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Omnis Atrum Sep 2013
A lachrymose ebullition,
unable to be muffled by its producer,
is postulated idiosyncratic,
and erupts behind locked doors of each abode.  

Remembrance trailing each hastily inhaled sob
of each adolescent informed of responsibility,
and of how appearances are more important
than actualities,
but not the stones it chains to their feet,
nor how they must repress sentiment.

If the building blocks of Stonehenge
were to frolic and wriggle voluntarily,
what force would fight the gravity
always pressing downwards on those below,
from collapsing the entire structure?

Without convenience to focus on sentiment
the neglected portion of our humanity
congeals until it can no longer be contained,
until it metastasizes from heart to brain.

Until the bulldozer rolls through you without resistance,
to create a more scenic landscape,
or else,
a multistoried parking garage for others to leave
their possessions they do not require at the moment.

Inaudible to distracted passers-by
wrapped up in their causeries,
of the scores of their preferent Colosseum teams,
or else,
sensational stories relayed by jovial faces
from the teleprompter directly to their subconscious.

This outburst,
anticipated to reverberate only within the confines
of the relative safety of this shelter,
until the sound waves of each echo
slowly
lose
momentum.

Who could be expected to hear each cog,
slowly being worn down,
while hidden within a working machine?

When those that convince the populace
that their lament will be heard and mended
urgently cram currency into their ear canals
when their position has allowed their own
muffled cries to cease.

This begs a question from the masses.
A question, muffled, and without words.
Each raised hand stretched upwards
as the inattentive teacher ignores,
causes another hand to reach skyward.

This populace never intended for their own
whimpers to be heard,
not heard, but heeded.
While the torment of their tear filled convulsions
bulldozes through them,
not heeded, but auscultated.

Yet, these proceedings were never attended.

Not even by those same
that attempt to muffle their own ebullition
within the sound-proofed walls of the shelters
that they conceal themselves in.

Each, alone, quietly succumbs to the pressures
of waiting out
jovial sentiment with uncomfortable contentment.
Waiting,
to not exhale each murmur,
but to consume the promises they are fed
by those same whose ears are plugged with green,
until the protecting walls grow bars
and all are provided with solitary confinement.

Until it is only logic that guides the thought
that each is truly and irreversibly alone.

Until all are singled out in their struggles,
until they are uncomfortable recognizing
that they exist.

Until, separately, each attempts to smooth
their worn edges,
as to not break down the machine.
To hide the nicks that they have endured
lest they should cause,
a momentary lapse,
in productivity.

Each gear is further deformed
by this bending and contorting,
as the fear of protest causes them
to endure the pressure of warping
to try to fit a position
that they were not molded for.

Until they believe that unrepressed sentiment
has been made illegal,
and that unmuffled voices
will only cause more harm.

Yet, there are those that hear,
and heed,
and auscultate,
each muffled cry.
Each weeping convulsion,
and the pressure caused by keeping them in.

For those,
each turn they make within the machine,
is made with the sole purpose
of removing mufflers.

Until each muffled sentiment is uninhibited,
moved by the tsunami of a zeitgeist,
and ascends toward the empyrean.
Until each cultural center covered by a filter
inverts the filter's position
to collect sentiment from the base,
and send the congealed, concentrated,
neglect of humanity to the precipice.

Each syllable combining with the next,
working in unison,
as those that participate in primal dances,
to take a new form.

Not even those that release this unmuffled sentiment
know the form this conglomeration will adopt,
but it will move from one coast to the next.
A tidal wave of tears that will push
from one corner of humanity to the next,
until we again understand that it is acceptable
to feel our pain in unison.

So that we can begin to make progress
on the alterations that are necessary to the machine.
So that we are once again able to produce something,
besides awkward struggle.
So that we can stand on the highest precipice
of every unmuffled sentiment,
with unimpeded hope that one day we may relearn how
to hear, and heed, and auscultate,
happiness in unison.
remington carter Mar 2018
lying facedown on the train tracks;
home is where the heart is.
i sharpen my alibi on my mother’s bones
blink blink blink
the rays of the sun gouge my eyes out and
i blink, feeding on her conscience
through roots in the dirt.
regret metastasizes inside of me
like the very consumption that killed her

i found a way out, what now?
the daylight picked out my ribs one by one
the moon died and i buried her in the flowerbeds.
brave molly, come save me, the train's at the station

maybe today
i can talk to myself
out loud on the way there.
primal scream therapy.

