Making Time for Things to Go Wrong

Dragonfly traffic on the greenway
five PM in the summer
Steps light, conversation – lighter
Talking about wild, wild
w i l d f l o w e r s
Crazy seeds

Drinking the fresh air, toasting
ourselves, each other
for finding other perspectives

And talking about wild, wild

m u s h r o o m s

Until the sky went thick and grey
And I laughed and said “it’ll just be sprinkle

And was I wrong? In every way
Because it swiftly swept the paw paw trees
And nothing in our cozy side trail would save us.

I heard it tapping on your fishing hat, and!
The woods came alive like a rock concert
And the rain filled our ears
And a beat rushed up in our souls

A n d w e w e r e F R E E

So when I was already drenched –
Nothing left to lose, to do
But O P E N U P A N D L E T G O.

January Crickets

The dryer makes a noise
Like crickets.

I used to loathe that
Incessant sound.

But the frost on my bones.
I ache 
To hear them again.

Adulthood in 40 Words.

She doesn’t remember the tunes
She’d sing to me at night,
The ones that had the power
To crush waking nightmares
Into a powder for pleasant dreams.
This is the beginning.
One day, she won’t recall for whom she sang.

A Page From My Journal

That my own company
Which I have thus far
Found so insipid
Now seems much like
That soft and crucial peace
Found only
In the crumbling monastery
Or the graveyard of the forgotten
In all its mystic, pale and mild solace;
That all this should be preferable
To the company of my fellow man
Too violent even in silence
By virtue of his combative energy
Warns me as death’s echoing bell
That I am altered,
Irrevocably
By weariness and the witnessing
Of that corrosive hypocrisy
With which the society of modern man
Is shaped
Or perhaps that I am become
A mad, an alcoholic clown.

The Best is What You Are Today

Youth is only wasted on the young
Because they’ve nothing to which they can compare
This gift we treasure when we’ve sprung
And rue we’ve done but half of what we dare.

It was the careful rehearsal of blunders
Like a band of many rubber violins
Doomed from conception, errors and wonders
Reflecting in mirrors, in our various skins.

Age is wasted on those who conceal
Each stroke of the brush and colour selection
Clinging to a youth which was never real
As a child to a stolen, forbidden confection.

Today is the best of the days I’ve had yet
For I am neither young nor old, I am all-
At once and nothing; how sweetly met
Is the sunrise upon the earthly sprawl!

~Dedicated to those who have lost the battle against mental illness~