Laughable
Affable
Reachable
Near

Damnable
Mandible
Crucible
Bone­

Icicle
Tricycle
Sensible
Fear

Inevitable
Dependable
Dispensabl­e
Stone

Too early,  the dreary skies, the cold days.
The warm, the sultry, the windy without-a-coat ones
Were allowed to pass without note
And our opportunities to dust off the bike
To put the canoe in the water
Silently changed from must-do-soon
To wish-we-had-done.

Too quietly, our coats and sock and over-shirts
Took up positions nearer the door.
The sandals became stacked and set aside
The lawnmower found a place further back
Behind leaf-bags and rakes that await
The spaces between rainy days.

Too silent became the phone
Too still the mailbox
First summer, first birthday, first autumn
Without garden and cooking notes shared
Or stories of people I don't know.
Too long and silent will come the winter
Without her footprints in northern snow.

Melting away the crystalline snow underfoot
I spread crystals of salt
Scattered across the icy walkway.
Overhead Bohemian-glass icicles
Hang like stalactites
Like for the tenuous Damocles.
My beard is frozen, encrusted in the blizzard
But indoors soon I'll shed my layers.
And sit to warm my throat
With a bit of Scotch whisky
No ice in mine, please.

Who is it that comes?
A crunch from the pathway heard
Icy frozen steps

Like a back-lot set between movies
Or a radio-active Soviet village, abandoned and vacant
The cold January sun illuminates
A first-day-of-the-year neighbourhood
Unmarked by human presence.

Snow skiffs are the only activity
And frosted, black-green lawns
Retaining their last tending in an icy stasis
Everything remains empty and frozen
As the clock ticks relentlessly
Into another year.

In fading denial, I faced the leaves
And scattered hoses
And the pots still distributed about the yard
Where seeds had once ****** stalks and leaves,
And colours had burst, among the greenery.

In the chill wind, I removed them
The ice-encrusted aquatic plants
And exposed black cold water below.
Sunk a bubbler into the pond's depths
And caught glimpses of the orange inhabitants.

To the warmth, I retreated
As the sun turned up the shadows
And the creeping, early approach of night
Intruded upon the late afternoon,
And the winter, upon the fall.

We are just back from an autumnal walk.
Gold, red, and yellow lead green by a nose
And the sharper neighbourhood edges are softened
With leaf piles that fill the dips and voids.

We are just in from a loop around the 'hood.
The unseasonable warmth has even coerced
Teenagers onto patches of parkland to play ball
While their digital assault rifles go unused.

We have returned from exposure to the environs.
A long summer of incremental house adjustments
Pauses for the interim, so neighbours can await
The soon-to-be revised ostentation index.

We are inside again at the end of an autumn day.
Dying rays of sunlight filter through windows and half-bare trees.
Free warmth leaves us to rely upon the furnace
And savour anonymity among the bricks, stucco and vinyl.

No voice could call
From my sandpaper throat.
The script written
In a watercolour ink,
Left the pages blank
After the rain.
Clutching a weathered branch
On an overhanging rocky ledge,
Legs dangled into the abyss.
Finally, a reaching arm
From the quicksilver mirror
Pulled me back
To the rabbit hole within.

so too the shifting powdered sands
from pulverized mountain ranges
that sift with a
whisper
through my fingers

and the planet turning
grasses creeping in
then going away again
baked out by the aging
swelling sun

but the sands still drift in lazy dunes
grains freed from their hour-glass
still shifting under foot
and warm through my fingers

and sift with a tsk
and a breathy sizzle
and melt away afterwards

as the dry touch of your
lips upon mine
on a sun-baked afternoon.

A throwaway.
Not for posterity.
Not for unborn archaeologists
To extract caked with mud.
Not to be hidden from the sun
Under a millennia of detritus.

Just for now.
Just for this bit of time
When nobody needs you immediately,
And nobody expects you to deliver,
And nobody is depending on you.

Just for these moments.
Just to share a bit of your space-time
While the sun finds a gap in the branches
And drives the chill from the room.
While the office has emptied for lunch
And a breath can be taken in peace.
While the hum of the bus/train/plane
Has lulled your fellow travellers to sleep.

Just to see some words gathered
Purely for their affinity to one another.
Just for the love of pictures
Painted in your head alone.
For when just one more read through
Is purely for the pleasure
Of sitting awash in an idea.