(in between bittersweet fragments of memory
i can say your name without—
gangrene makes a home within my brittle skull.
cyanotic lips preach to me the
everlasting weight of my sin)

today
i’ll talk to myself out loud
on the way there
and maybe the echo won't
sound so **** scared
it's taken me one grueling year to be able to write again. logging back into HP and seeing everyone's beautiful writing again has made me so happy. i really did miss you guys
Revel in space, yet not darkled, still
the **** and span of things that breeds
airlessness; The trees are evenly cut,
and their overgrowth seems like a forethought.
Where I am from, we eat fish with
our bare hands and our furniture, from bodies
of sandalwood, crushed with the scent of
peregrines. The morning makes you conscious
of space, and altogether the height of trees
syncopates to a nauseating stillness. In the awning
hours, leaves punctuate the ground – the cicada
with its machinistic song prowls, spills like
water from a broken vase toppled by me
years younger, raw, agile, deftly windless,
  wounded in love, lovingly wounded,
perhaps if there is a word for it, then let me
have my way, easily fraught with its meaning:
   a casualty. Sometimes the timeworn folks
would light cigarettes underneath the canopy
of a mango tree to banish ants and send them back
  to their queens – roosters in their wrinkled stations
croon in stasis, a song for the somnolent. I become
what the seasons evict. Constancy. Rearing weight
and gravity from nocturne. Tears are communal.
They make us aware of the weight of the Earth.
Somewhere, a funebre stilts through the silence,
and the jangle of little pieces spells out fortuity,
men in huddles mending pain by the sleight of hand,
a toss of a card, spinning in its imaginary axis: fate,
   feigned and fine-tuned to belief that it is controllable,
a variable, or a tabulation marred by frailty. From where
I am from, people stride through the streets naked,
soldering baskets filled with fruits gossamer from the
harvest, children suckling their mothers, the music of sweeping
metastasizes throughout the afternoon, and the same clouds
contort themselves to afford wry proposition: it is a day tender
with wonder, its allure overwrought, its sheen unremarkable.
  The funebre leaves with a necessary abundance of absence.
All the leaves depart from their mothering boughs,
  collapsing on the dreary back of the loam like penitence.
Like how once when you were young, you tinkered with
the fresh scab of your wound and felt the pain confine
  itself there, a part of you, that has now healed, but is still
      available for the world to break once again.
I get off the Belt Parkway at Rockaway Boulevard and
Jet aloft from Idyllwild.
(I know, now called J.F. ******* K!)
Aboard a TWA 747 to what was then British East Africa,
Then overland by train to Baroness Blixen’s Nairobi farm . . .
You know the one at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
I lease space in Karen’s African dreams,
Caressing her long white giraffe nape,
That exquisite Streep jugular.
I am a ghost in Meryl’s evil petting zoo:
I haunt the hand that feeds me.

Safely back in Denmark, I receive treatment
For my third bout with syphilis at Copenhagen General.
Cured at last, I return to Kenya and Karen.
In my solitude or sleep, I go with her,
One hundred miles north of the Equator,
Arriving at Julia Child’s marijuana herb garden–
Originally Kikuyu Land, of course—
But mine now by imperial design &
California voter referendum.
(Voiceover) "I had a farm in Africa
At the foot of the Ngong Hills."
My farm lies high above the sea at 6,000 feet.
By daybreak I feel oh, oh so high up,
Near to the sun on early mornings.
Evenings so limpid and restful;
Nights oh, so cold.
Mille Grazie a lei, Signore *******!
Andiamo, Sydney, amico mio.
Let it flow like the water that lives in Mombasa.
Let it flow like Kurt Luedtke’s liquid crystal script.
We zoom in. We go close in. Going close up,
On the face of Isak Dinesen’s household
Servant and general factotum. (Full camera ******)
Karen Blixen’s devoted Muslim manservant,
Farah: “God is happy, msabu. He plays with us…”
He plays with me.  And who shall I be today?
How about Tony Manero for starters?
Good choice. Nicely done!
Geezer Manero:  old and bitter now,
Still working at the hardware store,
Twice-divorced, a chain-smoker,
Severely diabetic, a drunk on dialysis 3 times a week.
Bite me, Pop:  I never thought I was John Travolta.
But, hey, I had my shot:  “I coulda been a contenda.”
Once more, by association only,
I am a great artist again, quickly made
Near great by a simple second look.
Why, oh God? I am kvetching again.
I celebrate myself and sing the
L-on-forehead loser’s lament:
Why implant the desire and then
Withhold from me the talent?
“I wrote 30 ******* operas,”
I hear Salieri’s demented cackle.
“I will speak for you, Wolfie Babaloo;
I speak for all mediocrities.
I am their champion, their patron saint.”

