A seed found furrow in my brow
Awaiting harvest, hungers now

Through my fertile mind’s palimpsest
A vine breaks soil where memories nest

Pushing on with a writhing stem
From deep brown earth toward blue welkin

With nostalgic rays, a star unfolds
a leaf, a story, yet untold

Each bud a poem that’s yet to bloom
In flowered couplets for the moon

awaiting dawn, for petals pleat
to release a blossom’s fragrance sweet

And from one strand a spider weaves
a gossamer web on trembling leaves

to capture prey that seeks to read
Poetic verse among the weeds.

Plant and spider thus conspire
conscripting minds of like, inspired,

to sew words of thorns, that never wilt
till every bough, a bookshelf built

Discordant leaf chatter
argues over the path,
dispersed by a nettled wind
This is the Fall of my life.
Every breath shivered
and twirled on the air,
Fogging a glass piece
Through which I stare.
At lions at play
in the depths of my soul,
fierce and gentle
On ethereal fields.
Moon rays softened
on the curves of your hair.
now stars on their nightly procession
clatter like ignited leaves
Across my path,
where all will join the Fall.

Quietly sighs the dawn
long and languid through the hours
All to come about lies in wait
Per chance, to say
Something sagacious,
Something great.

Dreamers wide awake;
So erudite and perspicuous.
As if their dreaming
were to dream
away the smothering Incubus

That sponges up the will to act
by a forlorn soul expecting
that fortune’s grin will have it's heart
as effortlessly as it's wanting.

Stock-still and stunned of mobility
Tipped teaspoons heaped with emptiness
Into steaming cups of void
Sipped by thirsty lips of young
on blarney stone, a kiss and tongue,
to speak their yearning with sang-froid.

Dear Ed.
You'll have to forgive me if I
stop favoriting most of your work.  It's all spectacular,
and if good poems were gravy,
I'd need more bread.  
And a bucket.

But you see,
33 years ago, despite my uncontainable appreciation
for the many high school graduation checks,
I broke me sense of gratitude
while handwriting out scores of "thank  you notes.”
Now, I’m unable to offer even the slightest compliment
with these ungrateful fingers.  

So forgive me, if I'm hard-pressed
to as much as click a “heart”
or a “thumbs up” button;
for even one more of your upgrades to the Holy Grail.

And don’t bother clicking my stuff.  There are no more
thank-you fish in Walden pond;
I’m ingrate enough for the both of us.

Just know
as my mouse goes quiet, your **** is **** good.  
**** good.
"And that goes for the rest of you
poems."

By the end of this poem, those once vibrant
shall slough off in horizons of necrosis.
As I tap out completion,
their summer cedes to countless performances;
actors bow before the closing curtain of Autumn.

The maelstrom of summer-lovers lulls to a murmur
And the great Mevlana’s couplets and Khayyam’s quatrains
Float away on the formations of down-bound geese.
You’ll hear the Doppler shift of devotion’s goodbye
On the whines of the locomotive’s whistle.

By the end of this poem, the thistle fades
from heliotrope to gun metal gray.
The clandestine scent of “once-whens”
Wafts into a future of “now-agains.”
Yet, this new Fall is bittersweet.
Before another ******* of trees,
a red rose blushes in reminiscence.

By this poems end, I’ll be in love
with the chill of an approaching season
wearing the brightest flower in my garden of poetry
One last choke on the rising smoke
as the last painful stanza goes
Into the solemn procession
toward the sacred pyre of leaves.

Sadly, I dreamt
in forgotten words
or none at all.