Throwaway.
A handful of words.
Just for you.

What is the matter with her?
Is it dark?

She keeps it undetected
Except for occasional silent tugs and pulls
Upon the large things in her universe.
Does it stream through your hair like the solar wind
Sparkling and glowing upon your brow with aurora,
Or emanate the blue of your lowest mood
A Cherenkov glow
As the unbreakable light-speed barrier is surpassed
In the medium of your blood-filled heart?

The dark stuff is everywhere and nowhere.
Never seen before by science
You hold it deep within you
Sheltered from prying eyes
Or hungry Nobel-seeking hands
Or the silent sentinel listeners
Of the radio telescopes.

She gathers more now,
Until her fragile, silk-over-bone frame
Fills with swirling black axions
Until they spill out of her eye sockets
Like the streaks of wet mascara.
She tugs and pulls at us all,
The em-ones and em-twos are unknown
But not the universal constant
Between human hearts.

The potatoes to eat with our meat
Are waiting under my feet.
And so here I toil
In bad clay-filled soil
Hoping for something to eat.

Tomorrow I will need to go
To a place I'll never know
I'll go there again next week
And find some more of what I seek.

I look for silence, sharp and ringing
I look to leave the things I'm bringing
There among the nothingness
I'll stop, and drop, then quick egress

Tomorrow you will find me there
Within a space I know not where
You'll find me there again next week
In silence where we dare not speak

Empty block
Full of everythings
To be carved into something
That was already in there

Finally revealed
It wasn't hidden by the unremoved pieces
But rather by billions of other shapes
That all sat juxtaposed
And each with just as much of a right
To emerge as the chosen shape did

Fragments of The Others
Worthy of reverence
Lay strewn on the floor
They gave themselves
That The One could exist
Those that never were
The unseen

Melt into me
Caramel and salt
Pine sap into quicksilver
Fog dissolving in volcanic lava
An alchemy discordant and electric
Makes an ore of iron sing into steel
A green copper ingot shine into bronze
But discarded I am left as detritus and debris, a cold abrasive ****
Among the twisted forms of the ideas never formed
Far away from the shaping hammer and anvil
The bellows there that only draws
Pulling away the last of the heat
And unidentifiable melted figures
Are each there somewhat me
But are incomplete alone

First words carved from stone.
Chips fly and sting when they bite
Cheeks and forehead and forearms,
Tiny welts, hard to see, but they're still there.

Later words moulded from grey, colourless clay.
Too wet and hesitant and sticky to hold a form.
They want to slump again into an unformed mass
Like the one from whence they came.

Words scraped now in hard-packed, ****-bound soil,
Each requires pulling and tearing to take the slightest form.
A rain comes before the phrases could all be scraped together,
The concrete-like surface quickly softening into mud
Soon it's as if they were never said at all.

A burden looms
A curse against the destination
So seemingly attainable
When setting out upon the road
And making first steps
In untrodden snow.

Around each corner
Another barrier rises above the path.
Yet another stalwart mountain.
Cannot one day be easy on the journey?
Each makes the distant goal seem more futile.

Yet the base of the hill gives way
To the persistence of small steps
As surely as the summit does.
The tough slopes seem insurmountable
But have no reply
To the inching progress
Of one foot
Placed
In front
Of the other.

And as rest comes at last upon the crest,
And yet a thousand more peaks still rise in the distance,
This one achieved goes into your pocket.
Credentials against which
All the rest will fall.

He insisted we go down
To a place near the river
He was briefly obsessed with the boats
And explained he didn't have anywhere to stay that night.

All these constant changes of subject,
And weird self-obsessions,
Then he calls ME half crazy,
As if that would make his company pleasant.

Why does he keep checking the origin
Of my tea
And of my oranges.
He's a loveless, non-committal fool.
Just when you think
He understands what you're saying,
He says something stupid.
And I don't say anything,
Just let the river do the talking.
He's delusional about our relationship.

And he wants to come on vacation with me
And he doesn't seem to care to where,
And he thinks somehow I'd trust him,
And he makes lascivious comments about my body.  

Jesus, how did sailing come into this?
Is he some evangelical nut?
Oh man, he is going on about this.
Sailing, and garbage and flowers and seaweed.
He clearly cannot maintain a train of thought.

I look at my watch,
I take out my mirror,
I practice my 'yeah, sure, I'm interested face.'

