These are the
darker days
Highlights have turned
into grays
Teardrops stain my
pillowcase
Maybe I'm not
thinking straight

But I dont want to be here
My mind is digging deeper
This pit is inescapable
I'm falling down an endless hole.

I remember us sat looking at Manga cartoons like it was yesterday. But now?
She's gone away.
And I'm just a ghost
in a shell.

When I watch Akira I still hear her.

And,

the fading sound,

of
our era.

As I sit listless,
Alongside the river supreme,
Silent stars gently rise above me,
Kissing the clouds with reckless abandon,
I watch the light bleed and create individual paintings,
As if the heavens were but one giant brush,
Though guided by luck and not creativity,
It seems it doesn't matter either way.

All things are connecting,
Dissected by interchanging strings and correcting,
Paths that most others would not take,
That wakes and creates an empty covered-grounding,
This is what we dream of and must make.

A selfish soliloquy that was written in haste,
Left a bitter taste from the poor and hollow remarks it made,
But it spilled out in every direction anyway,
Until the world left a cloak and dagger in it's wake.

The sunshine blasts my eyes and I am startled by reflections,
Memories of the dreams that we shared that night,
Our children are the thoughts that now follow us,
The remnants of a dignified trip into our own minds,
Alongside the river supreme,
In the shadow of our collected consciousnesses.

Today is July 4, 2020. There is not much to celebrate. **** Trump leaves us in a Polynicean gloom. Fireworks remind me of wars. I would rather, and therefore will,  listen to Rachmaninov's PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2 tonight.
I will celebrate beauty rather than killing. And I will give thought to Antigone as well, for she willingly gave her life for doing what was right. I shall listen to Yuja **** arpeggiate notes. I will again become fixated both by her light-
ning dexterity and the glorious sounds to which she gives birth. Humankind has this dual potential:  it can either **** or care. So why, I ask myself, does it always choose the former? On this national holiday especially, why do we now not celebrate Thomas Paine and Walt Whitman and Harriet Tubman and Eugene Debs and Martin Luther King Jr.? We do we not collectively ask forgiveness for all the covert, sinister, malevolent interventions into the affairs of other nations, resulting in unjust overthrows and war crimes aplenty? Fireworks? July 4th? We did defeat the evil of ****** and his unspeakable genocide. Let us be sure to give unending thanks to all those who lost their lives in this moral victory. But Viet Nam? The lives of 58,000 American soldiers lost for the lies of our leaders? And Kissinger and McNamara and the Bushes and Cheney and so many others in our government never held accountable for their war crimes? And yet tonight we have fireworks instead of Nuremberg-like trials. Antigone knew she would die if she buried her brother, Polynices, and yet she went ahead and buried him and died for doing it. And the 4,000,000 blacks who were slaves in 1861 and the 500 indigenous nations that covered for centuries from sea to shining sea what we now call America--did they have anything to celebrate on this day, on this date? Fireworks, that's all.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

Maybe if you knew
How this mind works
Like I do

Maybe you'd run for the hills
and maybe you'd engage for the thrills
Maybe.... Only if you knew

asked what I desire for breakfast,
replied, scones and crumpets from the
good ole U. of K. with a cups of celebratory
Jamaican coffee  (tee-hee)

she did not even bother
to snort in an elegant
derisory manner,
just walked away,
just turned on her
high heeled sneakers,
(a very worthy sight),
“prithee, grilled cheese sandwiches,
it is then,”
quoting the Bard

alright.

No need to ask me which cheese,
she experientially knowledgeable
in my hard milk acculturation,
one will be home grown ameddican,
real cheese, not Kraft “cheese food”
the other swiss, unless
smoked mozzarella is in the larder,
(who has a larder anymore?)

as I am in matters of cheese,
I’m a transgender, formerly bisexual,
but still a questionable, open minded,
but globalist willing to
entreat any country that values
cheese above war

We'll put a label
on what we can not define.
What's wrong and what's right?

What if
there were
no voice left to speak