Wherever grass grows wild and tall
I'll think of you beneath it all,
A secret shared with earth and sky
And no one else.

Where winter came to freeze a heart,
That summer thawed us both apart
And somewhere in that hazy heat
I laid you down.

There's funerary flowers there,
Run wild and overgrown with care.
I think I'll take that wilderness
Before your chains.

A shackled love, a fettered life?
A rarer smile, brittle with strife?
All that, I'll leave behind with you
And go alone.

In the end, all is made right.
The page, so pristine, so vulnerable,
Awaiting my every error?
It's all set right, wiped away, and nothing.
Nothing remains of what I've wrought.

Perfection comes at the tip of the scalpel,
Carving away and down into jumbled
Words, each its own perilous
Non sequitur. They fall away in tatters.

The only peace is in purging them
From the mind to the page,
Then from being to unbeing.

This is no way to get published.
There's no fulfillment in the empty book,
And even less in an empty hand.

The weight of a dream
Broken up against the rocks
Of my distractions:
I'll abandon this one, too,
Content with the same old things.

My family has always moved west;
running
to
from
over
our brethren.

Now that we've hit the Pacific,
where to next?

The Summers flash by
green and succulent
like stations in the night
through the long journey of life.