I’m so tired I could drop
But I mustn’t go to sleep.
Vicious dreams are hiding
Just behind my pillowcase,
Waiting for the perfect time
To tell me I’m inadequate
And guilty of egregious sins
That doom my frantic efforts
To create a perfect life
And move across humanity
In ways that make things better.
ljm

I must confess,
Amidst the swirling blizzard
That I had been waiting.
How to explain that feeling
As you lent into the storm
To cradle my focus
Before it swam away.

I still remember
The first encounter.
How when you're a child
Worlds alter during mealtimes.
As the adults in the room hesitated
I saw then that you lived
In the gap between their words.

I was raised in fear
To believe you spoke only
The language of regret.
To never disturb 'neath the hood
Or pause to revere, the haunting beauty
Of those lingering webs
Misting dew drenched fields.

I see you approach
In dreams, as soothed calm encompasses
Those vague surroundings
Outside, on the line
All that haunts us is just time
Looking back, like a drawn
Face in the basin.

I understand now,
Perhaps, I realised even then
Under the night somewhere
In the faint darkness
You walk beside me.
Under an emerging moon somewhere
The paths of our shadows meet.

There: in the distance
Snowfalls, heavier and heavier
A landscape of solitude, muted,
Not grieving but all-knowing.

What still moves underneath?

As I fell to thinking
You turned and said:
'Come outside, watch it fall'
Those eyes, those eyes
Recessed through the glass
Bright and visible still
As the hereafter.

I open my eyes to let you go
And hold on a moment longer
Morning, and its forceful breath
Shakes the dangling blossom off the tree.
I remember you once saying
Beauty always arrives too soon,
And that's precisely the right time.

If I dream of inaction …
I stand in that time before time
Where all possibility lays over
A field of bristling deep white
And all the words that are unwritten
Outreach every star ever stitched.
Sometimes, I picture in absence
All things waiting to be connected
To one continuous present.
Where those not yet born
And those who have lived
Exist together side by side.
Were I then to write of action
I would be drawn by narrow pleasure
Into a slow but diminishing realm.