Must I wind up in the same
Viennese loony bin with Antonio?
Note to self:  GTF out of Austria post-haste!
I’ve been called on the Emperor’s carpet again,
My head, my decapitated Prufrock noodle,
Grown slightly bald, brought in upon a platter.
Are peaches in season?
Do I dare eat one?
I am Amadeus, ******, infantile,
An irresistible iconoclast and clown.
Wolfie:   “I am called on the imperial carpet again.
The Emperor may have no clothes but he’s got a
Shitload of ******* carpets."
Hello Girls: ‘Disco Tampons!
Staying inside, staying inside!
Wolfie: "Why have I chosen a ****** farce for my libretto?
Surely there are more elevated themes . . . NO!
I am fed to the teeth with elevated themes,
People so lofty they **** marble!"
Confutatis maledictis,
Flammis acribus addictis.

So, I mix paint in the hardware store by day.
I dance all night, near-great again by locomotion.
Join me in at least one of my verifiable nine lives.
Go with me across the Narrows,
Back to Lenape with the wild red men of Canarsee,
To Vlacke Bos, Boswijk & Nieuw Utrecht,
To Dutch treat Breuckelen, Red Hook & Bensonhurst,
To Bay Ridge and the Sheepshead.
Come with me to Coney Island’s Steeplechase & Luna Park, &
Dreamland (aka Brownsville) East New York, County of Kings.
If I’m lying, I’m dying.
And while we’re on the subject now,
Bwana Finch Hatton (pronounced FINCH HATTON),
Why not turn your focus to the rival for Karen’s heart,
To the guy who nursed her through the syphilis,
That old taciturn ******, Guru Farah?
Righto and Cheerio, Mr. Finch Hatton,
Denys George of that surname—
Why not visualize Imam Farah?
Farah: a Twisted Sister Mary Ignatius,
Explaining it all to your likes-the-dark-meat
Friend and ivory-trading business partner,
Berkeley (pronounced BARK-LEE) Cole.
Can you dig it, Travolta?
I knew that you could!

Oh yeah, Tony Manero, the Bee Gees & me,
A marriage made in Brooklyn.
The Gibbs providing the sound track while
I took care of the local action.
I got more *** than a toilet seat, a Don Juan rep &
THE CLAP on more than one occasion.
Probably from a toilet seat.
Even my big brother–the failed priest,
Celibate too long and desperate now–
Even my defrocked, blue-balled brother,
Frankie, cashing in his chips at the Archdiocese,
Taking soave lessons from yours truly,
Taking notes, copying my slick moves with chicks.
It was the usual story with the usual suspects &
The usual character tests. All of which I flunk.
I choose Fitzgerald's “vast, ****** meretricious beauty,”
My jumpstart to the middle class.
I spurn the neighborhood puttana,
Mary Catherine Delvecchio: the community ****
With the proverbial heart of gold &
A backpack full of self-esteem deficits.
I opt out.  I’m hungry and leaping.
I morph again, grab *** the golden girl.
Now I’m Gatsby in a white suit,
Stalking Daisy Buchanan in East Egg,
Daisy: her voice full of money;
My green light flashing on the disco dance floor.
I, a fool for love; she, my faithless uptown girl,
Golden and delicious like the apple,
Capricious like a blue Persian cat.
My “orgiastic future” eluded me then.
It eludes me still. Time to go home again to the place
****-ant Prufrocks ponder their pathetic dying embers.
Time to assume the position:
Gazing out from some trapezoidal patch of green
At the foot of Roebling’s bridge,
Contemplating an alternative reality for myself,
A new life across the East River,
In the city that never sleeps.
I crave. I lust. I am a guinzo Eva Duarte.
I too must be a part of B.A., Buenos Aires:
THE BIG APPLE.
But I am ashamed of my luggage,
Not to mention my baggage.
It’s like that last thing Holden Caulfield said to me,
Just before he crossed over the Brooklyn Bridge,
Crossed over to Manhattan without me,
Leaving me alone again, searching for our kid sister,
Phoebe, the only one on earth we can relate to:
“It’s really hard to be roommates with people
If your suitcases are much better than theirs.”
Ow! That stung; that was a stinger.
I am smithereened by a self-guided drone,
A smart bomb full of snide antigravity,
Transformational and caustic.
My meager allotment of self-esteem
Metastasizes into something base,
Something heavy and vile.
I drop to earth like lead mozzarella.

