New Year’s Eve
and the clatter of suitcase handles
defying the quiet car
concerning the woman in the seat beside me
silently screaming
into her teeth.
Pop! Pop! The train is under attack
the assault we fled from our point of origin follows us as
chaos kids chuck
firecrackers on the rails,
new worries, same as old and
further furrowing the silent screamer.
The air is must, jacketed bodies still heaving
from the sprint to catch the train
now sweating in repose and slipping off their winter shells and
no one is comfortable
so you know we must be traveling.
Someone cracks a window to combat the stale air,
sliced bread eaten plain & crumbs crumble the floor
furrowing brows yet further.
We’re all going somewhere
as our minds trace where we’re coming from
collectively and silently screaming
“THIS YEAR WILL BE DIFFERENT”
and most of us now sporting
furrowed brows
as the train pulls us inevitably forward
towards the future.

I run my fingers slowly
over the lips of another;
just to see.
But those lips
don’t brush as tenderly
against my tips
as yours did,
my original lover.

Like the licking of an old dog that insists you take her
for a walk
the insistent swell
laps your legs.

Off port, headlamps
slip by in an unending current
supplying the illusion of your
inevitable progress forward,

and little certainty you had ever been moored at all.

Lying in repose, limbs akimbo
mirroring the reach of a vast mauve
starfish above me,
half-hidden in the shallows of the night.
Ungripping and unmoving.
Still as time.

It does not toss
        But I do
It does not turn
        But I do
It does not think
        But I do

The ceiling fan is off but I am on.

Though even scars fade,
though even stars burn out,
though sunlight soon gives way to shade,
as facts are drowned in doubt.

Though death hounds every life,
and all beginnings find their end,
though what once was young must meet the scythe,
it soon will grow again.

For nothing will stay stopped
since all has been begun,
all false summits seem the top,
yet there is no final rung.

We sat hand in hand on blissful beach.
Toes wriggling genially in warm sand.
I watched as you commanded the waves
to crash backwards into setting sun,
dousing day into night.
You smiled sweetly as ebbing tide
sped you away into the arms of the pale moon.
I cried that night.
Until I had created an ocean of my own to control.

Heavy lids cinch sockets shut
allowing only in(ternal)sight.
Awash in slumber
I witness dreams
those interdimensional thoughts,
that stuff of other worlds.
My consciousness has entered their land
and they drift toward it, permeating it placidly
like nubile nimbus innervating the sky.
I am enraptured by their ever-changing narrative.
Wispy cirrus with its fleeting skeleton story,
cumbersome cumulus, pregnant with meaning,
eager to spill forth and shower me with its mysteries.
I gaze at the heavens and I am their architect.
I mold the ever-shifting shapes they show me
into some semblance of significance
as they dissolve before my eyes
and new forms take their place.
Though I will remember none,
their impression leaves
imprints,
and I awake with more questions than answers.