It was the darkest ******* night
You could imagine, especially
In a town like ours,
Stripped of streetlights
Down to the basic blinking
Of a single red stoplight,
Where the first selectman
Probably wants us to feel
Invisible, which is ultimately
What we really are
In this corner of the earth
Blind to war and starvation
And disease and discrimination
And bug bites and sour milk
And lost pen caps and return-to-sender letters…
Those things aren’t native in our minds
They don’t spill off the surfaces
Of our tongues because
We have people to worry
About that for us—
Well, I don’t—
But we couldn’t find the reservoir
So we sat in my car, turned off,
Emotions turned up,
And it winds up we were
Right next to the reservoir
The entire time…
It had just blended in
With the sky and with the road,
And if I didn’t know any better
I’d say we were just floating
Along the water as I told you things
And you held my hand
And the soles of your feet
Were pressed up against my windshield,
Which left imprints in summer dew, there,
And on my heavy heart,
But it was so ******* dark
And I didn’t even notice until morning,
When I couldn’t feel you squeezing
My hand every time I told you
Something new,
When it was light enough
To find the reservoir,
Which I don’t even think wanted
To be found.

“I read to find inspiration.
I write to restore candor to the mind.”
N. Scott Momaday

                        <<<<<>>>>>>>>>

Find Inspiration:
a phrase that diodes light, a one-way current within,
making me a selectman, “of thee I sing, of thee I write,
of thee am I composed and fodder for thy dissection &
”my decomposition.”

a phrase that reads me more than I read it,
jumps onto my ontological eyeballs, a great leap
forward, and I suppose humdrum you could call it,
inserted inspiration

Restoring Candor:
thus begins expiation+ excoriation+ exhumation;
a longish road to candor restoration, where plausible
deniability is denied, Jedi verbal mind tricks are
just in movies, and candor is really “can-do(r)!”
but
no one dare say that
for fear of being laughed at,
a cancelled jingo-lingo-patriot.