I look up;
The mighty ships
Drift slowly hither.
They stop for a while,
Looming over the plains
Attacking the fields,
And the meadows,
And the gardens.
A beautiful attack,
Alleviating despair.
The fresh scent of the Earth
And fragrances from the new blooms
Fill the air;
It is as if this landscape
Just learned of colour.
But the ships anchor not,
For they must bring life and hope elsewhere too,
And they drift slowly thither.

On world poetry day
I'm a tortured poet
When my ambiguous words
And meanings
Touch your soul

You kept sending me mixed signals
A week ago, you were telling me you miss me
Now you're saying you wanna call it quits
Remember when you joked about being obsessed with me lately?
I so badly wanted to know what changed
between you being sober and after a bottle of gin

Do you ever just pine for someone?
The way they smile while talking to a loved one
That bright and easy laugh, the gleam in their eye, the knowing...the realization that you're watching them enjoy themselves from across the room

Or maybe you're just a spectral spectator
Flipping through photo albums, looking through photos that are a permanent snapshot
A moment in time
A second
A few minutes
Of them smiling among a gathering of friends

They're so happy, they're so brightened and unassuming in their youthful zeal
You can hear the bursts of laughter
The peals of it
Disjointed conversations among friends
Maybe one or two have passed on
Maybe they just lost touch with them

But you look at them now
All the same
You really look at them
You realize that they've changed so much from the person they were in those pictures

No more bright laughter
No more infectious smiles
No more disjointed conversations with gatherings of friends
No more college bar hopping
No more wandering the backstreets of Venice at night
Or Rome
Or Britain
Or Germany
No more spontaneous traveling

The light is dim now in their eyes
It's like the bulb inside of them has burned out

So...
You pine for them, for the person that they were yesterday, & days before, & years before you
entered their life

After your arrival, came a burial

Somewhere along the way
With the unspoken hurt
& unprocessed trauma
They died

And so ...
You grieve

I

I was told that faces persist, could wear away pebble, wind, and sand. Rivers, long and winding, and the rain, always so strange, mingle with rippling ashes of our ancestors, their fingers dipping through charcoal powder, tracing animals over stone’s face, carving bodies out of empty space, faded faces on walls. We are not a dream, they were saying. Not flashes of an aged old dream. Sand-like memory, look for us.

Filters litter the ground around me,
Slowly they fall to the abyss.
Waiting for time around me,
To go amiss.
We wait for the filters to fall,
so we may see reality once.
And all the while,
it leaves us behind