A quarter-life is twenty years,
Forty marks a half,
In forty years you’ll be a stone,
With a stick-on epitaph.

“She was a force of nature,
Brave and bold and bright!”
They’ll say - who never knew you -
As you’re borne into the night.
When really you were old and tired,
And didn’t care to fight.

What if I kneeled in a glassy church,
And prayed and said “amen”?
I’ve never touched the Holy Book,
But if I did, what then?
He wouldn’t hear my voice among
His eager sea of men…
But if He did, what then?

Your sentences were gated,
And locked within your lungs -
Your words forbidden fruit to me,
The apple of your tongue.
The uninspired oft’ find it hard
To leave another’s song unsung.

So I harvested your phrases -
I burglarized your breath,
And nurtured all your laden words
‘Till there was nothing left.

And living with your hollowed words,
I died a stolen death.

You were a Rembrandt on the subway train.
Critiques of art would surely say
The canvas of your worldview
Rivaled masters in their day.

You were a tour de force of heavy strokes
That rendered my depiction feeble.
Your lambent eyes and lightning skies --
Why hurricanes are named for people.

To you, I was a peculiar stranger
Leering through the morning rush.
Admiring your impassioned presence,
Your steady hand and vital brush.

I’ve learned that
nothing
truly touches.

“Likes repel,”
explains the unbreachable
absence between electrons.

Perhaps this is why
I feel distance
in our embrace.

Must we ask an unpayable fee?
Saying “wait” just to later decline?
It now seems that the land of the free
Is a home that the brave cannot find.

How vexatious that they storm these walls
Pleading reason and asking charity.
Oh, how dare they try escaping home
To a land we brand OPPORTUNITY.

I fear the longing of millions of souls
All brimming with fury and cause
Is more pond’rous than the marching soles
Of the soldiers defending our flaws.

At night, white roses glow as bright as the moon
and as round.
They curtsey in the breeze, necks dipping.
Underfoot, pea flowers explode across the dirt,
imitating the scattered stars above.
In darkness, the most vibrant grass is deepened
to a celestial backdrop.
In this garden I can’t help but think
the moon must be a narcissist,
looking nightly down upon
her mirrored sphere --
Ah, how beautiful I am!