"55 years,” she said, “That’s a long time.”
She couldn’t know the length meant nothing
What mattered were the moments
We did unforgettable things together.

Unforgettable only to us because they were ours
As we walked, ran, and fell through our youth
Burning past loves that were not
And challenges that were
All of which left movies in my mind
Of what we did when the future was limitless
And all that happened in the years it narrowed
Turning us into flawed men who
Tried hard nonetheless not to be.

55 years of who we were together from then
To today when a voice on a cellphone
Said, “He passed peacefully.”

I find no peace in this and
I will tell him so when the time comes.

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

Breathe with me as we
Lay together.  
Feel my heart's union with yours
And let this night go on forever
By repeating it into
Eternity.

The weight of my life pressed behind me
Pushing like a dark wave for me
To outrun before it could swallow me.
I drove to work with thoughts
Of the must things and the must nots I had to obey
Or suffer a fall from which I could not rise.

My eyes were locked on scenes in my mind
When I turned a corner where a small bank of fog
Had taken temporary residence in a field.
The sun was rising behind the tree line, so it
Was safe for the fog to sit here for a moment and change the world
Into something soft as it piled and flowed in a gentle breeze.

It drew me in

I almost felt it on my face in the cool morning
I wanted to stop and run into the bank where the pressure
Couldn't find me and the must-must nots were not
The fog was all potential and would whisk me off
To where I should be…

Prisoners call fog the parole man because it can hide an escape
I see why now for I needed to be released from
What I had wished for and received.

But the car moved and the sun rose and the wave pushed me on

Someday.

Someday.

A quiet moment gathers itself around me
As I stare at pixels looking among them
For something great and compelling to write about.
But there is no wisdom tonight, no passion,
I am even empty of the need to cry for change.

I grow so tired as the quiet closes tighter,
Drowning out life by calling for sleep.
I drift  away and dreams of great themes come to
Me like old friends calling  to talk over coffee.

They are around me and we laugh,
Some make me cry, others...
Well, there are others too and I feel in tune with them
As I  never am awake.

They listen to me judging the worth of my insight.
Some smile, others chuckle and scratch their heads
As I try to fit in knowing I never will
Even though I will always try.
God, I love what I think I can make of them.

There is a nudge on my thigh,
They fade away as I wake then they are gone.
There is only me, the empty screen and my dog
Whose world is defined by where I am,
He brought me back to toss his ball.

My themes are lost in Morpheus' mists
They will be back one at a time and I will write
Inadequately of wonderful things with high meanings

Until them, I make these crooked marks for you...
Because, it seems, my world is defined
By where you can find my words.

I slumped into my friend the chair and
Waited for sleep to carry me away somewhere
While reruns reinforced my nightly monotony.
,

Then the first wind of autumn ran ahead
Of its due date and rattled my windows rousing me.
I raised up and killed the tv.
Soft amber lamp light filled the room
And I could hear the low roar of the lake
Rolling under the wind.

I got up and opened the door to the deck
Then closed it behind me.

The wind carried the lake up to me
While the constellations danced through
The moonless sky.
The glow of Port Stanley rose from
The far horizon, between us one of the last
Boats of the year struggled against the
Wind and waves, making for Detroit.

The moment pulled me out of myself
My name was lost, my hopes and desires meaningless;
I became the smallest part of the endless night
Whose purpose was to be no more than this.

But the chill is more at home here
Than a human trespasser;
It drove me back toward
The mediocrity that sustains me.

One last look across the lake
Wondering if a Canadian stands on his
Deck wondering about me…

Not like the stories, is it?
Or the movies, or the expectations
we get from all that.

It's about people who travel with baggage
they carry when
they move into your life.  

It's heavy sometimes, and ugly and you have
to help them carry it, which isn't much fun.
Not like what it was supposed to be;
nothing you want to do;
not fair at all…

So what it is, love that is, takes all the stuff
from the stories and expectations
and adds understanding, acceptance, accommodation
because that's what it takes to help you
carry someone's baggage…

and what it takes to help them carry yours.