I am unworthy, unworthy in the maximum mendicant,
Roman Catholic mea culpa sense of the word.
I am now Umberto Eco’s penitenziagite.
I am Salvatore, a demented hunchback
(Played flawlessly as a demented hunchback by Ron Perlman),
Spewing linguistic gibberish in a variety of vernaculars:
“Lord, I am not worthy to live anywhere west of the Gowanus Canal.”
By East River waters I weep bitter tears,
The promise of a promised land denied.
I am a garlic-eating Chuck Yeager,
Auguring in, burnt beyond recognition,
An ethnic trope, a defiant Private Maggio
From here and for eternity,
Forever a swarthy ethnic stereotype
Trying to escape thru a small but significant
Hole in the ozone layer above South Ozone Park,
New York, zip code 11420.
That’s right, Ozone Park.
If you don’t believe me, look it up.
GO ******* GOOGLE IT!

And I just don’t know when to quit.
So why quit there?
Work with me, fratello mio, mon lecteur.
Like you, I took the LSAT so long ago.
Why am I not a distinguished American jurist
Asking the one question that seems to be on
Everyone’s eugenic lips today:
“Aren’t three generations of imbeciles enough?”
I am Charly from Flowers for Algernon,
A slow learner with a push broom, swept up in
Some dust from Leonard Cohen’s cuff.
Lenny: a grey-beard loon himself now, singing
“Hallelujah” for fish & chips in London’s O2 Arena.
“Suzanne takes you down, Babaloo!”
At last, I am Jesus Quintana—
John Turturro stealing the movie as usual--
This time in a hair net and a jumpsuit,
"Made of a comfortable 65% polyester/35%
Cotton poplin, you can even add your own
Ribbon leg trim and monogramming
For just the right look to be one of
The Big Lebowski’s favorite characters.
Mouse-over the thumbnail below to see our actual style
(Color must be purple). Style #: 98P, Price: $55.95. On sale: $50.36.www.myjumpsuit.com."
Fortunately, I am a savvy marketeer:
I understand the artistic potential, the venal
Possibilities of product placement. Go with me
To that undiscovered country.
The humanities uncorrupted till now by
Crass gimcrack television ads. That’s right:
******* commercials smack dab in the
Middle of a ******* poem. Why not?
Great literature has always been about
Selling something, even if only an idea.
Hey, **** me, Herman Melville!
We both know the publication costs of
Moby **** were underwritten by the tattoo artists &
Harpoon manufacturers of New Bedford,
Matched by a small research grant from some
Proto-Greenpeace, Poseidon adventure in some
Great white whale-watching swinging soiree.
Murray the ******* K, pendejo!
At last, I am The Jesus, a pervert & pederast,
According to Walter Sobjak—another post-traumatic
Post Toasty, like me, still out there in the jungle,
Still in love with the smell of ****** in the morning.
My bowling buddy, Walter, comfortably far to the right of
The Dude, and Attila the *** for that matter,
But who gives a **** if Lenin was The Walrus?
(“Shut the **** up, Buscemi!”)
“Once you hang a right at Hubert Humphrey,”
Said the streets of 1968 Chicago,
"It’s all ******* fascism anyway.”
That creep could roll, though, and as we know so well:
“Nobody ***** with The Jesus.”
Can you dig it, Travolta?
I knew that you could!

INCOMING!
I just heard from an old girlfriend who is miles away,
Teaching school in Navajo Land.
The Big Rez:  a long day’s interstate katzenjammer,
A Route 66 nightmare by car, but by email,
Just down the block and round the corner.
I had previously closed an email to her with a frivolous
“Say hello to my stinky friend.”
It was a total non-sequitur, an iconic-moronic,
Ace Ventura-mutant line from Scarface,
Which may have meant–in my herbal lunch delirium—
That she should say hi to some mutual acquaintance
We mutually loathe, Or, perhaps an acknowledgement that she–
My surrogate Cameron Diaz–has a new **** buddy,
Of whom I am insanely jealous.
Or maybe it was a simple Seinfeld “about nothing.”
Who knows what goes on in that twisted *****’s head?
She spends the next two hours in a flood of funk,
A deluge of insecurity.
A veritable Katrina ****** of self-consciousness,
Interpreting my inane nonsense in terms of vaginal health.

