I walk in wild
liquor combs
of stag grass,
alleys of fat cubes,
all engraved with
a Cinderella moon
that bows out at midnight.
Under it all,
a grease of solitude:
it's just me, and
these things.
I watch one neighbor
collecting delivery
in the upper dusk.
Another falls
to mattress, in
a lonely window
all of yellow.
Lamps fluoresce,
streaming cruelly,
while cigarettes
float in the dark.
Where are you,
in this?
Thousands of miles
in the rain.

The clouds are entrails
full of meals of sun.
There has been a petite
****** between us,
but I've forgiven it -
the heart is water.
That could be a lie;
the scalpel's slit is finer
as I sit here,
the ideal patient,
staring at a street
scrubbed with wind.
Please, never read this.

An incomplete face
in its glass slab,
pulls a distance over me.
Mournful, I watch the neighbors
streaming down the toothy walk
in black and brown coats,
their laundry massed  
on shoulder tilt,
or in little onion cart.
They are all right here,
in this winter identity.
Washington accepts them.
If they should crane
& launch a coup d'œil
into this hunched pane
they'll know I am not of them;  
what body I have
stalls on this laminate -
the black fume
behind fastened eye
has already bolted
to keels of poetry
across furrowed Atlantic:
completing a glass face.

I think of ways I can brighten my own day
today I stood on a an escalator as Crowded House played on my phone and for the remainder of that descent
down the moving stairs
to the underground subway line 9
I fell so deeply into life that I couldn’t help but smiling at everyone and tapping my feet
and I was reminded of how much I truly love life
of how good it is to fall into the moment

I thought of ways I could live in this moment and create the joy I always wanted in my life and suddenly
without much thought my inner climate became just that as I rode on a mundane staircase the destination found me
And I might not know how all the pieces fit together but I do not need to know

Sturdy
cardstock
with glitter and a gauzy
image on the front

and no metaphors
to describe the feelings inside
only words

plain heartfelt words

read
and spoken
over
and over again

whit howland © 2021

O tunnel of firs,
tied with rain,
were you watching too,
when my parapet
ate a hock of indigo
at seven, and, still hungry,
gobbled a dull star?
Were you watching
from cold roots,
little grove, when
something unfaithful
happened? A curling lip
received a sacrament
of apple cider vinegar
under clouds of hospital gauze.
O firs, you never tell me anything,
too proud by half in your
gowns of needles.  
That's alright - I'll lay until
the night slips over the line,
and imagine a kind of morning
where I have nothing to tell you either.