she tiptoed on teaspoons,
drank sunsets from a straw,
taught a goldfish to waltz
in a teacup of awe.

her shadow wore slippers
made of old lullabies,
and her laughter?
a jellybean storm in disguise.

she planted her dreams
in a shoebox of stardust,
whispered,
"grow wild, not wise."

when asked her name,
she smiled sideways,
and became
a question mark in the sky.

Another gray trip to a small town.
At the bus stop:
an abandoned bicycle,
trembling in the rain,
waiting for someone,
who never came.

The coughing crowd,
getting on and off,
headed for the unknown.
Actors carrying
heavy bags of ugly food.

Out of the corner
of an invisible eye
snatches of words
drifting into a wrinkled world—
not the first, vivid green,
but the tired lettuce,
expired bananas—
a symbol of unreachable luxury.

Casual dialogues about angels and demons,
atheists and spiritual needs.
Random people battered by reality
rolling out a red carpet for their thoughts,
spoken aloud in the indifferent air,
small talk about kicking life—
an existential fight to survive.

The game downloaded
by an unfair fate.
Something put him, her, them
on this wrong level,
an extreme mode
the deepest discomfort.

Unfair purpose of pain.
For many,
not being loved is an aching way,
for others,
the lack of bread.

The multiple truths
closed in one small drop
of a rainy day without a name.

Stumbling into ancient scripts, authored a decades plus ago,
ago being a modifier of time quantities, minute or large, unspecific
without an objective adjective additive, that faucets a stream of an interlocutory elocution of a batter of rooted emotional histories,
but not histrionics

fanciful words for dredged up memories, acute, but tarnished,
powered yet worn by a cousin of ago, a/k/a,
age
and yet
renews as of,

at this very second, as if it were a first, a tumult of visions, swelling of remembrances, embodied scars, and I weep anew but not
for me, as much for the resonating simpatico souls with whom
they even  now vibrate with resonance of the immediacy of
If not now, When?

Aside: The exterior environment is noisy wet pelting of thunderstorms and ****** sheets of bulleting rain, piercing projectiles, but I am safe in the sunroom, sadly happy my dog is no longer here to shiver and tremble, cuddle and be soothed by steady stroking

But I am here, wrestling with this dredging operation, digging up
tons of sand that require dumping, and I ask, inquire, beg:

Who will take this detritus off my hands, once more, now uncovered,
now recovered, the soil is already soaked and can absorb no more,
the soul is already soaked and can absorb no more, the weakened
heart, damaged and occluded, suffer cannot bare twice the

outrageous misfortune

of unbared recollections, twice, or thrice, and I feel myself drowning in revisiting pain, **** **** ****, these old poems, not nuggets, but boulders dropping from night skies, shot from a pitching machine, without letup, piercing of agonies that once ago  
freshly desecrated and decorated my basic training in humanity.

Enough whining:
I wrote those poems to
eject out those pains,
and I write this now, once more,
to realize that so so many still face
uncertain and unrelenting similarities,
doing their own sums,
and I wish them easing,
strength to compose and
thereby dispose of
the ineloquent
and eloquent
words of staining suffering

3:30am
Thur
July 10
2025