She reminds you of a tiny flame. You look at her and she's small and beautiful and luminous. And in the back of your mind you know she is equally both dangerous and weak. One wrong word or action and she can diminish into nothing but smoke. But if she catches something that makes her feel alive she grows too quickly even for herself to handle. And while you stare into the glow of her soul. Feel the warmth of her body. She begins to burn down everything you hold dear. And you should have seen it coming. You should have paid more attention but that little flame flickered and danced around and you couldn't help but still see it as small and beautiful. And once she absorbed all she needed from you to survive, she vanished. Leaving you in piles of ash and rubble. You saw her as a small flame and she saw you as everything she needed to grow into a fire. Now you carry around buckets of water throwing them at everyone you see. Hoping they won't engulf you into their destruction while you rebuild yourself.

The possibility exists that on November 8th
a circus clown may become Ringmaster
of the World and that will be a *****
trick played on humanity by God.

My world is too dark, I can’t see.
My world is spinning to fast, I can’t breathe.
I feel like I can’t trust anyone anymore.
Every time you text me, I’m hoping it says you still love me and that you made a mistake.
I wanted things to work out.
I have been hurt to many times, I don’t remember all of them anymore.  
I try to block it out, it does no good to remember.
It still haunts me though.

It's easier to vent here,
Where the people that find what you have to say worth hearing - can, and do listen.

Maybe if I used auto-tune
When speaking about how I feel.
Or used catchy lingo
And played a sick beat
You
Would
H e a r
Me.

This whirlpool of useless words,
A point made a thousand times over -
Speaks no louder than a whisper
T(w)o ears that are closed.

I know how it was in that time
sixty years ago when roads seen
from above were little more than
two thin tracks through grass.

My mind has heard the noiseless roads
cutting unfenced fields, passing cherry groves,
skirting steepest hills and flat lakes,
making settled burgs where roads cross.

I know how it was in that time
when many-handed harvests,  
sweet smells and back breaking work
were wrenched away without referendum.

Wrenched away by Ford's cast iron.
Wrenched away without option of staying
to enjoy the scale of day-long trips
on foot, in wagon or buggy.  

Our innocent grandfathers too,
wrenched away, not unwillingly, from plowfields,
to be told by newspaper and newfangled radio  
of the one-day Atlantic crossing.

I know how it was in that time.
I've seen it from three or five hundred feet;
the quick shadow and lake-mirrored
image of fabric covered wood and wire.

I've gently flown, pocketa, pocketa,
in that time; in a ship as much a product
of those shifting decades as of its tinkerer/
designer, builder, pilot, Pietenpol.