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Just in case you
couldn't
guess, it's not a
a fair fight
or a level
playing field.

It's you with
boxing gloves
and them with
machine guns.

It's Van Gogh
throwing his paintings
out the window
to stop the hecklers.

It's Janis falling
down
the stairs, lonely
and
broken
looking for love.

It's Morrison seeing
the game for
what it was,
wanting to disappear
in France and
write poetry,
then dying in a
bathtub with a
witch in the wings.

It's morphine dreams
and thorazine days.
It's the tiger
declawed and lobotomized
at the zoo.

It's the lobster
cursed with
precious meat.

It's the statue of liberty,
burning her bra
and impaling
working class men with
her stiletto heels.

It's Gogol
dying after a
prolonged fast,
because a charlatan
told him
it was evil.

It's the elephant
domesticated by
the cage, but
still dreaming of
the Serengeti.

It's the dolphin in
a Hollywood
swimming pool,
a shark in your
coffee cup;
it's the criminality
of releasing the insane
from their cages to
wander the streets of
Santa Barbara.

It's pathetic and putrid,
a setup up;
the perfect tragedy;
a crime that goes beyond
denunciation.

It's what they will continue
to do to
you and me
until someone or something
intervenes.
There is a cough and a bark
& then a roar, and suddenly
the green night is singing.

A light rain hangs like a history,
the silver toad bus squirms stop to stop,
the street racers flick rubber kisses.

In the opposite building, a woman
undresses before watching a movie:
the rain begins to flop and hook.

A bicyclist shines and streaks down
the sleekish funnel. The moon is forgetful.
A love story is playing out on the sidewalk.

The green night cascades smokes
with sharking clouds that drift north
into Maryland with their lethal line.

The cat sleeps on my great-aunt's rug:
I am alone in this quiet. Something is dying.
I watch the rain dry on the summer road.
And then
the night
comes flooding
in, like
a spilled beer.

Fear is a
rabid bat;
fatally
infecting.

Loneliness is
an ice cube
in a bathtub
melt-
ing
slow-
ly.

Love is a
flat toad in
the road of
life.

Hope is a
broken dish,
an empty
pocket,
a shattered dream.

Life is a sparrow
in the cat's mouth,
an abscessed
tooth, with no
antibiotic.
It's a whale
in a frozen
ocean;
an eagle in the
city.

Insanity is
digging for the
courage to
continue
day after
day
after day.
I cannot say is miss you
well not every day
life moved on, and took me with it
carried with the tide
and weathered by waves
you stayed as you were
as you will always be
safe and dry on the shore
but you cannot dip your toes
or dance in the sand as I have done
feel the sun on your back
or the wind against your face
for you the race was too quickly run
all over and done
before it had really begun
This week in 1993 I lost my big sister-it was horribly sudden and she was only 30
 Mar 2021 Sam Lawrence
Traveler
Love can make us losers
Invested in love’s game
It can hurt to be human
But..
I love you just the same!
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