Raise the flag!
The lucky lost
fighting waves of inky stars.

Sleepless soldiers
on silent streets,
waging war on the wild and wistful.

Fall in line,
learn our song!
These ragged ranks have room for all.

So long as dreams ne'er come
and nightmares run,
we will whisper our violent lullabies.

Reap the fields of dying holly
and sow the fields with red berries.

Dream of sunny spring awakening,
before the dew sets in the morning.

The march
never tells true
stories of weary legs.
Through great jungles of green and steel,
aching.

Press on,
we urge against
the ground dragging beneath.
Unconquerable, every day
they walk

Such habits born of repetition
through the meandering walk of days.
Moments caught in a rhythm
or stranded out of time

Scribbles captured and enshrined,
ignored and then forgotten
Back to the mind of your creator
to recall the lyrics of yesterday

Like violent footsteps of translucent insects,
rain clouds the glass.
A dynamic curtain between
the warmth
and the wind

Window dancers,
forever shifting, obscuring, revealing.
A one man audience
to a one night only movie
playing exclusively
in the courtyard below

Smog and sizzle,
ears fight eyes to be the first report.
Colors swirling in a pan,
steam hissing up,
the ripe flesh cleft through,
spraying the counter top.
Pungent spices dance with delicate herbs
through the kitchen air.

A spoon as a baton
and a knife as a paintbrush
are tools of a necessary art

Standing against the sun.
Gazing across beaches.
Staring down cliff faces.
Towering over harbors.
What is a lighthouse in the daytime?
But our Athena to Poseidon

Well traveled leather binding a vault of lost ideas.
Haphazard graffiti
dripping ink down the page.
Crumbled sentences and half-finished
thoughts
backdrop the soft scratch of the pen
trying to outrace time

Years, composed as fragments,
have no place
outside the white walls where they were born
Only the architect remembers

and still he is mortal

It is quiet in the dark
the winter air settles,
stagnant on the glass,
before the sun can thaw the sleeping dew

Striped wool hats and cracked leather gloves
emerge from the closet
to join a hopeless war.
They shamble,
illuminated by the high rise windows
dotting through the fog,
towards the front lines.
Catching the warmth from their breath

And for a split second,
just before it flits away,
they are dragons