And again he's off again about coming on my vacation,
And again he doesn't care where to,
And again he thinks himself trustworthy
And again, with the unwelcomed comments about my body.

It'll go like this, a December day
Dishes and laundry all put away
The thermostat  set way down low
The car is loaded, it's time to go

It'll be like this, a snowy road
Driving north with a precious load
Of treasures wrapped with anticipation
Our hearts are primed for the celebration

   Christmas has always been like this
   It’s what we go there for
   And what we'll miss
   Faces Familiar, stories heard before
   From the moment we face that wreath on the door.
   Our Christmas has always been like this
   It's what we're all looking for.

It's always like this, when we've gone half way
The weather turns to a snowy day
In the falling darkness, there are no other cars
Our headlights illuminate the on-rushing stars

   Christmas has always been like this
   It’s what we go there for
   And what we'll miss
   Faces familiar, stories heard before
   From the moment we face that wreath on the door.
   Our Christmas has always been like this
   It's what we're all looking for.

Hours gone by, and arriving at last
We're finally still after moving so fast
We sit in the car, a moment or two more
We take a deep breath and open the door

   Christmas has always been like this
   It’s what we go there for
   And what we'll miss
   Faces familiar, stories heard before
   From the moment we face that wreath on the door.
   Our Christmas has always been like this
   It's what we're all looking for.

Five forlorn fugitives stood tall
Five warnings to all who approach
Heavy bows move with foreboding in the wind
Chained to the wall of the ever-dark wood.

Needles brush needles,
Their tips like razor claws
Needles against bark,
Coarse and the colour of old blood.

They gaze across a soft blonde prairie
And the elders tell the tale.
"Avert your eyes, do not look upon the fugitives."
"Past those five, none return."
"Better to stay on the plains and live."

Five tired, twisted sentinels mark the boundary
A dark forest wraps around the low black mountain.
In our fathers' fathers' days, they say,
Pursued by horsemen they made it to the forest-edge
Five murderers, fugitives from the people.
Five went in, and none came out.

Their backs were seen immersing into a green wall
Their tracks ended at thick beds of needles
The horses would go no further.
The screams and howls were heard through the night.

Five fugitives went into the forest.
The next day, five tall, ageless trees
That were not there before.
They stand, and watch, and remind the people
You can run,
You can hide in the grasses.
But the forest wields a dark justice.

Waist deep.
The thick black syrup meets skin
A sharp black/white line
Across the pores
Like a moving limb of day/night
Across the distant craters of the moon.
To tread deeper and pulls the surface down
The mirror-black surface bending, pulling.
A meniscus
A relativistic bending
Of space and time around a star.

Deep below the surface
Wiggling toes are sluggish
Movement of legs are impeded
A tug at each hair on legs and toes.
And the hydraulic squirt of the liquid
Below the soles as your weight shifts.

Ah, but sometimes shallower now,
Withdrawing belly skin pulls with it
The deep brown-black rubbery surface
That will not be left behind.
It will not relinquish this new intimacy.

What horror comes with the rising depths?
Liquid darkness comes over shoulders, chin and cheeks.
A sweet salty taste now upon the lower lip.
A tug, a pull at the chin with every breath
Every attempt to lift it above the surface.

Fear. Darkness. Unknown.

Over mouth and nose.
Sticking to eyelids.
Thick and warm into ears.
A bubble of air tries to escape from under your chin
And tickles as it pulls up on the hairs it passes.

The cool open air irises-off above your head
Only a momentary depression in the top surface.
Until there is no record, of your having passed here.

Silence.

A sweet and sticky seal, impermeable between this world and the void.

Silence.

Push up now with strength in frightened legs.
The suction is immense, the pull strong.
It does not wish to let you withdraw.
But you push and breaking the tension of the surface
You emerge.

Great thick layers of darkness remain.
Hands claw great gobs of blackness from nose and mouth.
A gasping, stuttered pull brings icy, bitter air.
Standing now, a black shadow-ghost emerging from tarry blackness.

Velvety and warm was the invitation,
Soothing and intimate was the gentle touch,
Silent and heavy was embrace,
A smothering, airless dark at the end
And silence.

But sweet, oh how sweet and warm.

Her voice is flute-song upon a wind
Known both in tall, still trees and coastal gales.
Every pleasing sound,
If of nighthawks or of August rains,
Gathers in breaths, both in and out,
In notes forbidden to all others.