Six letters making a sound that means so much.

The pressure of a month's uncertainty released.

The dark spell ended; the nightmare over;
the dawn burning hot with the promise of more life.

The glow had not faded and I thought of those who never heard
the word.  

Those now gone, those who suffer, and those who love them.

I wonder why I am the one who will sleep well tonight
while the only peace they will find is in their final rest.

The petals which had been so red
Are browning now and bow their heads
The limbs which held the greening leaves
Are garish colors now instead.

Everywhere that I can see
Summer is prepared to flee
From cooler days the autumn brings
Before the winter's frigid sleep

I stand among the morbid scenes
Of the dying beauty Nature gleans
By calling back what She bestowed
To the earth with summer's heat

They'll rise when springtime melts the snow
I wonder if the same is so
For me once I am put to rest
I wonder, will I even know?

Toward the end of every year, Christmas comes again,
To life the tired spirits for those of us who can
Celebrate with lights and trees and carols that we sing,
And all the warm and happy smiles expensive presents bring.
But December twenty-fifth to some is just another day
To bear alone like all the rest that drain their lives away.
Come take a look at holidays for folks you might have missed
As you hurried by them to buy your family's gifts.

Sara Jenkins limped along the sidewalk on South Main,
Her ancient, failing body was bent with cold and pain.
Her ***** fingers held the bags storing all she owned;
She walked alone and spoke to ghosts of people she had known.
The shoppers on the sidewalk stepped out of her way,
The sight and smell of Sara drove them all away.
No one knew old Sara, no one wanted to;
No one had the time for her with Christmas things to do.
She hobbled down an alleyway behind The Deli Suite,
To find the empty packing crate she crawled inside to sleep.
She turned a corner, dropped her bags and gave an awful howl,
A delivery truck had crushed her crate against the Deli’s wall.
Sara scrambled to the crate, and pulled the boards away
She searched around until she found a photo in a frame.
The glass was cracked, the photo torn, but she could see his face.
And his arm around her shoulders in their younger days.
Then the wind whipped up around her, she pulled her sweater tight.
Sara knew she needed warmth to make it though the night.
She saw a rusty dumpster where she used to look for food,
The only thing the dumpster held were rags and broken wood.
She packed the rags around her, underneath her clothes
And looked about to find a spot to sleep out of the snow.
But the alley didn’t hold a place to lay her tired head,
So Sara walked up to the truck and tried the door instead.
She braced herself and pulled, the truck’s door opened up,
And Sara’s life grew by one night thanks to random luck.
The driver of the truck had quit at noon that day,
And left his lunch behind him in his haste to get away.
A thermos and a lunch box were lying on the floor;
Now Sara had a meal and a place out of the storm.
She gathered up her battered bags and slid onto the seat,
Locked the doors, settled back, and ate the driver’s meal.
Tomorrow he may come back, and then she’d have to leave,
But time for that tomorrow, tonight was Christmas Eve.

It is a sad world where the things
happening in the night are the most fascinating,
which means they are broadcast where we can see them better
and hopefully buy the toothpaste sponsoring them.

The startling things are real, but they are not who we are,
not we who embrace our humanity and shudder
at the tales of those who prey and injure
to feel a power we shun

My mother said there is no paycheck for being good;
Maybe, but there is consolation for
in those moments when what we do
is what we ought to have done

Moments when a stranger's child frightened by lighting
instinctively leaps into your arms for comfort,
times when a stricken cancer patient is solicitous about
the sound of your cough in the doctor's office.

You have felt the warmth I cannot describe
and you know, you know
this is the touch of something greater given to
comfort us for all we will endure.

Dusk, on a quiet evening
Toward the end of my summer.
Shadows kneel at the foot of the setting sun
In a place where I can see them gather just before
They join to form the night that comes on to steal the world.

