dog tracks northern snow
joy resounding in motion
deep love connection

In emerald seas where shadows play,
Steel ribbons thread the green ballet.
Through whispering pines and mossy glades,
A journey carved by human blades.

The iron serpents hum their tune,
A song that cuts through leafy dune.
Sunlight dances on rails' gleam,
In this hidden, tranquil dream.

Beneath the canopy, worlds collide,
Where nature and man in silence bide.
Tracks through forests' heart, profound,
In this sanctuary, our paths are found.

Winter had arrived
overnight, and

we had slept soundly through it, the
snow smothering

any sounds that dared
try to escape.

The morning arrived clear and sunny
and cold.

I was washing the dishes in that
old kitchen sink of ours when I noticed them—

footprints through the snow in our backyard—I couldn’t
say how many sets there were—

starting at the back fence and
proceeding directly

to our kitchen window. You
told me that you were going to head outside

to shovel the walk, but I told you
that I would take care of it, and I put on

my boots but no jacket, and I walked
out the back door, shovel held tightly

in hand. The tracks traced
the full perimeter of our house—

they appeared to be searching
for something—and they stopped

right outside of her
bedroom window—I couldn’t say

how many sets there were, or how long
they’d stood there while she slept.

I don’t know what
compelled me, but I turned the shovel

over, hurriedly using its edge to scrape
away the footprints there beneath the

window, the grass beneath them still
green and struggling to breathe.

And when I came back inside
you asked me

what I was up to out there, and I told you
that it was too cold

to shovel, that we should put on
another *** of coffee,

that we should stay inside
and not face the day,

and let the children
keep sleeping.

Harmonies and melodies that accompanied my drift,
nursing wounded soul and often giving it a lift.
Moments when cords and rhythm took me the next mile,
so many old chorus' that could make my heart smile.

Songs and tunes that touched the moments I've seen,
to connect forever to people and places I've been.
Soundtrack to my life to record memories in rhyme,
taking me back as if I were some traveler in time.

At some lonely hour when an old track comes to mind,
stresses and troubles for a time gone and left behind.
Teleported by some in the moment pertinent track,
where a mind can find escape and be taken right back.

The music of who I am, of my soul that shaped my life,
at every joyous moment and every tumultuous next strife.
I play those old tunes and I sing so badly right along,
I can't help but  to do so, as its my life and hearts song.

Aged, wrinkled and worn
Our Palms of fortune and destiny
Show tracks leading to new places
Playing out the timeline of our lives
Like a show - a Chorus Line
The queues will flock for the matinee
And so this poetical line ends.

****** or Heroine?
by Michael R. Burch

(for mothers battling addiction)

serve the Addiction;
worship the Beast;
feed the foul Pythons
your flesh, their fair feast ...

or rise up, resist
the huge many-headed hydra;
for the sake of your Loved Ones
decapitate medusa.

Keywords/Tags: drugs, addiction, user, ******, needle, tracks, marks, pain, despair, recovery

On the tracks of our lives,
                          the autumn of life
may fall on the trail we may travel.

But one may falter on this journey  
                   and the remnant path,
but if we brush aside the failing  
                                             that fell before us
we can travel further than we ever realised.

Nights Are For Stuff Like This

It's 3am.
The city's sleeping and I'm not.
Lights like scattered dots burn dim outside my window.
People are dreaming and I'm awake thinking of the
life that's been passing through me like second hands-smoke
lingering in the slowed-down traffic of my DNA.
Nights are for stuff like this;

stuff like silken roads through ragged hillsides,
feelings blacker than night that disappear in the
day light, prisms  bouncing off grey ash, tiny sparks
falling through trap doors, never again to be seen
nor heard, nor taken for granted upon the long
laid train tracks of this ongoing dance.

Memory like loaded simi-trucks taking me all
the way back through corn fields and hay, through
old hard hitting rain that goes clank, clank in my brain.
Scars cutting  through my skin opening again and again
like songs that you hate but can't stop singing  on endless
streaming highways-hitching a ride inside my mind,

pitch-perfect pristine and off-key in the dark,
on a night like this blue black over amber gold.
I'm a million miles further away and one mile closer.
Signposts loud and large selling  big hopes for
happy dopes, emerging eyes now gone from me
peering through clouds because they can, because
they probably always will.

Because who knows how far they've gone and how
far I've come on this night of all nights awake in the
grid of passing stars and dividing lines, now merging into
my lane for better or for worse where gratitude needs no
promotion, because it just is or is not. Because it can't be faked.
nor pimped. Because it has no need for
patronizing nor apologizing.

Because it's outcome, a side effect of nights like this where
everything makes sense and where nothing makes any sense
at all in this gigantic freeway of time that will eventually reach
a dead end. Where sleep will come 'cause the poetry will have
run itself off the bend.
Ah yea nights are for stuff like this.