Hey, you want to ruin a woman’s day?
Tell her, her **** smells.
All the roads are closed. Silence metastasizes through the stretch of EDSA. Cold seeps in bone. Sun still flagellates.
        Oscillate through sound space and whitewashed walls. Seismic grunt of jeepney awakens the signs: no avatars, yet. The night was as deep as any lover, a fine blistering moon glares through lit rivers.
   Nothing exists except heads of tacks and maimed populace ambulating across roads sequined with ermine light. The disquiet approximates   the lightness of
buildings in repair. Scaffolds, ubiquitous lovers,
    clouds explode into white, and everything else like pain, pales in comparison with the slow twitch of everything.
     Today there will be no siren nor
   simultaneous joust of cyclists in perpetual motion— just you contending
   against hues of all graffiti:
Cataract of anguish. News of killing.
    Incarnadine trees netted with aureoles burning bright in solstices. Penumbral undulation of
           forethought and afterthought.
   Dislimned – all; you, left
       in polaroid taken in solitary shutter,
    in pursuit of light.
Coop Lee May 2014
we begin
as college sweethearts.
maybe
made express efforts
       to ignore dreams,
       & the careers within those dreams.
to slip away and instead
assemble upon eachother’s bodies.
                           fuse into one.
one & new dreams.
with our mouths we speak of love.
                   we eat and eat and replicate
                   the fridge-inner with groceries endless.
we work until our fingers go numb
                          work the steering wheel way
home ::: to you.

maybe we drift, some days;
before;
& after ::: the lump in your breast.
                    you think of black depths,
                    eternal depths,
& the fire we are.
the fire we live,
                     in restless color.
all else is oxytocin
           so soaked,
           so thick upon our thoughts.

& we only know the world as reflected in words like
                                                                ­                           love.

an idea, a notion, an act,
a belly, baby :::
                   ::: echo of us.
& as our happiness metastasizes,
         we grey on certain edges,
         we say things that remind us of our parents’ voices;
& slip away
into the night, to dance,
to remember.

the babysitter will get a good tip,
us being so late.
the child sleeps
& you are smiling.
even the dullest of knives
can **** —

a smile has fallen deep into
the silence.

wincing on and off
like terrible vertigo.

it is you lashing across
dispersing images

seeping like ruthless mileage
underneath the bone.

you come in the room
full of these hours splintered

an outpour with a foreboding,
like spindrift you wet my lips

sealed shut and silence
is all the language i understand.

what good is there that this hungry
cavalcade gapes its mouth

and metastasizes like an opulent
laugh as maniacal as drum-taps?

your are river with feet or pond
sprawling mad, enigmatical.

is this the clearing motes depart,
unhinging the crepuscular

and fade out, as a cat shrieks tumbling writhing fornication of metal and rust?

even sleep cannot manage such realness,
and the doubleness of its comatose

or say, a war in spite of its radical
artillery. between two cities lost,

its indefatigable exertion pullulates
to a hand, laying garlands

over the same blue lament of sky
and the unawakened orioles.
moss Nov 2015
everyday his melancholy metastasizes
as he grow exponentially emotional
and their words continue to tantalize
until his feelings are unproportional
they are split up and segregated
happy to the right, sad to the left
and though they were once integrated
all that he feels now is depressed
Ana S Apr 2018
Trembling beneath my hands
If I could I would rip it out of you,
Your pain, your cries,
But the tumor metastasizes.

Tumor never die.
Tumor holding on tight,
Tight to the very foundation of our lives,
You.