The road behind me leads from purgatory, ahead it leads to home,
But home is different now.
The car I drive is empty of those who once rode with me.

I wonder how much different
Where I go will be from where I have been
At least I will not have the locks
They put on my doors and
Hope is not a word and whispered
By souls who have abandoned it.

I am one who always watched the sunset,
The end of the day is where I lived,
I never saw the sun on the rise
Or knew what the morning had to give.

I missed all those years so full of sunrise
Left there behind unenjoyed
I knew the dawn as just a noun,
A word I never understood.

But then I woke one morning to the sunrise
And saw all the colors of the dawn.
That was the day you came into my life
And made it a joy to carry on

The sacred, elemental fire of the sunrise
Burned hot between us from the start
The sun rises high every day for me now
Where the dawn is always in my heart

Something gentle woke me early;
You were beside me, warm, breathing easy,
With that young girl look that sleep leaves softly on your face.
I touched you and you sighed like you do and
Snuggled closer to me
I sighed then too and raised my face.  
That’s when I noticed a glow coming in the window.
I got out of bed and went to the deck where
I saw the sun announce
The morning with a fire burning in the sky and
Dancing on the lake behind our home.  
The world was only shadows then,
Before it lit the day.

I looked back and saw the dawn on you as if
You were the source.
I thought of all the dawns I thought I’d seen,
And I knew that until this moment I had never seen a thing.

A woman came to see me today,
She sat across the desk and handed me
A deed she wanted me to look over.

I didn't recognize the name on the deed at first,
Then slowly it began to dawn on me who she was
I looked up and saw her expectant eyes and a curl at the edge of her lips

God knows what she saw in my face, but she said,
"Hello, Jimmy, it's been a long time".
And it had, probably 30 years ago at my mother's funeral.

Here was my mother's friend, 81 now, old enough to call a
65-year-old man Jimmy and touch the place inside him
Where his mother's memory lives.

But it was more than a visit between old friends.
A friend of mine now gone called such things divine appointments

Because, you see, my mother was in that room as we talked
About our families and the days back when our world was young,
Full of love, and death had never touched me.

When she left I cried…

It's hours later and mom's still here beside me as I write.
I feel her as I have all the terrible times when she protected me,
Mostly from myself, and the blessed times like when I found
My way to a new home and love.

I'll see mom one day where she is waiting
I have missed her so very much,
But today I discovered she never left.

Look around and trust your heart, you'll see what I mean

Life is so expensive
The cost is not in gold,
But in effort we pay, and pain we endure,
And the compromises we make for love.

The beauty of life is that we do these things and enjoy
The moments when the cost seems small for the experience.

But she sold it for a needle full of junk

And we let her, you and I…

I wonder why I am here so I pick over all the little
Things, and some of the big ones, that
Fell into my life.  
I hold them up like a jeweler and examine them
For flaws, or causation…but I don't really see
Them clearly through the loupe of my
Memory where I am always in the right and the aggrieved
And the righteous one who was let down..

And I wonder why that is.

But I know now I wasn't always the hero and I think
I can live with that, though I still don't like it.
I turn my face skyward and pray for forgiveness, realizing that
I also have to forgive, and I don't like that much either.

And I still wonder why I am here and if it made a difference
To anyone…

And then I think of you reading this jumbled mess from
An old(er) man who knows the best stops are in the rear view mirror…
I wonder what I should tell you that would make your minute here
Worthwhile and it comes to me.

Don't wonder, live.

When from this mortal place I go
To lie beneath Time's silent snows
And when my sacred name is but
A broken phase of verbal rust
What matter then that I had lived or laughed or died?

Yet if there is one heart who says
"He touched me as he passed my way.
He shared his smile and loving arms;
When I was cold he kept me warm."
Then your gentle memory will justify my life.

God, forgive me my thoughts.
Look pst my whims and follies.
Excuse, if you only will, the moments
Of my weakness when my humanity overcame
What I knew I should have done.