A waving blade of grass, or a tumbling leaf
Will half-obscure the slight nothings
That escape upon her tender breath,
Or punctuate a moment’s surprise.
Illustration of a serene purity and tenderness
That dwells sweetly within.

Too upon those lips,
Escaping from tender cheeks softly,
Quickly appearing, yet sparse,
Between those pillars of her smile,
That restrains poorly mirth and glow,
A name comes quickly,
And delivers opulent wealth and pleasure
To be my own.

There's a groove in the floor
I slip into it each morning
I slide on cold steel casters
Driven by a low-rumbling steam
Pushed through my routines.

It goes down the stairs
And into the shower
And loops around to the mailbox
And past the fridge.

Sometimes there are a few splinters
Sometimes it's polished smooth
And it feels effortless to move along

I dream that the groove will lead out
Into the deep green forest
And crest upon a granite cliff
Where the vista over patchwork fields
And under rain-laden clouds piled high
Is opened up before me.

But it passes the table
And the TV
And the couch.

Next time it brings me to the mailbox
I'm going to make my big break.

smooth grey-black stones
you held in your hands
i threw them one-by-one
into the dark oil-like water of the lake
they made intertwining radiating circles
that spread out slowly
to finally lap gently
at the crystalline sand
at the water's edge
and tickled you
between your perfect toes

"I'm changing my name" she said
"I've just met my father for the first time"
She said
Payment rings through
In transaction for a *** of tea
The gathered paraphernalia handed over in exchange.
I had little to offer in return
To my smiling young barista
A friendly tendril for a familiar face in the shop
An eagerness to share some part of her life
Even though time and place
Offer little option for elaboration
For sating her need to say it to herself again
The enthusiasm around a momentous life event
A few kind words the final part of the transaction
Then the scoop of tea leaves
And some hot water
And a fragile white porcelain cup.

The night,
Like a panting black dog
Falling exhausted upon the day
Like his favorite old blanket.

A thin tendril of wispy stuff
Threads in-between and around the heavy planks
Binding them together
As they float directionless off-shore.
All aboard lounge about
As listless as their path,
Floating this way,
Then that.
Surrounded by steam-belching tugs
That **** and jostle the drifting raft
Go that way,
Now go this.

Ultimately low on coal,
And with a weaker head of steam.
Soon they move away disinterested
Leaving the lounging raft-bound hoard
Never having found the controls
Nor recognizing the cardinal points on the compass
They hold over their heads as a talisman.

Snow, once wind-packed and
Crackling with a layer of ice,
Turned soft and wet under foot,

Like a rigid, schedule-driven life
Softened by a glimpse of mortality.

Like a hard impersonal heart
Warmed by the touch of a hand.

Like a cacophony of public chatter
Melted by the sound of a friend's "Hello."

Fresh weather will bring new snow,
And plummeting temperatures freeze the landscape solid again,
But these other things leave a glow that continues
After the moment has passed.

They are each and all still there
The moments we have lived
Toss them bright up in the air.
Like diamonds out of soil sieved

All exist like coins we've scattered
Time's the path between them taken
We keep the ones that we think mattered.
Memory-sounds like spare-change shaken

Uncertainty too in our exact position
Life's velocity with no certainty known
Entanglement tells naught of the mission
And futures sprout like crystals grown

And thus we dig as life goes on
And smash small things to find their meaning
Until we find our Higgs Boson
The pieces fall and scatter screaming.

Extend your hand, palm up
Silk - a long bolt of it,
unfurls across your palm
Cold on contact
And smooth
And smooth and smooth
Dragging a crisp wind behind it
As it falls away like a solid liquid

Extend your hand,
A gelatinous orb, almost sticky to the touch
But not quite.
Rubbery, resilient, responsive
Pulled under the weight of gravity
To bulge and droop over the edges of your hand
When you drop it, it hesitates as it lets go.

Extend your hand
Feel the weigh of a solid masonry cube
The greyest concrete
Each crenelation of its surface
Like a dry-skin pore
The corners and edges hold their shape sharply
Dragging fingers make a rasping sound
And a ceramic-like ring as it slips from your hand

Extend two hands together
Like to catch a stream of water
But instead you cradle
A tired and content weeks-old kitten
It adjusts its position, and curls up
Content with the warmth of your hands
You feel the soft, purring of velvet fur
It feels implicit trust, warmth and security
For its always-pending next nap.

