The last time I saw your face, I couldn’t see it all. It wasn’t that you were in profile, or lowered your chin in sadness, though sadness stalks your eyes too often, just waiting there for a sag of your shoulder to pounce. No, the last time I saw your face we wore masks for Christmas, perhaps to see New the Year, perhaps to see one another again at all. But I know the last time I saw your face, your eyes told me a smile was crossing its Tropic of Capricorn, since I’d come back safe from my own Tropic of Cancer. And I held your face close, its Equator to mine, our cheeks at anchor for a long moment, because what if this really was to be the last time I saw your face?
hope
The Tracks We’ll Leave
The tracks they all leave criss-cross and follow, stretch and tangle and some just up and disappear as if their signatories ascended in some great leap to that better place. And so with us on our journey between unknown and known, confused and understood, apathy and love, love and some other kind of love. Maybe the tracks form at the corners of our eyes, where tears can pool or joy marks its trail so as not to get lost again. Or perhaps they step one into the other’s so that it looks like we’re walking alone again. But that would mean one following the other and wouldn’t it be better if, for at least the part before one set finally disappears, our steps walk side by side?
Wishes Like Castles in the Air
Wishes are the foundation of my life, so many, like grains of sand on a beach. The truth of this story cuts like a knife, they never came true, ever out of reach. Anything you build on a bed of sand will always topple in the wind or surf. Don’t matter if your life's wish-castle’s grand, it’ll fall as if built on clouds above earth. So I stopped wishing when you went away, and my sturdy life became earthbound. I never figured you’d be back one day, but now here you are and here’s what I found. Those wishes like sand made by younger me didn’t really fit when I got older. Except this one that's mostly come true, you see -- the wish-castle I built on this boulder.
The Price We Pay for Light Is Shadow
I don’t wish to be dark, since all I want from life is to bring you light. Light to shine like joy upon you and me. But I know I can’t hand you a ray of sunshine, like a celestial flower, just as you can’t chase away my dark ennui. And I don’t know if you’d even accept it if I offered. Maybe because you know what I know about life and light. How whenever each has shone upon us, neither of them has come cheaply. And nothing’s ever come to us without a fight. So while I don’t want to bring you more darkness, we both know shadow’s the price we pay for the gift of light from above. The shadow light casts when something or someone stands between us and some someday’s bright shining love. So I will never stand in the way of the light you need and deserve. Just as I hope you’ll never block mine. For that we must stand side by side, letting the light have us full, and leaving our lives’ shadows behind.
We’re Really Real
Why do we look to horoscopes, psychics and dreams, coincidences, nature and subconscious schemes to help us understand that which we think we don’t know? When within these trees, actually, a forest does grow. So let’s not worry about offending the past. At our age, there’s just too much, the past is so vast. And the future? Well, we know that’s never a sure thing. If past is prologue, nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. Yeah, I’m scared, too, but see how short is existence, how long is regret, and how strong this resistance to take it head on, this long put off conclusion. Together, we’re real. It’s those excuses that’re delusion
Visions of Sugar Plums
Somewhere in a Christmas fantasy, something like my Life’s sugar plums resting all sweet and spicy upon a cosmic comfit plate, right next to the roasted chestnuts I hear about, warm and soft as a lover’s kiss. Or so you tell me. Because this is a fantasy, a dream straight out of one of those Hallmark Christmas movies, only none of us are princes, princesses or destiny’s darlings fated to leap holiday hurdles to couplehood and, per every fantasy’s script, fall into one of those chestnut kisses in the last thirty seconds before the credits roll. The sweet and spicy? I don’t care. But we all need dreams, don’t we? Otherwise why even have that one day of the year when wishes can come true and hopes aren’t dashed and danced upon by a fantasy fleet of reindeer, an ill-fit significant other or make-believe mean girl. Maybe that’s why I keep my list short, written in invisible ink between lines of fanciful good-boy reveries of an exchange of Life’s gifts you can’t buy, nor steal and I’ll likely never get to try. Like sugar plums.
I Wish
I suppose it’s only right that I so often use a word that, if you listen to it slantwise, squinching your ears just so, sounds like a short burst of warm wind masquerading as a fleeting kiss on your cheek. But mostly, to me, someone for whom the whole auditory world echoes scrunched and askew, Wish reminds me too much of a sigh. Perhaps that’s because so many of my wishes end up punctuated, if not begun, by a hopeless exhalation that starts with loosening up my lips from a kiss and then an admonition to just shut up. I wish (see?) that just wasn’t so, but (another word I use so much I’ve worn a groove down its middle) that’s wishes for you -- and me and us -- lots of misses full of near-kisses and things maybe better left unsaid.
Between Gemini and Leo
When they told me, I did not think too acutely of disease or death. And that might be the worst that’s wrong with me. But I had others to do the worrying for me. I just listened, decided on a course of treatment and considered it like having a new job. I was a temp radiation patient for three months, like a holiday hire at Walmart. Or more like a part-time stripper performing daily in the hospital Oncology Department, dropping my pants beneath the sparkly ceiling lights, watching the green laser light show trace its crosshairs just above the hairs below my waist as the speakers blared 90s hits and the girls out there in the dark encouraged my performance each day. I barely used that word defining why I hid my moneymaker beneath a tiny towel and allowed invisible beams of blind hope to clear out the unseen intruder two spots higher up on the zodiac bill than I. But that’s show biz, and I’m not looking for a callback anyway. I was tasked with writing a health poem for Writer’s Digest’s Poem a Day Chapbook Challenge. Let’s say my health has been my job for the past four months. Showing up every day to beat the word I don’t say in this piece. Except maybe in the title.
Call It
I don’t think the trees care if the leaves they flip come up heads or tails. They just let them fall, like coins into an old toll booth basket, something you must do to get from here to there, from Summer to Winter. Sometimes I feel like one of those leaves, flipped from the branch closest to the sky, where I could sometimes feel as if I was flying, only I’m actually tripping my way down the oaken stairway, ultimately jumping into the void between Up and Down. I know the ground's coming, cold and sad as another broken heart, but for a moment or two, I’m defiant, ignoring gravity upon an October breeze, enjoying a freedom I’ve only felt for so short a time before. It’s not the sky in which I fly, but, soon enough, the bare trees won’t block my view of that blue. Unless… Heads!
The Nights Are Such Lonely Walks
Perhaps if I dreamed I’d not find all my nights such lonely walks from light to light, like street lamps pouring down without warmth on this corner through the dark to the next pool of yellow glow ahead. Or like Tuesday to Wednesday. I’ve strolled or rolled my way through each, always wishing I could reach out to touch that warmth light and dark and I denied me, wrapped as I might be in blankets or shadows. But if I dreamed, perhaps I’d dream of you joining me here at the intersection of Yesterday and Tomorrow. Someday some warm Tonight.
A Thing for Words 