Please hear me now as I cry from
This tragedy which is the Test You
Have given us.

Let me find my way Home.

They all lie together now,
Those who hate and the ones they hated.
The short and tall, rich and poor
Ones who worked and those who lazed away their lives...

They all sleep together, equals here, even though some have massive
stones to mark their passing, others just flat bricks
with a weather worn name

And when they wake in some other place
this will have been a bad dream they shared.

He sat at a table in a suit that didn’t fit.
His shirt was open, a tie stretched across the void.
His eyes were forward, scared
Hands on the table gripped together so they didn’t shake.

The eyes that looked at him were not friendly
Most focused on photographs in easels
Showing what had become of a girl who made a bad choice
Then came back and made it again and again until
The power to choose was no longer hers.

A woman in a black robe sat above him reading
Then raised her head to look down,
“Do you have anything to say?”

Now they all looked at him as he rose,
If their stares had power he would have been dust.
Behind him one poor woman wept
In a room pressurized by silence.

A man stood beside him, leaning away.
The monster swallowed once gathering his power
To twist their thoughts as he had the girl in the pictures.
He made himself weep then in a shaking voice said,
“I loved her to death.  She was my everything”.

But the woman in the robe was that day deaf.

Clearing out boxes holding once
Cherished things, there was your photo, smiling
When once upon a time
Was still ahead of us
And our minds were full
Of excited emotions I no longer recall

We burned then like a fresh struck match
That flares for an instant, then
Settles into a fire that dies
Before the stem’s consumed.

I shake my head to think of
How I burned for you
And then the hopeless depths where
I sank when the fire died first for you.

Your picture is like a grade school drawing now;
An amusing curiosity I barely recognize
As having once been mine.

For I now know the slow burning fire
Which lasts a lifetime
And maybe more because the fuel is
In the soul and not the *****.

I burned your picture today and didn’t feel a thing.

I almost remember the first steps he took;
I certainly remember his smile and
The light in those little eyes.

I remember watching him run, play tennis.

Basketball.  

There is a very specific memory of
My son walking into school with me his face open
To the new things in front of him, taking it in,
Holding my hand as he started a journey to today
Where he sits with others taking a Bar Exam.

This being the first steps of new journey for him
One I began so long ago

There was fog this morning softening
What I knew into whatever I could make of it
My mind fell out of life and into  
The business of re-constructing reality;
Like when I was young and could dream
Of things to come without limitations because
Young minds are endless fonts of possibility
Before life replaces the pressure of belief
With the exigencies of work, and pain, and the weight of broken hope.

But the fog restores by turning the hard edges of the world
Into soft things that my mind can mold.

Gravity becomes the illusion in the fog for everything floats.
Light is no longer sharp and discerning, but gently hides imperfection.
Shadows who fear the day walk bravely in the fog and carry
Dreams I had, and quiet memories.
The sound of the world is muted and I cannot recall
My failures, only my hopes, my dreams, the warm memories.

All this rides the fog…

Its mist gets in my eyes.  The breath of it is cool.  I feel it around me

I wish I could stay here forever.

My friend who I admire believes the future
is controlled by our discipline and preparedness
and the effort we put into securing what we want from life.

But she is young, probably beautiful,
and therefore handicapped by the privilege given
to the young who see many doors to what the future holds.

Time will cure that, or perhaps not, but probably so,
in any event, I hope her perception works for her,
I have seen too much to believe it.

I have walked the stairs of life
where the future is not behind
limitless doors, but rather windows which get smaller
the further up you go, and there are a fewer of them.

So, for my dear friend, I hope the future
remains limitless and becomes glorious
I felt that way long ago,
but capricious fate  and destiny make me believe
the end was written before the story was published.

If you can read this or hear it or ever knew it existed, I still love you.

No matter what may have passed or where we may be
or if I am gone, I still love you.

