I prefer imaginary over reality,
whispers in stretched-out corridors
stand more stable in my mind
than the marble columns
stacked in rows like dominos.

I love the ethereal thoughts that glimmer
like a dream right before or after
I wake up,
and then pass away,
fading from flickering thoughts
to concrete decisions.

Oh how I wish fact was fiction,
and we all lived in the fantasy of inky words
scratched onto a reality
thin enough to see right through.

Their lips carried words
like songs through some corner café,
with jazz lingering among the aroma of fresh coffee;
beckoning me into their eyes,
as though the street was far too cold
for me to stay outside much longer.

Some memories are tears frozen
on your eyes,
like frost on a December window.
Life through those lenses may be blurred,
but time will clear your sight
when warmer days bring a thaw,
and roses to view in spring.

Some moments can be felt
as though they are written
into a chapter of your life.
The intensity of an event piercing
through the thin paper of your being,
bleeding onto several following pages.
Pull out a book and write
in the margins,
the words only matter if you
ponder them,
and let their meaning drip
from your mind.

Wind whirling around prairie fence-posts,
a few weeks after winter’s last frost
was melted away,
replaced by white flowers that whipped
and flipped in spring’s fresh breath.
Like waves frothing in an ocean bay,
the fine, flirty song of a Meadowlark
is willed into the world,
and frolics through the windy hills.

Stillness surges,
each moment washing into the next
without pause-
no rest for ceaseless waves
of instances indistinguishable
from one another.
Books only mean with other books;
and pages within a community of others;
words connecting to other words.
So the same is with then, now, and next.
Snapshots flashing by,
time framed,
so that it only starts to make sense
after the film is played for a while.

You are all your yesterdays
and tomorrow you will be that
plus today.
What will you speak now,
that will echo in a self
only one sun rise and set away?
Extend your hand into precarity,
and meet a new you
who has one mysterious day
up their sleeves.