the self seeking*
white powder man
came
to consume her life
snorting
the only love
who'd ever embrace
a loneliness so rife

the relationship
destructive
to the soul
it propped her up
and took all control

an emptiness
he bought
a hollowness
in every facet
of his giving
the feeling of the muted line
so flippantly cold

she tossed away
the truer man's
caring
for a ******* frequency
incapable of love's
empathetic
*heart

let's write a song together, lyrics like, "you don't love me no more
see you walk out the door, wondering why it took you so long
your cuteass in tight jeans, a curse and a blessing to watch you leave"
got an upright piano in the corner that's sort of been neglected
and it plays every other C out of tune, but we can't afford a tuner
to come by and nor can we buy new strings for a guitar

we get up, we fall down, we find love, and we crash all the way
and heaven help us, now that we're separate and on our own
love the route it takes us to a melancholy mood that's so particular
and so comfortable to be wrapped up in an ocean of blankets
under a crepuscular night~ play that song all night and have it repeat
when you're at work and it'll burn itself in the background forever

gladly the birds sing
though skies be so drably lit
their trill resilient

The Agèd Hands of Time have reached yet another
toll of the bell.

12 years have passed since I’ve last seen her in this life.
Distance and sickness in our being had robbed us both
of streams of time which passed like a long cold winter
into her death. These lost memories often create over-
exposed and superimposed photo negatives of imaginary
frames of time I desperately imprint to hold tightly in my
heart and mind.

But I still hold tightly in memory to her soft voice on the
phone and pictures of split second frames of physical
time my sister would send me. Many people don’t even
have that.

In this life she loved to mother her three grown children
and flower garden as near as
she could to the end. It was
in her nature to nurture us--
her perennial children--
and to help make the move easier for her literal annual foster children plants taken
from a confined existence to a deep soft warm bed of comfort.

Stamped on my mind is not the faded and worn, bruised
and torn image of her outward shell in the Trauma
Center at age 88, but the indelible inner and outward
image at age 38: a lovely young mama who tucked her
little boy in bed every night with a song and a prayer.
The little boy that is still alive in this man.

The Agèd Hands of Time have reached yet another
toll of the bell.