If the stars are still burning or if they have burned
themselves out and all that is left is emptiness, I still love you.

Only truth transcends and survives the fiction we call reality.
The truth between us is, and will always be,

I still love you.

He would’ve made you first if He thought about it
Maybe He did, make your first I mean,
because you are the fountain of everything.
And it grows uncontrollably from your bounty
Which is, I think, where we come in
Jealous we can help start but cannot  create life
So we give it order which so easily goes too far
And only has value when paired with your nurturing grace.

I suppose that’s why there is you and me and
Why, in our case, it’s good.

I don't want to be here anymore.
  Not just here, anywhere.
I rode through moments
  That hung on me like a chain of
Black pearls which got so heavy I
  Can't lift my head anymore to see what's
Coming.  If I could, I'd only regret it.
The pressure to be what was expected
   Built too high while no one had the pressure
To be what they promised.
  The expectations killed me


I don't want to be here anymore.  
  The reason I am is cowardice
Because I know this place and I can only
  Guess what's next.

He left for good today,
It was earlier than expected and without notice,
Just a voice on the phone
Saying, “He’s gone”.

I went to the place where he lived
Hoping it was a mistake, but he was gone,
Hard to believe,
Difficult to accept,
But he is gone and my world is a lot scarier.

I’ve got his place now and I am not the man he was
Because he made it easier for me than it was for him.
He did this selflessly and with
Joy because I was his son.
  
Am his son.

An honor I didn’t have to earn,
Yet I want to be worthy of it.
So, I have to find my balance
And do what he did for me when it was his turn.

There are people behind me
Who need the things he gave me and
There are people behind them.
Though the shoes they must fill are smaller
Than the ones I step into.

Safe journey home, dad.
I’ll see you soon and we can talk about it all.
Rest well ‘til then

She should have been fine,
Right school, good family, right color,
But she was at the age when things go wrong.

She began to feel the weight
Of weightless things
And the need to be someone
No one could be outside the cover of a magazine.

So the doubt crept in and
Muddied her image in the mirror
Then frustration took hold
Because she couldn't reach a
Place that never was
Or ease the pain of that failure.

One bad day, the devil whispered
Through the mouth of a boy who knew her pain
In his hand a pill, he said,
“It's cool, everybody does”.

But she heard through tortured adolescent thoughts  
“Here is peace, acceptance is here, belonging “.

And so she did and did
And when she tried to turn away
The whisper became a shout, then a command
And the pill became a needle in her arm.
  
When money ran out, she started selling
Pieces of her soul in backseats, or ***** hotels.
The devil left her then, he had won.
No more promises, no dreams, or hopes or even fears
Only the need for something
No one ever needed.

Her world became an illustration
She maintained with just enough sense
To keep her on the street, but
It wasn't enough in the end.

Her mother found her in her bed
Afterward the woman always said
“She looked so peaceful and
So young. “My little girl “.

Somewhere the devil whispered,
“Peace” and laughed.

Heroes who were gather at the round table
Under Valhalla’s Golden Arches
Recounting the legends they lived.

They forget now the events of their day
But recall forever the moments of their glory
And the loves they lost who beckon from further on.
Their peers are fewer each year, their families
Shrink and turn from the old and trusted ways.
Most are alone but for comrades around the table
And none know who will be the next to disappear.

The tales grow with age as does their
Wisdom of how the world beyond the Arches
May be saved.  Their hearts are pure in this
Though their scars real and imagined, lend
Perspectives not all accept, but they are to be forgiven
For these are survivors of the tragedies of life.

For years I admired them, listening to the
Stories of their bygone world.
I think of them often now as I sit at
Their table watching the door for my friends.

I think too much, and thoughts
Can be demons carrying fear,
Doubt and pain as they chase me
Down paths where there is no hope
And optimism isn’t even an echo.

