Where are you going
What are you doing
Where have you been
What are you trying to do?

Are you lost
Are you found
Have you forgotten what it is
to be around?

Are you
Alone in your room

or

Together with one roommate
too many

Are you trapped alone,
Trapped together?

Do you remember who
you're supposed to be
or
Don't you have a clue?

I know,
There is no magic sentence
to make it all okay

But
In the end
we'll all have the end
And I guess
that's
okay
with me,

We'll see.

~and for Harlan, who loved this one best~

"for tandem is the ever-changing, graying color of their fierce attached tenacity"

waking/walking in
careful pacing regular lock steps,
like new cadets, counting cadence,
in perfect silent, almost motionless,
except for the minuscule quivering of
slightly parted moving lips

these two elders,
still now plebes,
freshmen
but of a latter, graduated stage,
demonstrating robustly
the slow shuffle-along,
a well practiced dance conjured
'in tandem'

her arm, crooked in his,
his other hand,
in protective custody of a
knight's armored chain glove
encasing hers,
he, shuffling just,  
a precise, intended half-a-beat slower
lest she ever think
that she, ever be a drag upon him

hair, his,
threaded with daily,
new arriving grays,
proudly accepted
as the privilege of
graceful aging

hers,
disguised with periodic outings,
outings for the hidings of life's bookmarks,
conceding nothing ever to
time's lunatic desire to separate them

modest in dress,
styling hints of  pasts' elegant,
the man's hat defiant,
daringly jaunty angled,
a small scarf to handbag knotted,
matching his Windsor knotted tie

the passers-by, all smile,  
the signal charm of an
end game processional,
thinking so sweet,
yet mine eyes detect more,
something
hardy and radical

a fierce, fierce fierceness,
both fighters in the resistance,
armed with tandem tenacity,
ground given,
but only inches surrendered,
wounds resisted by
scar skin toughened
by the caress of ions bonding
under the pressure
of atomic level mutuality

worn out,
well past Purple Hearts,
no capitulation feared,
to the ever changing,
enemies' new disguises,
they,
a two person platoon,
each,
having the other's back

and I burst into tears on the street,
a train of out loud moans,
even groans emitted,
like a string of perfect pearls
breaking,
clattering on an asphalt terrain

weeping
not
from visions of the inevitable,
sighing
not
from the certitude of a
cycle's uptime ending

but jealous furious by this reminder delightful,
angry at myself, for having lost so many wasted years,
mine, the loss greatest, for absent was the
fierce tenacity of tandem

There must have been a million raindrops falling down hard
Loud drops plummeting from the place where the sky overflows
The seemingly infinite pitter patter painfully counted one by one
Noir moments impinged beyond a rainy night:

Splashes splatter, showers flood torrentially,
Shards of water blind the befogged windowpanes,
Catching the candle light’s dull flicker
Upon the sway to the heartwood of the rain sodden trees
But underneath it all, there's this heart
Nobody really knows ― unborn and alone

Waves of silent reverie seize firmly a fragile heart,
Only learning to grasp the soul’s most poignant sensibilities
Wrought fifty shades of melancholy blue

Dreaming with eyes wide open
to see you tiptoeing around me
Bereft of touching as we reach for love
As if it were a moment we could hold
But I'll reach to you from where time just can't go
In that beloved moment leading the way back
into my dreams

Broken silence roused the moment's ache
With a boisterous sigh, the daunting fading murmurs
Of unspoken breath cogently exhaled
Hallmarks  of a secret place no one else can go,..

One drop at a time…


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