In this place things swim around slowly,
every color bleeds into each other.
You can't make out what you're looking at or why you're there,
but more specifically,
how you feel.
You're sitting in front of a pool of absence.
Dipping a toe in and watching it ripple on down to the edges; change course.
I, of course, sit in front of it for hours pensive, worrying.
And all my thoughts change the mixture.
And all my moves trouble the water.
And at times there is the great upset brought upon by rain.
When it rains the silence dissipates.
The surface ends up fighting against itself.
The little droplets spring up and begin spurting out towards whatever incomprehensible answer will suffice at the time.
The commotion is only settled by focus and time.
Then, everything turns to whispers.
Here and there of words drop phrases or concerns.
Ultimately it quiets and it's back to swaying like reeds and still moments like these.

He stood quite still on the sidewalk.
Stood there for hours, actually.
Stared into another place that wasn't here,
wasn't there,
just sort of muddied in the two feet in front of the glass he looked through.
Static went crackling in the depths of his mind.
Sometimes a spark would jump from one edge of the gap to other-
and a flash of recognition would pass like a tankard barreling past a bus-stop.
Violent but brief.
He doesn't speak.
He doesn't move.
He doesn't anything.
It's as if existence put on pause in the self-contained universe that was his body.
Then, he walked away.

Our lives are set-up in beautiful hypothetical.
Propositions swirl around like conveyor-belt sushi- delights to choose at semi-random.
Light and fluffy brightly colored choices.
Candied aftermaths of promise.
We stare at the world like through a pane of glass that houses every good thing.
Select a sweet impermanence.
Finger a whim.
Cast yourself onto a game of chance.
Play your favorite song on the jukebox of 'nowness'.
Skip all of the imperfections in a sidewalk.
Dandy through your daydreams.
To want is to behold.
To wish is to brush the tips of splendor.
All of it free for now.

I learned he'd died through a friend of a long distance friend.
I heard he had snuffed it.
Kicked the bucket instead of the usual rock into a gutter.
'Give me another', he'd say until his eyes went glassy and his face went numb.
Until the hands dropped from the weight of his fingers.
No one lingers to watch.
No one ogles the brilliant light of dawn over this collapsed stranger.
New and old to the neighborhood, we all stood where he once stood.
We all walked away from that place.
His mouth agape but no words can escape the blue lips of a fading memory.
He is dead and his time died with him.

She wants the trumpets to play.
She wants them to play all day long until their lungs give out.
She wants to see them marching down the street, keeping the beat of another failing heart.
Don't start. I can't.
I cannot pick your roses,
I cannot breathe in the sulfur of your departed memories.
Don't make me weep at your parade.
She stayed long enough to orchestrate the players.
Stayed long enough to write the tunes.
Stayed long enough to make the costumes.
But not long enough to watch the charade.
Watch it blossom and screech and wail
There it goes down the street named after you.
There it goes with you at the helm,
Waltzing down to that other realm,
where we get to watch you pass.

Oh, she says, I’m going to wash you away.

I’m going to wash you so far down stream,

Out to the sea.

I will dilute you in the infinity of the ocean.

The rains will come and off you’ll go.

So far, so far away from me.

I will wash you down with what’s in front of me.

Goodbye to the rain, goodbye to the streams, the sea, the oceans and you.

The trees breakthrough the sidewalk;
and why shouldn't they?
Send the cars careening into one another.
Overtake the city-
until there is naught but a grove where this place once was.
I could use a grove right now instead of a shopping center named after one.