puny human time

 A full moon hid behind a cloud bank.
Near the horizon its oblate reflection glimmered
like a portal to heaven. The waves threw innumerable
tantrums at the yielding shore.
Grasses stood as tall and straight and sparse as sentinels.      
I asked them what they were guarding, or whom.
The surf bid me hush and
The waves continued their battery.

I await a response, but the grass, and the wind, and the sea, and the moon
speak so slowly, and I haven't got forever, 
like they do.

living to be a quarter- century

We wander down backways often, speeding out of ignorance
towards an a address we only half remember.
Something with a six in it, we agree.
There's an anxiety in our tremulous bellies
like report card day or touching down after turbulence. We
outpace it. We call that Progress. We turn up
the radio and down the windows,
we forget we don't know don't know where we're going.
A quarter is half buried in tobacco shavings and fry crumbs,
warm from the ass pressing it into the charcoal fabric.
It has ridden these old roads before,
Slid and bounced around their curves and potholes,
etched memories into itself, compiling annals;
It has internalized this scarred history, become rugged.
We dig it from the seat cushion and flip it.

A quarter's swan song is singing,
undulating on the granite, is ringing;
I chug a keystone heavy, eyeball it's mathematical decay.
Eerie above the chants and jeering flit the overtones.
The empty harmonics echo and qwaver at the edge of perception--
the terror of knowing my mind's to weak to harvest the fear and
my liver too mortal to filter it.
I slap the coin into my palm and chuck it out the window.

You reel and titter in the hallway, maybe hoping to echolocate,
the way you read once on an eastern healing blog,
maybe hoping, like me, to discern a pattern from the chaos.
An ancient beetle twitches its vestigial wing.
You can't make sense of the image, commit to consider,
 tomorrow, the past's effect on the present. You never get around to it.

irony of mirrors

Foreshadowing: green, I gleaned once,
from a series of graphs,
is the color most absorbed by a mirror.
It is more accurate, then, to call a mirror green than the silver my gullible eye insists.

A drop of blood trembled down through the steam to the porcelain and
ptt
like the snuff of a tiny candle.
You and steam both settle continuously:
It onto the hard surfaces of this bathroom,
you into the razor- nicked mediocrity
of not seeing yourself.

I am misled by myself singing.
In this lonely room, before a sheathed mirror, murmurs swell to screech,
through the steam, seem a barbaric yawp.
I cannot see the smallness of my mouth.
I cannot hear how puny my whispers.

reboot/reflection, or forgetting to be afraid to write

Peek into and out of a drafty window,
Fully knowing its brittle protection:
Navy drapes hang, crooked, cruelly
admitting midnight and streetlight.
Crane and peer for some relic or talisman in the empty cul de sac--                                                                              
Roving eyes glow in the dimness and roll
Like a mad dog's, but there is no lather or fuss, only the hush of the draft, it's whispered imperatives.
And the memory of once translating that rush of air into power, or verse.