Everyone lauds the sunny day
They lavish them with praise.
It's such an easy proposition
In warmth and golden haze.

But it is, I'd say, a refinéd taste,
When the day dawns bleak and grey,
To find the joy of heavy clouds
That bubble-wrap your day.

And oh, the ones with pouring rain?
Many call them vile
The drum of raindrops on one's roof
Brings to me a smile.

A wailing wintry driving blizzard?
You declare it all so rotten.
Yet my heart gets a pleasant lift
From a landscape wrapped in cotton.

Now slush-and-sleet-filled days in March
Are a horrible kind of weather
I fear it seems to void my thesis
And bring to no one pleasure.

It erodes the denizens' state-of-mind
Optimism quite diminished
Everyone with tempers short
All wishing it were finished.

Oh, for a bright day in July
With no one getting huffy,
A golden sun that rules the sky
And clouds so big and fluffy.

On a frost-whitened afternoon
There are wet black lines through an urban park
Throngs of people pulse along paths.
As all manner of routes come alive
With tributaries of humanity.

On a warmer day some slow and linger
Pausing in the shady spots
Bodies pool there to escape the sun
And the city embodies the lethargy
Of its denizens.

Trains and cabs and buses
Corral and group clusters of humanity
Eject them out in a seething mass
Upon the sidewalks of the tallest buildings
Which vacuum them in through tiny orifices.

From the greenery filled parks
To the traffic-grazed sidewalks
From the tallest buildings
To the tallest trees
The motion of life permeates the geography.

Immersed in it, I feel my blood flowing
Without my intervention
And my lungs breathing
Without me ordering them so.
So too my heart warms
Whenever you are near.

There are no words today
The shopkeeper told his patrons.

They gathered bereft seeking sublime phrases
Poems of love and loss
But he could offer them none.

There are no words today
He told them.
No typeset letters upon the page
No phrases crafted of sinew and strength
Or of weakness and failing.

They pressed on with their day then
Without their fix of crafted words
To scribble waxen-colour inside their lines
They were left to contour their own imagery
And look about them for hue and tone and rhyme.

Lost then in clichés and quotations
For day after subsequent day
Used words were read over and again
Off ***** or torn sheets
Or passed hand-to-hand on gritty streets
And stapled and taped
To telephone poles and fences.

There were no words for the patrons
On that day and since
And their unspent coins
Brought them no respite
For the disquiet in their hearts.

April paints green
Across the grey and brown
Of winter trees.

As if from the dead
The swell
The tufts
The rhythm of life
A resonance subatomic
And gargantuan.

It's all about the timing
Like the sun versus the wind fable
Life's harmony
Awaits the gentle coaxing
For its big debut
And emerges
To move with the beat.

The door needs to be kicked in.
No gentle open and whispered hello
It needs become of splinters and dust.
The glue of its joinery to shatter and crumble.
The latch which would open smoothly
With the simple request of a raised hand
Needs to be driven shattering through wood
Sending formal wooden trim embellishments flying.
The myriad of small retaining nails will be extracted
Reversing a collective hold they held resolutely,
Pinned by hammer blows so long ago.

That door needs to come down.
To lower hinge will give way completely,
Leaving some screws still biting desperately
Into a fragment of the wooden frame.
The hinge at eye level will twist apart from our blow
One side remaining stuck in place on the frame
The going with the door as it disintegrates.
The pin that held it together in smooth harmony
Soon will dangle pointless on half a binding hinge,
Still now – the mechanism prised-apart.

The door shall be destroyed.
Our collective force irresistible – it will fragment.
Once trees were felled and sawed into planks,
Smoothed and shaped and joined in the build.
Now we need to render it all into firewood.
And where once stood a blank, heavy door
There will be light and air flowing through.
And the only hint of the barrier that was before,
Will be a final clear, metallic note
From the pin that finally falls
Upon the smooth stone floor.
A single note will ring out
And lead into a song of freedom.

By the river I meandered
Where oily-black water runs silent.
Malevolently, it tears at the eroding bank
And dares me to walk more closely.

Under a twisted oak I ducked
Past ancient bark and sinewy branches.
Patiently, it awaits one who ducks not so low,
And harbours a dark enmity in the long shadows.

Around a silent bog I navigated
Mud occasionally ******* at my shoes.
Gurgling, it pulls lethargically at passing limbs,
And begs for a new visitor its fermented depths.

