Struggling against a swift current eventually you give in
Realizing you are simply a man out of time
Just an auger boring forward in a gyre forever turning
Yet moving nowhere

In a place where you are no longer living nor dead
Neither past nor present meaningful nor meaningless
You just are frozen in time and space
Where there are no awe-inspiring last words
No enlightenment
No decree stating what your impact on this reality has been

It is just you dwindling until there’s no more fight left
The pugilist in your soul concedes
The lost souls of those lost before you
Coaxing you to justly give in and concede

The final battle has been fought and scripted long before conception
The burning wick sputters and suffocates rhythmically until it flickers
No more
All Uniqueness begets soon insignificance
And like the swimmer in the mists of the midnight sea
You disappear

Is the lawn, which scrapes the horizon
And the hose waters where it may
Fissuring long the earth where morning glory rises
To strangle the gutters and ravage the fences
Alone there is a woman in the doorway
With blue eyes long since grayed
Her fairness speckled with brutish black and blue

For her husband is drunk
And when he is he does what he pleases
She screams, “You have no right”
He replies, “That my dear is why I strike with my left”

The Woman of the World

Who declares that
On her journey to London
She realized how disgusted she is
With America
And
Our misgivings
As she orders
Cheeseburgers and Beer
While men throw
Around the horn

She sat contained in the all-encompassing embrace
His arms a welcome warmth
as they sat under the smoldering fires of dead days past
They drank and spoke wildly as sanguine freely flowed forth from the glass
As it swirled upon the inside of their mouths
Puckering stained puce lips and drawing mandalas in the clouds
Rich with color and endless ingenuity as the tall grass softly swayed
Carrying music to their ears
From time to time exchanging glances
Witnessing the last salvos burst in the dusk
Heralding daybreak

She knew there with the breath of dawn caressing her face laying against the heaving of his heart that she would never see him again

Shouting slurred meaningless obscenities falling corrosively
On the impressionable ears of all of those unlucky enough to hear
A snapshot of a generation within a soulless storefront of some new age coffee shop
That used to be a pawn shop next to an old hole in the wall jook joint called Cool Joe’s
While twirling her shiny silk strung platinum hair that used to bounce in brunette curls
She’s smiling as she’s telling her room full of new lovers
About her even atom tan