.

Then I met a young girl
with rainbows in her eyes,
bringing hue to my life
and to the skies.

"I cannot go back,"
I think to myself driving alone,
early afternoon, Rt. 7 North.
The last time I visited
the house where I grew up,
I felt like a ghost
there in the yard,
as if something - some secret misfortune -
were tugging at my sleeve,
begging me to stay, to remember.
A secret not my own,
but one I have spent my whole life forgetting.
A secret as old as the great maple tree
under which I used to play and pretend.
That tree no longer stands,
though its branches remain
scattered about the yard,
causing me to remember.

Harvey Weinstein is not in jail because of *******,
nor did the Devil make him do it.
Harvey Weinstein is in jail because of power.
He felt he had it - all men feel they have some.
Yet, Harvey Weinstein is the kind of man
who knows not restraint, who knows not respect,
whose little taste of power, he felt, should
be on the tongues of the women whose lives he polluted.
******* is not the impetus of abuse,
just as a gun will never be a murderer,
just as the Devil will never be anything but an excuse.
Men are their own devils.

In the mind it still
rusts

the metal skeleton
of my youth

as I plunge
again and again
into memories

with images
flashing
behind my eyes

and I struggle
only to remember

the good stuff


Whit Howland © 2020

You are the reason I look out the window at night and smile.
You give light to the darkness, it is your nature.
You bring thrill to an elsewise soulless sea.
Though I saw you not that night, you were there
(part of me) at my birth and,
come time to die, I will look on you and smile, again.

No one wants to hear the truth.
That's why we tell stories,
invent personas,
make secrets of ourselves.
Lies are the currency of love.
A peacock is just a turkey with pretty feathers.