In the bottom of It all, where the dark swallows everything
I find myself whispering “I want to go home”
And I am comforted by recalling a house
In a time when I was encouraged to believe
The consequences of not reaching for a better place
Were worse than failure…
A fable for kids that has been beaten out of adults.

Home, the place where I could always go
And they always let me in with a smile.
It's gone now, alive only in a whispered invocation
When the bad thoughts invade my mind.

Maybe you can never go home again,
But maybe its recollection is a seed
To a new home where my role is different
Though necessary to others who may someday
Whisper in desperation so the memory will let them in.

The core of me holds the truth I have
Hidden so well I don’t really
Think about it anymore.

I am more concerned with the story of who I am
That I tell to anyone who will listen.
I don’t think I’m a liar because
Everyone is hiding something
For some good reason
That no one else needs to know.

But the hidden truth leaks out
No matter how we twist the story around it.
It comes to us in dreams and,
When the voice beneath our reason shouts
Louder than our doubts and denials,
We hear it demanding to be free.

Some of us us comply
Releasing our truth carefully between
Crooked marks on pages others read.
Carefully I said, in tentative bits
Hoping for acceptance
We fear will never come.

And yet we write
Because we are helpless to hide
The truth that cannot be denied.
Thank God.

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?

You forced me to play twice,
But thanks to a friend, we got to you before you could dig in.

I was lucky, and I walked away and I was safe.

Two days after a check up
they told me you were back,
"this time it's in your pancreas".

Again it's early and I think I have a chance
but I keep hearing things in my mind like
"three strikes and you're out" or "third time's the charm".
        I would be lying if I said you didn't scare me, but
I'm more afraid of being a coward
And causing my people the extra pain
Of watching me whimper.

And I owe it to those who helped me before,
the ones less fortunate than me who you burned and crippled and killed,
Those who smiled and gave me courage as they were suffering.
  
So we start again...

I knew he wasn’t there, but I had to stop
Tried to drive by.  Couldn’t do it
So I pulled up to the glass wall he sat behind
All those years in exile from what
Should have been his and looked in to see
Where he’d been the last time I spoke to him.

No surprise, he wasn’t there just shock
He’d never be again.

They hadn’t taken his things.  
His glasses were still there and car keys;
A picture of his kids.
Business cards with his picture.

I went in pretending he’d walk in from
Somewhere in the back and say hello
Then tell me to get a haircut like he always did.
He didn’t walk in..
“No gots,” he used to say
When something didn’t happen.

No gots anymore.
He’s gone and he took a part of me with him.
But I took one of his cards
Just in case I need some advice.

I say I know you, but perhaps I only know
What you want me to see
Or what I hope you are as you bend here
And twist there to conform what you can
To what you think I want.

And I bend the tunnels of my reason to fit your contortions
So I may fit them to the conclusion that I know you.

You do this for me, too.

So we live, an accommodation each to the other;
A compromise born from knowledge we learned
From those we knew who could not learn,
Who could never know either of us.

And in the moments we are close I must touch you
In ways I could never do before or will again
Because the force that gives us strength to blend
Is that over used word that means
We have built of ourselves a home that we will never leave.

I looked away and you were gone.
Though I can still feel you here,
Smell you in your clothes,
Touch the things we hold dear…
But you’re gone and the only place
I can find you now is in my dear and
Painful memories of us.

I am only an echo of who we were
Bounding from the sharp edges of this life
Searching for my source, which is
The love we share even now.

How can I stay here without you?
And yet I must for there are
Others who would look for me
With the same terrible longing I suffer now.
They will suffer soon enough and need no help from me.

So I will live for now and pray for the day
When I will be again with you.

the key to our situation
is surreptitiously
concealed under the doormat
where anyone who wanted in
would look…
and so, my love,
I will pretend to be
surprised I found your
key if you will pretend to be
surprised when I come home..

You don’t know the power compressed
In the gentle aspect of you,
The strength in a mindless gesture.
The force in a glance
The fearful energy contained in your whisper.

