Twenty fragile broken promises
To the American future
Twenty holes that will never fill
Telling it over and over uselessly
All the guns in the world
Will never make us safe
From the cancerous rot
Of our homegrown monsters
Twenty little lights are gone
And we buy away our grief

A spiritual presence of awe
For hovering body and dark brown hair
Brushed to one side, a kind face.
Memory fails me, but I know it was kind.
She took me by the hand, hugged me,
but then she had to leave.

Angry tears fell, and I ran around the house,
Breaking free from everyone,
Was not going to stop until she would not leave.
I ran around the house until I collapsed.
Betrayed by an uninhibited little body, I had soiled myself.
For my first shame, I would not see her leave.

Now I can only see traces in the shadow of dream
Who she was and why I ran around the house,
unknown, but when I experience shame, or loss, or longing,
a small part of me wishes she were here.

No more and brittle silence
Birds twitter under the clam shell sky
Sleep is lost in this world I dream
The sun shines in my long lost home

Anxiety fills in
When Nothing is happening
Like water filling a caldera
Years after the mountain disintegrated
in an explosion of fire and ash
and they told stories about it
beside the blue deep lake
It will happen again
they say in whispers,
Soon

People congregate and appear to be whole bodies
Flesh on bone islands sounding their beacons
In a deceptive fog of social realities
Separate like me by millions of particles
What forges their ties are tenuous cords of meaning
Spider's silk that stretches yet snaps
cut by the awareness of the moment
And then floats away.

Then the rules are not the game
but the parameters that make the game possible.
Yet in this particular form of play
Those who believe they know the rules convince themselves
that they are winning, and then win
and those who anticipate how the game is played
continue until they are tired and play another.
Losing is not easy unless you believe you are lost.
Unknowingly I play this game until I realize
that this is all that there is to it
the realization is
that I am that
everyone is
alone.