The dark heart of the night
Is close around me;
There is nothing to see but what
Spins through my mind;
There’s not much comfort in that

All the fears and failures dance together
At a party in my honor laughing like the old friends
They are not, mocking me they ask,
“Remember me”?

And I do and I feel again what I felt
And another space of my life is lost to it.

I feel the sweat, fists clenched.
My legs jumpy.  
But there’s no one to punch and no use
Trying to run away.

You can’t escape what you
Carry in your mind, and they know it.
So they laugh at me again.

Where the hell is the sun?

They are derelicts now in a lonely
Part of town even stray dogs avoid.
Broken, defiled, empty of the lives
Who made them roar and slam with
Machines building a nation, then defending it

Now they are empty, their purpose evicted
Then sold to lower bidders from lands they had to conquer;
Places making lesser versions of what they built with pride

The people they held bore children who
Prospered from what they made then
Shunned the labor which elevated them

But decay can’t change what they were
There are signs of it everywhere
Frescoes and cornices, brickwork and
Fading symbols defying the abandonment
Forced upon them

It strikes me now how similar we are

The air is too calm to bother with movement
The dew is too fresh to soil with my shoes
My body too old to push any further
How lovely to lie here with nothing to do

I look at him, not for the first time,
And wonder what is happening behind his eyes.
He is older now, white hair, longer
Than when he played football
Then gave it up for something more practical.

Settled that is, he won’t admit it
And he won’t admit he’s settled too often in life;
But I know all his secrets sooner or later.

I have seen him since we were very young,
Most of the time we get along.
Sometimes we fight, but I’ve learned to co-exist

Today he’s like a stranger to me.
I can’t read him and I don’t know
What he plans to do with himself.
I lean with my hands on the sink and
Stare at him, but there are no clues
In the mirror

Mom’s gone, taken when she was younger than me
By a bubble in a vein which had nothing better to do
Than break four hearts and send us spinning away from
Each other having lost the gravity of her love.

Every Thursday and Sunday she fed us what we
Called spaghetti, pasta being now the more fashionable word.
It came from her heart because that's how she was with us.
She cooked the sauce the night before then cooled it
In the refrigerator so the flavors would meld like
She melded us into more than we were, a family,
My family of whom my best memories died with her.

I see us eating together when we still had smiles for each other.
My brother and sister, who now hate the world,
And dad, who would always take a bite and say,
“Catherine, your sauce is like gold. Pure gold”.
She glowed every time he said it and he said it every time
We sat around her table eating pasta.

Mom knew we weren't sharing a meal when we ate her pasta.  
We were sharing her love for us and, in those days, each other.  

But my mother’s love is gone now like my youth and our family.
Irrevocably.  All of them.  Gone.  And I am less for it.

But I have those memories of Mom and the Family she made of us.
They fill me like her pasta covered with golden sauce once did.
Too bad you can't go home again...too bad.

I washed ashore blind with anger after the storm of my life,
And met a girl who loved rainbows.  
She found me, though she wasn’t really looking, and
Called out to me cautiously; for
She’d lived through a storm of her own.
We learned to know each other through the distance
Between us, enjoying what we learned and suffering,
At times, from the jagged edges of what we’d been through.

Trust that has never been betrayed came first, then
Friendship, and love.  Then came something more
As these three aspects melded into a union greater than the
Sum of them.  Something comfortable, something
Warm; a companionship of spirits gained over two decades.
That will carry us above and beyond and away
Where pain is forgotten, and the warmth lasts forever.

I have not earned this, it was my luck when I was blind
That she could see the rainbows after my storm…

Somebody died today, a cop in spite of which he’d always been my friend.
But they all were then when hate wasn’t the password and
Niches didn’t outweigh the Lady with the scales.

Think that isn’t true?
I was there then, a lawyer and a prosecutor
And there was so much less to be ashamed of in how it was done…

My friend who died was there too and he did it right
Then taught others to do the same.
When he left, things changed.

People somehow became categories and the law forgot Justice
So, things got bitter and that spawned something worse;
We’re living though that worse stuff now and for those who were there
Then looks so much better than now.

He knew how to do it and he did it for as long as they gave him breath
Now he’s probably doing it still on another level someplace.

Hopefully, it will trickle down.

Safe journey home, captain.