All I am and strive for would be lost
In the darkness of your indifference
Or shredded by a disproving look.

And if you willed it you could make me
What I should become, half a life
Made whole by the union of
Two souls who first met within
The mind of God.

You don’t know the power compressed
In the gentle aspect of you,
The strength in a mindless gesture.
The force in a glance
The fearful energy contained in your whisper.

All I am and strive for would be lost
In the darkness of your indifference
Or shredded by a disproving look.

And if you willed it you could make me
What I should become, half a life
Made whole by the union of
Two souls who first met within
The mind of God.

he was raised by a mother at the end of the line of
women who thought their sons did no wrong;
so he thoroughly enjoyed doing nothing wrong.

the rest of us envied him then,
no chores, more money in his pocket than any of us,
a sense he was never required to play by the rules that bound us,
he had no discipline because it did not apply to him
but you had to like him, he always smiled
and he always had a girl because he was the
one they were warned about and they all wanted
to tame him-they didn't know
you can't tame one who has too many carrots
and has never felt the stick

now we have spent our youth

those who invested it have treasure he'll never value
he spent his like the wind gets spent
and  he has reaped exactly what he spent.
his knees are bowed, his hair a color not found in nature
and his chest has fallen so his belt has to hold it up

but you have to like him, he always smiles
and he always has a girl, though none of them
look the same as when we envied him
        
But he's still smiling.

Maybe Hell is our fear and Heaven our hope both of which were spawned by someone taking different meanings from the same night sky.

And maybe not.

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 am not sure when the Anger first whispered to him
or how he treated it then
or when it became his companion and then his friend

or when it took possession of him and crowded the rest of us out of his life

But the Anger owns him now and sold shares of his life
to paranoia and fear and hopelessness at ever being loved
or loving…

He was a good kid and would be a good man
                      but for his master that compels
his rage and distrust of the ones who love him

And I wonder if he will ever find the freedom he thinks he gains by pushing us away

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

It was spring when the old things get cleared away
and I opened a drawer that was mostly closed now;
in the back was a ring of keys I hadn't touched forever
because the doors they opened were gone.

My first car, a castoff from my father we used in high school
to go to practice, or for hamburgers, or to the movies
in a time when that was the most fun we could have.
I see the boys now, smiling and singing songs you never hear anymore.

The key to my the apartment I had going to school, a little place
I shared with Jimmy Redd just off campus where we
drank, caroused and learned how to cook hamburger helper
between working and going to class.

The key to my first office and the house I bought where
some of my kids lived and I had a future
that was wasted by trusting people whose most important
love was in the mirror every morning

Then there were no keys for years when I could not unlock
the doors I lived behind in places where
the only comfort was a date yet to come as I waited
and the world turned without me, changing everything

Which turned out to be for the best
For the last unused key was to my first home after leaving high school
the place love became real and where the missing part
of me had been waiting through her own trials.

I smiled and held the keys tight then put them back into the drawer
they are not useless as I thought
because the doors they open are those I will
always be able to enter.

My best friend says either God invented us
Or we invented God, nothing else makes sense to her:

I guess I don't know what makes sense to me either, but
when  I feel comfort sending prayers into the Universe
or I survive what should have crushed me, or
or I see my children's faces in the album of my mind, or
especially In the moments after loving my wife and
         we lie quiet in the night

I feel what we must call God and I know,
I just know,
That people aren't smart enough to have invented Love.

It is the dark place at the end of the road we travel
And that darkness scares us, but it also beckons.
Seductively it calls with lies of an end to pain,
"Show them what they have done." the darkness whispers then demands.  
"Show them."

We all have heard, some have believed.
People with everything who could not see their worth.
People with options who could not find hope.
People who could only feel pain in the arms of love.

They dive recklessly into the cold dark water and are lost
To us, but not to all
For there is light beyond the darkness that beckons too
And the journey home is longer but no less sure
For all of them.  For all of us.
Peace, Robin, fly true.