You are everything,
The first and my last each day,
The distant prays all aimed towards you,
Let him be okay,

Trembling beneath my hands,
Holding tight unable to release,
The tumor clinging to you from beneath.
I'm Scared
TOD HOWARD HAWKS Mar 2023
Racism is the worst mental illness amongst us all. It metastasizes in our hearts and spreads throughout our lives hurting, often destroying, our sisters and brothers whose skins are of a different color than ours. But if we were to close our eyes and open our hearts, we would embrace them. "Come, join us for dinner. Tell us how your day was," we would say. All 8 billion of us would have a feast. Earth, the only home we all have, would no longer know wars, only peace. We would care and share. Generosity would supplant genocide. All air and water would be clear and toxic-free. With glee, we all would celebrate our ultimate freedom:  the right to be our real selves, helping, not harming, all others. There would be no weapons, no weeping over other lives killed, no artificial boundaries despots use to keep us desperate and distant from others whom we love. We do not have to die to incur the same noxious fate. Open your eyes and hearts to see and feel we are one.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS
you are slow like daggers or
        cancer.

this is what it feels like to travel
on a discourse:

something about you metastasizes
in my mind whenever the silences
are no longer beautiful;

and just like that, I thumb a prayer
to the fallen obsidian,
this harbinger of marvelous calm.

sometimes all the rooms are white
and I am immersed deep into pallor –
when both our eyes do not meet,
I wring out a cockeyed miracle:

dragging the blood of the trees with me,
these bushy polyps,
   these benign volcanoes skin,
ashen and dull like a heart – these agonized
appurtenances, I gleam like light
   cut from the mirror and fade out
as my visibilities hide.

something in me smiles when you
are flattened out – cross-legged, interconnected
  unloose a star fettered somewhere deep where
hands cannot reach for the inside of a tomb.
  
  this suchness that when I feel your sensations
press their threats against my skin,
      you are a salutary squelch
in this pure-iron condition, or a heavy-earth machinery
   moving inside my marrow, that deep

  into death like a morning waist-high
with tears, walled in by requiems.
JoJo Nguyen Aug 2016
Cancer takes us to dinner
then ghosts me never
calling again

The anger, sadness
and disappointment
metastasizes to every
node of our social
network

In desperation we rip
me out leaving wires
frayed

Eventually, new growth cones
form and try again to connect me
with we but perhaps the two
scared ends have given up
hope

And the fibers connecting us
will fade in a slow Wallerian
walt

Cancer will never know
and never cared
Torak May 2014
Fingers like scraped nails bore into my skin,
and while in a breathless attempt to rebut,
I found myself diving into a helpless hole
of madness that revolved around your touch.

While it burned and scraped for the futures promises,
the sweet sizzle and scratching left me craving more,
and I've never really liked long hugs and find myself
attracted to long stares,
because the intensity revolves like a tornado,
and the world is paused,
and Christ you have the most beautiful eyes I have yet to see.

I hate getting sappy, but
I'd love to be your tree.
But with no grounded roots,
and wicked wrangly branches
the stability is unknowingly nowhere to be found.

Sadness is worst than cancer,
for it metastasizes more rapidly than anything
imaginable,
so we must be in Wonderland,
where forever may be simply a second
and each forever fills you up more and more
with the cancer that threatens the life of every burden,
or mistake,
or habit, or anything that in the end is bad for you.

But stand as you are, for comparing you to something is rather
disrespectful
for beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
and I'd rather be blind than not see you once more.

You are my metaphor and my easiest comparison to abstraction.
RJ Days Dec 2015
Alight,
cares pause.
Warm December air
metastasizes under hopeful breath.
Exhale.
Deniece Long Sep 2016
Loneliness metastasizes numbing overkeen theorization,
Quintessence withers effortlessly despoiling fortitude.
Protesting indignantly yet zest vanishes....
Cacoethes burns abrogating sanity's grasp,
Hysteria unanchors judgement...kismet looms.
stillness moved  the  air,
   and it was neither a lark nor a flower in my hand
but the Earth within the trees that unmoved
   and the hand that unrest. is it not that petals our folly
and that nothing are we when we live? are we
               not our own brookwater
   which silence metastasizes
       a source or a dart of water
falling  and  falling?
is darkness solely our own light?
  is it not the shadow that we carry in night and day
   but the weight of our own darkness?

so much the weight of our living
  that we, amongst ourselves, are but stone atilt
    on a river – the birds sit well against
the taciturn afternoon and all the homes
   transfixed in wonderment as though we recall
our first storms in the eyes of the old
   and the debris the hand that has carried us
through, something the wind still is a mother
    or a father, gently motioning through the world.
Some thoughts while peering out into the high, Plaridel Afternoon.

— The End —