I sit on one side of a splintered park bench,
its weathered plaque telling me
Harold Finch loved this spot
before dying.

My finger traces
my watch's sharp cracked crystal.
Scratches layered on scratches,
hard to tell if it's three o'clock or four.

Horns blare,
and sirens wail,
the city pushing through.

An ant scales my shoe-mountain.
This day's Everest.
His tiny legs a blur of purpose,
unaware of the danger that awaits.

Across the path,
a neglected hollow metal general
reigns over his dry, rusty fountain,
pigeons crowning him white.

Gumballs lurk in the lawn,
tiny maces waiting for tender feet.
Once, one got me.
I was seven.
My soda and tears
staining the soil brown.
Mother's embrace saying,
it's okay, it's okay.

Grass offers itself
to all that pass.
Two lovers lie back,
and melt into its willing green.

My foot pins and needles.
I shift against the hard bench.
Everest sits empty.

A lone bee zigzags past my shoulder,
hunting flowers
summer promised
but autumn stole.

Above, a hawk circles,
a black speck drifting
in empty blue.

Below, a squirrel stashes acorns
for a winter it will never see.

And a single red leaf
falls upward
into the blue,
unaware it is dying...

But I see
its shadow dancing.

I'm all too conscious of the change,
nothing strange, and nothing never felt before
not a shock,
perhaps the clicking of a lock
the subtle closing of a door,
a key has turned,
that well worn latch is dropped once more,
on what is done, a green and fertile time,
I hear the chimes,
which ring and sing a tune I know full well,
a tolling bell
for autumn

My mom told me:
when you walk through sorrow,
do not fear the shadows
they are only the night’s way
of teaching you the stars.
you are not just a child of mine,
you are a child of the universe
born from fire,
shaped by silence,
destined for infinity.
And when I asked her,
“what is the meaning of all this?”
she smiled,
and said:
to live is to remember
that you are more than yourself,
that the cosmos speaks in your breath,
and every goodbye
is the seed of another hello.

A flower in the wind, has no control,
an arbitrary victim
without determined vision as it blows from side to side,
it has no views about the matter
when it sees its beauty shattered
into petals that are scattered far and wide

...There is no element, in existence,
equal, to me,
with the force,
and polarity, of you.

Take me...take me, further in.

I will not,
I could not...ever, resist you.

My will, is hammered carbon;
yet, this contract, of the soul...
it is ironclad.
Draw me,
into the tensity,
of your unbroken field.

Does your ghost, hover
like magnetite,
at the northernmost point,
of its own compass needle?

Does your shadow, dwell
in its arrowhead shape?
Does your heart, steel,
its directional pull?

I cannot pass you by,
but to be drawn,
into the divine gravity,
of your embrace.

Sweet...so sweetly,
do you hold fast, to me.

My lips, shudder,

tremulous,
with an irrepressible urge

to glue themselves
to the nectarine sweetness,
of sunbaked flesh.

Take me...take me, further in.

Leech me, of resistance.
Break me, of my defenses.
Shatter this separation,
that pulses fiercely, between us,

and pin me, to the core, of you.
Keep me, always...
yours, alone;
yours forever...

and worlds, may end,
castles, may rubble.
Entire civilizations,
may fall, to ancient ash,

Before these lips,
could ever dream,
of leaving, you.