Putting your hopes up in someone who does not care for you. Is almost like trying to throw a lasso over a cloud. It is impossible and will never work.

Sometimes at night

asleep by the firelight

I dream about them

how they died

some are singing

and others saying what

they no longer see

walking fencelines

limping as if in pain

some of them handsome

and some mysterious

silent but not

for long they tell you

men scarcely know

how beautiful fire is

and old stories

they can't remember

unless you can

still look them in the eye.

Greed is a person who enjoys sitting on his balcony as he sips tea, laughing as he hears others suffer, beg and plea.

Night, that old sinkhole
of the soul, climbs
the dark stairs of despair
who knows what the moon
is thinking behind that one-eyed
stare clawing his way through
the pines outside my window
carrying bootblack in a blanket
when it's colder for shining shoes
that go with my black suit
and the red rose on the pillow
I burn before the morning.

Love is a word
like a sword
that has worn
out its scabbard,
a lonely *******,
or a red rose
that opens alone,
a dream that lingers
for too many seasons
and passes in the shadows,
furrows in the dust
on a bannister,
a rock in the garden
of lust,
an empty place
at a table,
a ring on a cobweb
in the rain,
a long hair on your bed,
a nail in a blank wall.

tree spirits beckoned
through pools of dawn's blushing glow
trees silvered seeping with soft musk and hazel
their lilting throngs of whispering tilleul arms
splitting misted air into swirls of hushed enchantment
pressed into the grass with strokes of emerald shade
etched into that twisting turret
lines
a hundred
each a miniature scroll of letters and words
blazing through sap and bark and bramble
each a sample of language
the ancient and vast
ink of sun's blood, gilt and dragon's fire