Along

To an urging fog I give emptiness to its nothingness. My desperate hands go round. My shoulders turn. I feel no freedom, just alone in the waiting of time. Perhaps what surrenders first are dying eyes? This fragile, mortal self inside an eerie fog; that urging, cloudy voice says to lie down is to know peace. But I am too young to sleep in your eternal night. Let me go and see the morn. I shift and walk straight. Only my pleading heart is old. My mortal steps hurry along.

Happy
I don't need Chicago balconies like shiny, wavy smiles
I don't need Army Navy stores torn and tattered as ragged Ole' Glory:
The blood of soldiers
The stain of sad, segregated streets of black on white
Nor the L that loops round dying buildings, sidling closely
Then recoiling against the rumble of what?
The decay of old men whose broad shoulders bend against windy tongues
I don't need Chicago, with its smiling balconies
But you call me often as if I were a wounded soldier
You call me to victory!
I'll surrender in the end. I will return. Happy as a man can be.

Drink
I'm off the road now
It is late evening, the long summer sun is setting
I sit wearily on a grassy knoll
My canvas pack rests beside me
I must find a place to sleep; where I can unravel a thin blanket
Then when the morning rises, I again rise to the open road
But in this moment I will drink from a setting sun
Watch a dying light play on black tar that stretches out like long legs

Spirit
I walked into a cold place. It was late autumn with a large window open to a chilly air. The lights were gone, the bedroom stripped bare.
"This is where it happened," a female voice said behind darkness.
I didn't know her tone, nor was I scared.
"This is where it happened," she said once more. "Years ago, when your spirit was born, I was a soldier's girl awaiting his return."
I looked for the voice, but my eyes were too human to see at all.
"This is where it happened," she said. "He came home from war. This is where he came home from war. I can say no more."
I closed the window to make her warm and left her darkness there. But inside this curse there's an autumn wind...as an angel's soldier on my return.

Star
A thousand times I've opened a door. It leads me to a short hallway with a dark blue carpet old and threadbare.When I open this door and walk alone, sometimes late at night, I whisper to myself a question I've asked a thousand times: Where am I going? The whispered answer is often the same: I don't know. Or sometimes when I can't sleep, I'll say: perhaps I'll find a fallen star. This answer pleases me so much more.

Again
I wonder what it could have been?
The taste left on your tongue
Of me?
Of something freshly eaten,
like a fine meal
tender,
succulent,
a succor to your ailing and desperate heart
I wonder what it could have been?
If a taste left on your tongue changed you
That left you as calm as the Zen breath that fills your mind
I'll leave you now
You have peace that replaces your rancour
I have nothing to taste
Nothing, my girl
No tenderness
No succor
Just an old poem to touch my lips

Clean
There was a woman who lit a fire. She took sticks, dried grass, old sheets of newsprint and made what looked like a small pyre in a wide open field. With two rocks she struck a spark against the dried grass and watched the flames grow larger then die down slowly until only a slight smoke rose into the evening air. She drew the smoke into her face with her cupped hands and held her mouth and eyes tightly closed. The woman didn't know this was the way to cleanse her soul. But she felt at peace and was happy when a cool rain washed away the ashes she left behind.

Space
I wonder sometimes if the space between stars is really the space between darkness and first light. There is what Einstein said: 'God doesn't play dice with the universe.' The smartest man knows what's inside a Creator's head... So if God doesn't toss dice, He deals cards? I've known too many people who've been dealt a bad hand, and for certain a cold life isn't random. I guess that suffering space is in truth that space between dying stars. Like Einstein said, nothing travels faster than light.