Twelve to six to three
Twelve to four to two
Divided and separated
Stark white eggs stored cold in fibrous cardboard trays
Warm eggs, just laid, strewn among the damp straw
Twist a plastic tray, it cracks and squeaks releasing ice-cubes
Chunks of ice kicked along a frozen asphalt road
A rusting metal bolt from an unknown car, sits against the curb
A drill-bit bores through metal revealing shining inner steel
Razor sharp shavings curl from the oily machine
Thorny thistles offer velvety wisps of cotton
White drifting seeds float on a warm spring wind
Sticky sap from a tree trunk you touched for balance
Fuses to your skin and tries to stick your fingers together.

Five ten fifteen twenty
Twenty forty sixty eighty
Tiny black seeds like pepper scatter on the snow
From a hard octagonal pod that cracked between your fingers
Black hockey pucks spill out of a bag upon the ice for practice
Players spill out of a gate onto the ice to take their sides
Spectators spill out of the small arena into a parking lot
A new snow during the game has left it covered in a white blanket.

One hundred two hundred five
A thousand a million a billion
Stars pour out across the sky
Clustering sometimes thick as milk
Sometimes scarce and as black as molasses
Thick and deep and going on and on forever.

Wending my way through the work week
Wearily, Wednesday washes away
Wise to our whistful wishes
While weary as we wander towards the weekend
Without wisdom of why we are waiting
Rather than wrestling our woes into submission.

I will lay on the short grass
Nobody will see me
Vanilla-cream-pink against a thousand shades of green.
Insects encounter the mountain,
Such little things but with a power
To shrink large woes with their meanderings.

I will let the grass grow around me.
Tendrils writhe beneath my back
To search and plead for sun.
But turn white, bleached of chlorophyll.
Immovable and arbitrary, I am the barrier.
We share a common bond as his victim.

Others numerous soon rest their heads upon the soil,
Their hair grows down into the ground,
Weaving loops around roots and between stones,
And into cracks in the bedrock
******* at the moisture there
Until the trees, the grass and I
Turn brown, brittle and dry.

So much we try to stuff
Into those first two decades
All the pieces crowd together
Weight of one crushing another,
Mechanisms unable to turn freely.

Clarity begins to emerge in the next.
Mostly we spend it unpacking, making space
Among those things we stuffed
Into fragile, hastily-made trunks
That weighed so heavily upon our backs.

Later, the mechanisms run more smoothly
Their functions more easily seen, understood.
We learned what to keep.
And smiled as we left items behind
That we had never really needed at all.

Our collections seemed so unique,
And we never stopped to notice
The poorly made,
The mass produced.
The weight of it all.

Later we add selectively.
We invest time in the trunk, not the cargo.
Greatest become the things we share.
We enjoy the spaces
Between the things
More than the things
Themselves.

The night now.
Always the night.
Seemingly unreachable through a thick, leaden afternoon
But finally edges fade and muddle in unison,
Into a place that erases all acuity.
It moves across the city
On a sticky pudding of humidity
Daring the streetlights into action.

Oh, the night
Of asphalt and chrome.
Of oily skin and enfrizzened hair.
Of shouts and whoops and horns.
When even distant sirens
Sing the lament:

The night.
Always the night.

With a few clicks, fragments of my identity lodge themselves
Neatly among the grimy, toil-born ones and zeros of the Others.
Mine too smell faintly of stale tea and sweaty typing fingers,
Are gritty with the dust from between my keyboard keys,
And the sand that gets between my toes
When I walk out onto the patio
Without my shoes.

I am registered.

Night has well and truly fallen
And laying in bed
The sounds
Of crickets and cicadas
Sizzles in from the windows.
Though my eyes grow heavy,
I try to write a poemmmmm........¡zzzzz 0

Nothing from the world
Silence like a bell that rings
I make my own noise

Out of the door, and a right turn
I take the asphalt intersection at the diagonal,
As nobody is driving past just now.
The path is muddy where the sidewalk plow
Was misaligned all winter.
The paved bit remains hidden under
A shoulder-high mountain of icy snow.
Mostly clear footing the rest of the way,
The warmer spring days have melted so much.

Next past the elderly lady's place
Haven't seen her little dog in a while.
I suspect he has met his end, as he was on a bit too.
Not long until we'll have forgotten that he ever was.
He seemed to bring some comfort to her
As he shuffled along the perimeter of her yard.
She'd sit on the porch, and smile if you said hello.
Him off his leash, but disinterested in most things
Beyond the boundary of his shrinking universe.

Past a church and its adjacent oft-rented hall.
Here all manner of gatherings during the week,
Bring people by foot, bike and parking-space filler.
I've only been in there for occasional elections,
When cardboard boxes emblazoned
With yellow check-mark logos
Collect a sample of hopes and worries
From those of us living nearby.

Across to the next block after the spot
Where the writhing roots like slow-motion anacondas
Had once lifted the sidewalk
And grabbed at your toes as you'd pass.
It was finally re-paved the year before last.
Or was it the year before that?

On the next block, past the house
Of a recently-retired couple
Recently clerks in a government office
Where at once disinterested and annoyed
They'd awaited a smoke break, and a pension.
On the nice days now they sit smoking
And often offer a smile
While they drink glasses of red wine
On a raised front step that reaches
To the edge of the sidewalk,
As if the pub patio at the next street
Was now close enough to save them the walk.

Finally is a new complex of four units,
Before we reach the busy street.
This one was built just recently
And employed an innovative new scheme.
All concrete and sheet-steel forms,
It came together slowly
As builders seemed unsure how the system
Was supposed to work.

The units are all occupied now, top and bottom.
The below-grade residents, haven't deployed
Their freshly installed blinds since arriving.
Denizens of the sidewalk pass the large window
Where all their worldly possessions are displayed.
They seem to lounge in the adjoining room, mostly
Hypnotized by the large panel on the wall.

Their driveway crosses the sidewalk here.
And it was dry and clear all winter.
I saw the builders installing the snake-like tubes
Of a snow-melting driveway heater.
All winter it liberated the residents from the chore
Of being outside, away from their TV.
And from piling themselves a mound of icy snow
And from later watching it slowly seep away
As the warmth of spring seeps into the sidewalk.

The morning breaks like a jagged jam jar, the sun burns through like a stinking cigar, the time moves forward like a lethal lahar, and yet another day is burning.

And another one now, they just keep coming, there's no escape here, your brain needs numbing, you're tangled in wire and perplexing plumbing, and none of it's worth what you're earning.

Sometimes we think we've got a pretty perfect path, but as you get close it instead wreaks wrath, still we all want what the other half hath, but material goods don't quell yearning.

You could do more, you could work wonders, your heart says yes, but feet bestow blunders, as one thing leaps another thing thunders. It leaves your whole world churning.

But a light will emerge between the tall trees, the heat will fade with the fall's brisk breeze, you'll find warmth where you formerly freeze, you'll find inspiration returning.

Because humanity thrives on problems perverse, people have recovered from way, way worse,  a chasm wasn't made we didn't try to traverse. 'Cause the things we beat down, set us learning.

Oh please, not sunshine and 'here I sit" blank-page laments
Season-change ballads and idle-moment thoughts.
My muses are all sedentary and lethargic,
Only speaking up to demand another grape
Fed from dangling fingers.

Sure, the sun is streaming nicely in the window
And a reluctant spring has given way
To summer-like days, as I sit and ponder.
But the tropes and exclaims of 'excelsior!'
Aren't going to cut it this time.

Gold-leafed chaises longues and silver goblets
Are stacked haphazardly on the sidewalk
A pile of plus-sized togae thrown into the mix
A cardboard box of minstrels' greatest hits vinyl too.
The bums are sent packing
And my poem is concluded.

Like an arm across a cluttered table
Like a glacier upon the mountains
Like a silent unfathomable wave through the harbour

It was a look
A glance
Without seeing or caring
And the scars across the bedrock
Are visible for a million years

We have obscured points-of-view
From where we cling so earnest,
To this one rock among the few
That orbits ‘round that furnace.

But when we’re on the other side
Of our boulder, deep in night,
The stars blaze in the sky so wide
Such a majestic, unreal sight.

Lay down sometime, upon the snow,
In a treeless, open place.
As the spinning Earth below
Tries to throw you into space.

Do it now, you’re in your prime.
Take up your position!
If you let go at the perfect time
You’ll fly out on your mission.

Choose a spot that’s cold and clear
Where just last night it snowed.
Then punch out through the stratosphere
And let your head explode.

'Thirty days has September,
Now it's easy to remember.'
'How do you do it, my good chap?'
'I simply use my iPhone app. '